Abstract
While bombs continue falling on Ukraine, writers – and playwrights in particular – are busy documenting their painful experiences, thoughts and emotions. Such expressions began in 2013–2014, during the Ukrainian ‘Revolution of Dignity’ (or Maidan). However, Ukraine's neighbour, Russia, which considered herself to be the inheritor of the Soviet Union, and does not accept other republics’ independent expressions and choices, took Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. This trend escalated a thousandfold on 22 February 2022, when many Ukrainian cities were shelled, and Ukraine was invaded by its neighbour.
Two generations ago, in the 1930s, Stalin, Putin's infamous long-ruling predecessor, wanted to reduce the Ukrainian population, especially in the southeast. Stalin liquidated a significant proportion of Ukrainian writers and intellectuals (almost 60%), as well as farmers (almost 20%); the genocidal Holodomor famine caused the loss of 4 to 10 million Ukrainian lives in 1932–1933. Stalin then repopulated the southeast with Russian settlers and administrators, altering Ukrainian and Russian demographics, and forcing Ukraine to become ‘a bilingual country’, in which one could be sent to Siberia for writing in Ukrainian.
Since Ukraine regained its independence in 1991 (after the collapse of the USSR), Ukrainian writers have flourished, writing texts in their own language. During this new war, Ukrainian playwrights have been active across Ukraine, especially in the southeast (in Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mariupil, and Odessa). They are expressing their experiences through publications of short stories, and performances of short plays: to have their say while they still have the chance, ‘while the boomerang could still soar’. Within the last two years alone, there have been many publications of Ukrainian works about this war, translated into English: Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, Voices of Freedom: Contemporary Writing from Ukraine, ed. by Kateryna Kazimirova and Daryna Anastasieva, A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights, published and edited by John Freedman, and Voices from Ukraine: Two Plays by Natalia Vorozhbit and Neda Nezhdana. The latest publication is Ukrainian New Drama after the Euromaidan Revolution, edited by Moly Flynn. What is unusual about these publications is that many were published with the financial assistance of an institution in the West: as the plays were in English, it was possible to organise public readings and stagings of them, which encouraged the writing of more plays. This stimulated young authors to consider the genre of drama and inspired local writing competitions in Lviv, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and other cities.
The current Ukrainian reaction to the war that Russia started and continues is rather unique. Writers depict only snatches of scenes, on the background of emotionally charged events. That is why these scenes capture with pain a reality that is deeply buried in regret: they are painted with words of pain, hate, and disappointments with universal disorder. And these Ukrainian writers deal with it not with resigned acceptance, but with painful and quiet disapproval and/or anger. That is why their vocabulary is not lyrical and full of suffering, but rather rebuffing and harsh words of hate and painful protest. Now, almost every work contains f-words, because this is the people's only ammunition against the war, against those who brought it, and against everything that they don’t wish to see or tolerate today. Many of us remember the words of the Ukrainian soldier guarding the Snake Island who, in 2022, sent a reply to a Russian ship that demanded Ukrainian submission: ‘Russian ship go f… yourself’. That f-word is now employed in most current Ukrainian short stories or plays about the present war. Nothing like this would have been tolerated in previous centuries in Ukrainian literature or used by Ukrainian families (the mother of that Ukrainian soldier confessed that she had never heard her son utter such a word beforehand).
Wars precipitate outside interest in the country being attacked. Culture loving kind souls try to make the victim's existence more tolerable by helping others learn about their literature and or/other cultural assets. The above-mentioned texts commissioned in response to Putin's war on Ukraine are excellent examples of this effort. Besides the publications themselves, multiple public readings were held in many European and North American countries. A new cultural movement in Ukraine began to protect and preserve archival holdings associated with Ukrainian literature, theatre and culture of the last two centuries.
The Plays, Their Authors, and Translators
One would think that Ukrainian plays depict scenes of revenge and killings. Instead, we see philosophical treatments of crimes against humanity, the rights of humanity, or the limits of humanity. Ukrainian New Drama consists of eight plays. Two are by well-known writers (Natalia Vorozhbyt and Maksym Kurochkin), and six are by winners of various drama competitions (national and international). Interestingly enough, many of the latter are from the Donbas region (Luhansk and Donetsk), where the most intense fighting is going on, while others are originally from Kyiv and Lviv. They are cofounding members of an independent Theatre of Playwrights in Kyiv, dedicated to the staging of new Ukrainian plays, which was meant to have opened on 12 March 2023. Several of the playwrights now are living as displaced persons in various countries; they continue to write plays and even have them staged there. Molly Flynn, the editor of this compilation, notes that the writers’ ‘vivacity, vision, and vibrancy have ushered the Ukrainian playwrights to the forefront of global political theatre since the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-14’.
This collection opens with Natalka Vorozhbyt's Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha (2015). Vorozhzbyt studied Theatre Arts in Moscow and soon became one of the leaders of New Russian Drama, as well as a populariser of a new dramatic style employing fragments of spoken sentences and phrases, called the verbatim style. As a student, she wrote The Grain Store, about the Holodomor, which took the lives of her grandfather and his ten siblings, for a literary competition organised by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in 2009. Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha seemingly redirects attention from the serious to completely trivial elements of daily lives. It is set after the Euromaidan Revolution: a mother and daughter are preparing food for the commemoration of their husband and stepfather Sasha's death. In its final scene, set at least a year later, the dead Sasha appears and asks his family for permission to return to life and in order join the Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian attack, having answered the sixth call for mobilisation, which allowed the dead to sign up if their families agree to it. The playwright explained (in an interview) that she wrote about people who were awakened (to their identity) on the Maidan, but who had little opportunity to fight for Ukraine as soldiers. The translation is by Sasha Dugdale, a poet and translator.
Anna Kosodii's A Time Traveller's Guide to Donbas consists of nine scenes. This play is about how the Donbas region and the surrounding areas may look in 2036. There are two pilgrims/travellers wishing to find out how the Russian war on Ukraine started. One is a young woman who was only three years old at the time the war started, and the other one is a 60-year-old man, who is an inventor of a time machine. They are surprised to see how the Donbas area has changed from a highly industrial to an agricultural area, and have to be careful not to be too eager to judge the local people's actions during the war. The translation is by Jack Clover, a journalist and playwright, who has worked with several Ukrainian theatres.
Olha Matsiupa's Pilates Time depicts a very common pastime taking place at a very uncommon time. Such a setting provides a great contrast for a surrealistic discussion. While the pilates instructor shouts her directions and comments to ‘students’, she interjects with information about the death of one person's father, and also another's parents. The instructor wishes to keep the session running, even though the deaths occurred on the student's birthday: the play employs sarcasm and numerous juxtapositions which throw light on the disparity of ‘normal’ and ‘war’ situations. The text is in verse form and was translated by Daisy Gibbons.
Natalka Blok wrote Bomb in 2017: she is a playwright and screenwriter who now lives in Switzerland. Her plays have been translated into six languages. This satire responds to various historical and fake ‘facts’, such as old suspicions of money and Ukraine's loss of nuclear power. The protagonist, Dasha, suspects that there is a past-changing bomb ticking on her insides, which makes her feel so miserable and guilty that she can’t even enjoy sex. Although her family is very patriotic, she resists suggestions that she sacrifice herself and explode the bomb to resurrect all of the Ukrainians who have died for Ukraine. Eventually, a national referendum is held on whether Dasha should blow herself up: people want her to, so Dasha starts preparing ‘to rewrite the past of Ukraine again!’ The translator was Daisy Hayes, a theatre director and script editor for BBC.
Andrii Bоndarenko's House Of Ghosts. Why. We. Fled. Donbas relays a tense atmosphere. The author's numerous plays tend to play with mythological or fairytale figures: House of Ghosts only hints at the possibilities of drowning and mermaids in order to explore why a mother and daughter fled the war. The story stresses the differences between the refugees and the local people, who continuously ask why they fled. This play was translated by Jack Clover, a reporter who founded the Theatre in Two Weeks (2018).
Kateryna Penkova's I Don’t Remember the Name is probably written in Russian (the translator politely lists some parts that were in Russian, we can only guess about the rest). It is about a family that exists due to some unspecified genetic ties, including the protagonist's unnamed father. The mother is a former engineer who received a Lenin award and now survives as a post-Soviet “businesswoman”, i.e. vendor at a market. Three generations of this family live in cramped quarters, with tensions arising from creating gutter behaviour, gutter vocabulary and post-Soviet disappointments. The play, which hovers between theatre of the absurd and of realism, bathed in a strong acidic satire, was translated by Helena Kernan.
Lena Lagushonkova's The Mother of Gorky has a title one would not expect or suspect. We know that Gorky's novel Mother became the standard for socialist realism in literature in communist countries. The characters were one-dimensional, and so was their ‘internationalism’. Why did Lagushonkova pick on Gorky? What did she want to prove? Perhaps it was the fact that she did not need to write a whole novel, and wanted to demonstrate that dialogue alone may do as well as character development does in a novel. Much of the play is about family relations, especially between three sisters, one of whom was reasonably rich, because her family's business was growing vegetables and using human excrement for fertilising, which causes one of the sisters (Dianka) constant shame. This play was translated by Rory Malarkey.
Maksym Kurochkin's Tolyk the Dairyman (2019) has obvious allusions to Shоlem Aleichem's styles and stories. The philosophy that Kurochkin's Ukrainian Jewish protagonists pronounce provides many universal philosophical truths, such as: ‘If you are not who you are, then you don’t exist’. Individual identity is certainly emphasised here. The play was translated by Uilliam Blacker, a professor of Ukrainian and Eastern European Studies in London.
As such, though mostly written during the current Russian war, these plays do not contain many gruesome war details. Instead, the playwrights stress the importance of humanity versus such events, which come and go, but remain in memory. There is no mention of WWI or WWII, but numerous mentions of the two Soviet disasters seriously affecting Ukraine, the Holodomor and Chornobyl. The above plays do not conform to a particular style, but there are touches of inspiration from Ukrainian plays written by post WWII émigré writers, especially those of Ludmyla Kovalenko, Eaghor Kostetzky, Bohdan Boychuk, and Yuriy Tarnawsky.
This book provides a look at a selection of new Ukrainian plays depicting the vicissitudes that Ukrainians face today, due to a new Russian aggression on their country. And indeed, the plays provide a pretty revealing representation of the human condition, highlighting many problems facing Ukrainians during the current war, as well as their reactions to it. The playwrights' messages via the dramatic text may be also interpreted as an invisible boomerang sent back to the aggressor.
Regrettably, this book does not provide any information as to the original language of each play. All literary translations deserve to have this important fact listed (especially since very few plays in this book have been published in their original language). Otherwise, how can one evaluate and appreciate the writers' and the translators' talents and skills? Nevertheless, this collection has been excellently edited and provides for a most enlightening and expedient reading.