Why is Ukraine's theater scene thriving amid war?

"For these occasions I choose a beautiful dress, do my makeup, and wear perfume. These are rare opportunities we lost during the war," Olena Vdovychenko, a theatergoer living in Kyiv tells DW.

For her, the theater is a beautiful escape. It had always been special — long before the Russian invasion. And the daily air raids and threats of missile attacks have not dimmed her passion for it. Instead, it's evolved into another form of resilience. Olena sees it as an opportunity to support Ukrainian creativity and the actors, some of whom had served on the front and returned to the stage. 

No air raid sirens, please! 

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. Theaters 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, she tells DW.  

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 organized 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 2022Russian 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.a.m.

Uryvskiy has since attained the status of a theater 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 theater 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."  

Reclaiming culture from Russia 

"This is part of a phenomenon about reclaiming Ukrainian culture from Russia," says Dr Mayhill Fowler, an associate professor of history at Stetson University specializing in the cultural history of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. She notes that "as part of the Soviet Union in the 19th century, many 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 theater 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 theater director Les Kurbas staged a production of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Fowler adds that in 1943, set against the rise of Nazism, Ukrainian audiences first heard in their language another of Shakespeare's iconic lines, "To be or not to be" from "Hamlet."

Fast forward to June 2024, where the first ever Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival took place in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. "War is dehumanizing and Shakespeare is fundamentally humanizing. It reminds us that we're human," Fowler quotes the organizer 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 theater 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. 

Edited by: Brenda Haas