Why is Ukraine's theatre scene thriving amid war?
Despite air raids and threats to life, culture-loving Ukrainians still stand in line for hours or wait months for tickets to catch their favourite plays
For Olena Vdovychenko, the theatre has always been a beautiful escape, a place of beauty long before the Russian invasion. Despite the daily air raids and missile threats, her passion for theatre hasn't waned. Instead, it has become a symbol of resilience, a way to support Ukrainian creativity and the actors, some of whom have returned to the stage after serving on the front lines.
"For these occasions, I choose a beautiful dress, do my makeup, and wear perfume. These are rare moments we lost during the war," says Olena, a theatre-goer living in Kyiv.
No air raid sirens, please!
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But it has become harder to secure theatre tickets. Arts venues are fully booked and new performances are completely sold out. Sometimes Ukrainians wait for three to four months to get prime seats at a play. theatres also announce when new tickets will be available and so fans set reminders for themselves to go online on given times and dates to secure tickets. This is how Olena got hers.
And even if one is lucky to secure a ticket, a show risks being interrupted in case people have to rush to a bomb shelter. War has also impacted theatre routines: There is always an announcement before a performance, instructing people to head to the nearest safety zone if an air raid siren goes off.
If it blares for more than half an hour, the show may be canceled; something Olena has already experienced. "You mentally prepare for the possibility. You find yourself thinking: 'Please, let there be no alarm so we can enjoy the show in peace'."
A wartime blockbuster
'The Witch of Konotop,' is a dark musical comedy, based on a 19th-century Ukrainian novel by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, which has become a wartime phenomenon. Set in the small town of Konotop in northeastern Ukraine, it tells of how locals organised a witch hunt, blaming the women for a drought. All this unfolds against a military threat from czarist Russia.
In the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a video had surfaced of a woman telling a Russian sitting on a tank, "Do you even know where you are? You're in Konotop. Every second woman here is a witch." Speaking off camera, she'd added the soldier would be cursed with impotence.
The play's director, Ivan Uryvskiy, tells DW that witches are special in Ukrainian culture. "They often appear in Ukrainian literature. Each witch is different in every piece of Ukrainian classic literature. It is a whole layer of culture."
Therefore, it is not surprising that this play about witches went viral on TikTok, attracting the youth.
"People jokingly say they hate me, when I tell them I've seen 'The Witch of Konotop' twice. Because they've been trying for months without success," Olena recalls. It is almost impossible to buy tickets online for this play while those who've tried to buy them at a box office sometimes had to stand in line from as early as 5 AM.
Uryvskiy has since attained the status of a theatre rock star, with the mystical world he created on stage: minimalist, black and white and with ironic dialogues. "Culture is always important, but during wartime, it is especially crucial. Ukrainian culture has always been under threat, always pushed to the background. Throughout history Russia has always tried to erase, abolish or ban it. Yet Ukrainian culture is rich and worth exploring. Developing our theatre and showcasing it inside the country and worldwide, especially during the war, is vital," explains Uryvskiy.
'The voice of modern Ukraine'
Thus, "The Witch of Konotop" was even staged at the international Peace Summit in Switzerland in June this year, where the actors performed for the delegates.
Yevhen Nyshchuk, former Ukrainian Minister of Culture and the general director of the Ivan Franko National Theatre in Kyiv where the play is staged, described it as "the voice of modern Ukraine."
"This is part of a phenomenon about reclaiming Ukrainian culture from Russia," says Mayhill Fowler, associate professor of history at Stetson University specialising in the cultural history of Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. She notes that "many 19th-century Ukrainian plays were written under the yoke of the Russian Empire," adding that this represents "a possibility to write a new chapter of Ukrainian cultural history."
Throughout the history of Ukraine, the theatre has always been a place where people went in tough times. Fowler highlights that in 1920, amidst the hunger and turmoil of the Russian Civil War, the famous Ukrainian theatre director Les Kurbas staged a production of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth."
Fast forward to June 2024, where the first ever Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival took place in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. "War is dehumanising and Shakespeare is fundamentally humanising. It reminds us that we're human," Fowler quotes the organiser of the Shakespeare Festival, Iryna Chuzhynova.
In Kharkiv, the second-largest city, situated near the Russian border and under constant shelling, theatrical performances continue underground in subway stations.
The thriving theatre scene in Ukraine is not about returning to normalcy as Ukrainians once knew it. The danger and chaos of war is still there. It is "one of many ways to cope with the war," Fowler points out.
