To a basement in Ukraine, people of all ages flock to see new Ukrainian drama, even when the air raid alarm sounds. Oksana Hrytsenko remembers how people in the beginning of the invasion visited even simple readings.
People really want to come to the theaters and reflect on what they are experiencing. In 2022, people sat and cried rivers, because the plays were about the first days of the war, says Hrytsenko – who visits the Book Fair in Gothenburg to talk about drama.
Interest in Ukrainian theater has grown enormously in recent years. Oksana Hrytsenko was one of those who in 2019 founded the Playwrights' Theater in Kyiv, when there was hardly any modern Ukrainian drama.
Theaters have for years based their repertoire on Chekhov and other Russian plays. But now it's taboo to play them, so they've started to produce both Ukrainian classics and modern dramas.
About collaborators
Hrytsenko is a journalist and has covered both Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the Maidan revolution in 2013–2014. But in 2019, she felt exhausted, like many colleagues, and glanced at drama.
Drama gives you another opportunity to describe your experience, to write about what is important and painful for you. It differs from journalism but also has a lot in common, she says.
In Ellerström's anthology "Actions in wartime", with seven newly written texts about the war, Oksana Hrytsenko contributes with "Witnesses to a calf's execution". It's about a trial where people are accused of being collaborators with the Russians. She bases it on interviews she did in the Kharkiv region.
Sometimes you can see that people have collaborated with Russians, but in other cases, people just tried to survive. In small villages, there are often feuds that have been going on for generations, so when the village is invaded, people start accusing neighbors they hate.
About the war
In the 1920s, Ukrainian theater flourished as a form of resistance, but many of the actors were killed in Stalin's purges. When Ukrainian drama rises from the ashes again, it's the experiences of the war that dominate.
It can't be avoided, says Hrytsenko.
In both her journalism and drama, she seeks ways to show the truth.
When I write as a journalist, I can't guarantee that what I write is the complete picture, I can only guarantee that it's what I honestly discovered and that I don't intentionally distort the picture, she says.
But in drama, she can also portray people closer.
Only if you get under people's skin does the play become good.
Elin Swedenmark/TT
Facts: "Actions in wartime"
TT
"Actions in wartime" contains seven newly written short plays, translated by Nils Håkansson and Mikael Nydahl.
The texts were created within the project Triangle of Ukrainian Artists (TUA), a partnership between Rikstolvan in Järrestad, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm, Villa Decius in Krakow, and the Playwrights' Theater in Kyiv.
Since the spring of 2022, Rikstolvan in Järrestad has been running an artistic residency for Ukrainian playwrights. Contemporary Ukrainian drama is being translated and introduced to a Swedish audience, at www.ukrdrama.rikstolvan.se.
