CONTEMPORARY DRAMA IN UKRAINE
Hanna Veselovska
The Context of New Plays in Ukrainian Theatre
For quite a while, modern drama was not a priority on Ukrainian stages. Classics were preferred and the most popular authors were Mykola Gogol and Anton Chekhov, whose plays were performed in Ukrainian and Russian. A surge of interest in modern drama arose at the end of the 2000s, thanks to playwriting contests like the Coronation of the Word and others held by the Royal Court Theatre and the British Council, as well as the Topical Play Week and Drama.UA festivals and modern drama laboratories, all of which served as effective platforms for presenting new Ukrainian and foreign stage works.
When a number of major foreign cultural institutions, including the Goethe Institute, the British Council, the French Institute and Pro Helvetia, launched their special theatrical programmes for Ukraine in the 2000s, the local scene began to be exposed to the works of Sarah Kane, Ingrid Lausund, Marius von Mayenburg, Mark Ravenhill, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Matei Vișniec and others. However, the process proved to be slow and rather limited. As those foreign works were staged in an experimental manner and mostly by young directors, none entered the repertoire of a major national theatre, with the notable exception of A Number by Caryl Churchill.
Ultimately, Ukraine has seen this restrained and probably even prejudiced attitude towards new plays dented and abandoned, if only under the impact of the pivotal domestic political change that came with the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. At that time, an array of Ukrainian authors and directors, first and foremost Nataliya Vorozhbyt (1975), burst onto the scene with tremendous creative activity and were quick to produce documentary plays about the revolutionary change and the people who had made it happen, as was most famously the case with The Diary of Maidan, directed by Andrey May at the Ivan Franko National Theatre in Kyiv. Since then, it has been the norm for playwrights to offer frank conversations on complex, topical themes. It has worked in many discussion-stimulating documentary performances, particularly the one staged at the Post Play Theatre about the events unfolding in Crimea during the Russian annexation of the peninsula in February and March of 2014.
As the political transformation brought more freedoms and openness to Ukrainian society, it also led, among other things, to the disappearance of any remaining theatrical bans on topics that had been essentially taboo until then. As a result, richly provocative and contentious plays such as those written by the likes of Lukas Bärfuss, David Harrower, Martin McDonagh, Lars Norén, Dorota Masłowska and others could now be found running in various local theatres. One of the most important factors in allowing this type of drama to take root inside Ukraine was the emergence of new theatre ensembles and the reprofiling of academic troupes. Examples include the private Wild Theatre in Kyiv (director Yaroslava Kravchenko) and the state-run Lesia Ukrainka Drama Theatre in Lviv (chief director Dmytro Zahozhenko); modern titles constitute up to 90% of their programs.
Still, in general, modern foreign drama is staged much less frequently and widely in Ukraine than the popular classics. This is primarily attributed to a persistent lack of information about new plays created abroad and available translations.
Generations of Contemporary Playwrights staged in Ukrainian Theatre
Today’s active Ukrainian dramatists represent three generations. The oldest generation started back in the Soviet era and is best exemplified by Anatoly Krym (1946), the author of plays exploiting the world-famous stories about Don Juan (Testament of a Virtuous Ladies Man), and Romeo and Juliet (Autumn in Verona or the True Story of Romeo and Juliet) as well as commercial comedies that enjoy steady demand in Ukraine and some parts of the region, particularly in Bulgaria (Women’s Logic). The next generation consists of those who found fame at the turn of the century, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They include Pavlo Arie (1977), Nataliya Blok (1980), Anastasia Kosodii (1991), Neda Nezhdana (1971) and Nataliya Vorozhbyt (1975), all once associated with the New Drama movement that unfolded across the post-Soviet art space to promote what became known as doc. drama and initiated documentary projects on socially sensitive topics. The plays they wrote have already been published in separate editions and translated into several languages and their names are omnipresent on posters of local theatres. Examples of such plays include Glory to Heroes by Pavlo Arie (2012); The City Behind the Wallpaper by Nataliya Blok (2019); Timetraveller’s Guide to Donbas by Anastasia Kosodii (2018); Suicide of Solitude by Neda Nezhdana (2010); and Bad Roads by Nataliya Vorozhbyt (2017).
Still, the most numerous group of playwrights is now those who started out about a decade ago by participating in the various festivals and competitions mentioned above. Unlike their predecessors, who had been influenced by the Russian literary school and stage works produced by the likes of the Royal Court theatre, these authors paved their way independently, focusing on national traditions and the best examples of world drama. Many representatives of this generation experienced personal dramas arising from the loss of their homeland due to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which is fully reflected in their work.
In total, we can enumerate at least ten playwrights from the latter generation whose portfolios contain plays staged by major theatres in Ukraine and abroad: Andrii Bondarenko (1978), Vitaliy Chenskyi (1975), Oksana Grytsenko (1981), Tetyana Kitsenko (1977), Iryna Harets (1975), Lena Kudaieva (1977), Lena Lagushonkova (1984), Olga Maciupa (1988), Maryna Smilyanets (1992) and Lyudmila Tymoshenko (1978). While they definitely form a distinctive cohort, it is also worth noting that their works employ various methodological approaches and display significant stylistic variance. At the same time, perhaps the most significant common feature of this generation can be traced to its apparent effort to form a kind of wholesome playwriting community. It was that idea of togetherness that must have driven some twenty Ukrainian playwrights of different generations to unite in creating the Kyiv Theatre of Playwrights. There, according to this theatre’s declarations, the greatest value is afforded to a written dramatic text.
Key Themes in Ukrainian Contemporary Drama
The war with Russia has been and is likely to remain by far the most glaring and important theme for Ukrainian playwrights at present. In 2022, Ukrainian writers, actors, directors and journalists literally blew up the airwaves by responding to the Russian aggression in their work with hundreds of texts full of pain and horror. The war-focused discourse still very much predominates even now, three and a half years since the war’s outbreak, although the topics Ukrainian authors were working with before the full-scale Russian invasion have tended to be gradually woven into it. A particular emphasis on ecological and gender issues emanates from the overall theme of war. After all, following Russia’s seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, and last year’s destruction of the Kakhovska Dam, ecology has become a matter of survival for Ukrainians, as addressed in the plays The Ecological Ballad by Olga Maciupa and Five Songs of the Polissya by Lyudmila Tymoshenko. Gender has become a particularly pungent topic due to the fact that most combatants on the war fronts are men, while women make up the lion’s share of Ukrainian refugees abroad. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War by Olena Astasyeva and Our Children by Nataliya Blok delve into these dynamics. There is no shortage of plays about Ukrainian refugees fleeing abroad, the most famous being Nataliya Vorozhbyt’s Green Corridors (2022). Still, there is a demonstrable lack of texts about those directly taking part in the war hostilities, so the resulting disparity remains a steady trend.
The war-focused discourse has also raised the multifaceted issue of the human body. Previously absent in Ukrainian texts as such, this issue has now become an integral element of plays featuring characters who try to escape and survive. It has incentivised authors to talk about a human body that seems to disintegrate and almost fall apart during the war. The body is handled less in terms of its physical dimensions, as in Survivor’s Syndrome or Atomic Mermaid by Andrii Bondarenko, but more as a carrier of experience and memory, as well as a kind of intermediary in communicating with the world.
In tackling the human body, most authors are currently moving in two essentially opposite directions, although both deal with the overcoming of physical and spiritual traumatic syndromes. The first direction can be termed future-oriented, since it focuses on “saving” a person – not only in the flesh, as it were, but also as a microcircuit chip (see Atomic Mermaid by Andrii Bondarenko). In the second direction, the body is considered an agent of memory and, simultaneously, a lost experience that returns to cultural practices of the past (folklore, traditions, literary and artistic heritage), which were much repressed during imperial rule (see Viy by Nataliya Vorozhbyt).
The International Circulation of New Ukrainian Plays
Following February 2022, Ukrainian drama became a point of interest for the outside world. Thanks to John Freedman’s Worldwide Ukrainian Play Reading Project, “Ukraine. War. Texts”, dozens of Ukrainian plays were translated into English. The first wave of translations was subsequently supplemented with translations into Polish, German, Romanian, Lithuanian, French, Norwegian and Czech. In most cases, those who promoted and popularised Ukrainian plays were enthusiasts who supported Ukraine and considered it necessary to relay true information about the war.
Ukraine’s further active entry into the cultural life of other countries came with the organisation of Ukrainian play readings and festivals, along with special residencies across Europe, including in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Romania and France. Quite tellingly, the local artistic community – directors, actors and journalists – would typically take part in these events.
Thus, the apparent interest in Ukrainian drama must have helped overcome much of the prior prejudice against it, something that had not been achieved at the time even by the release of a two-volume collection of Ukrainian plays in Polish.[1] In addition, Ukrainian authors Nataliya Vorozhbyt and Pavlo Arie, who had experience collaborating with German theatres, received high-profile offers of work in the spring of 2022. Vorozhbyt’s Green Corridors was commissioned by the Münchner Kamerspiele and Pavlo Arie’s Arming Ourselves against a Sea of Disasters was commissioned by the Schaubühne Berlin. Subsequently, other Ukrainian authors who ended up in various parts of Europe – Olga Annenko, Olena Astasyeva, Nataliya Blok, Lena Lyagushonkova and Maryna Smilianets – were also involved in theatre projects in France, Switzerland and Poland.
The international recognition of Ukrainian drama’s potential peaked with one of the above-mentioned playwrights, Lena Lyagushonkova, winning the Best Young Playwright of Europe award in 2022. Her plays – the most famous of which is The Mother by Gorky, a dramatic saga about her post-Soviet childhood years in a depressing town – opened a whole new theme, post-colonialism, which is deeply relevant to the countries of the former USSR. This highly critical viewpoint on the post-Soviet experience should be well understood across Central and Eastern European countries, many of which used to be part of the so-called socialist camp. That the focus on post-colonialism has good prospects of developing further in the region is also evident in the fact that theatres in Poland, Estonia and Finland have recently staged plays by Oleg Mykhaylov, a Russian playwright who chose to live and work in Ukraine
[1] Nowy dramat Ukraiński: W oczekiwanie na Majdan, Tom 1. [New Ukrainian Drama: Waiting for Maidan, Vol. 1]. Selected, edited and introduced by Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun, Andrei Moskwin. Warsaw, 2015; Współczesna dramaturgia Ukraińska od A do Ja [Contemporary Ukrainian Dramaturgy from A to Z]. Selected, translated and introduced by Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun. Warsaw, 2018.