UZHHOROD, Ukraine – Dressed in black, the actors moved around in a sparse rehearsal room and prepared a new play – the story of a Ukrainian dissident who died decades ago in a Russian prison camp. While taking a breather, they huddled in a circle with their arms around each other, laughing and chatting.
Although the play takes place decades ago, the subject matter is close to the heart of these actors, and the mere fact of rehearsal is a triumph. Earlier this year, they survived the siege of Mariupol by Russian forces – and the destruction of their home theater.
“There is a saying, ‘The king is dead.’ Long live the king, ”said Liudmila Kolosovych, the acting director of the theater company. So, the theater died. Long live the theater. ”
Mariupol’s Academic Regional Drama Theater was destroyed on March 16 by a Russian airstrike amid the weeks-long siege of Mariupol, one of the earliest cases of Russia’s shocking brutality in the Ukraine war. Before the attack, the word “children” was spelled out as a warning in large white letters on the ground outside. Hundreds of people hid in the theater during the siege, including four members of the theater company.
On Thursday, an Amnesty International report called the attack a “clear war crime”, stating that the strike had killed at least a dozen people “and probably many more.” The exact number of casualties was impossible to determine because the city remained under Russian control after falling under those forces at the end of May.
Vira Lebedynska, 64, an actress, recalled the day the theater was hit.
“There was an explosion, walls started crumbling and then I heard screams,” she said. Lebedynska said. “We could not move.”
She, along with a colleague and that woman’s family, sought safety in a basement office, but even before the strike, food and water were scarce. Ms Lebedynska said nearly 1,000 people had gathered in the theater when the missile struck, and that she apparently killed hundreds.
After the initial impact, her colleague’s husband walked up a crumbling staircase and returned to say, “There is no more theater.”
Eventually, Ms Lebedynska and her group fled on foot to a nearby town and joined a humanitarian convoy that brought them to safety.
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A total of 13 members of the Mariupol group survived the weeks of bombing on their city. Some were removed to Russian filtration camps; others were displaced from their homes. Some hid in cells. Some could not bury relatives who died next to them.
The group has met again in recent weeks in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod – where they live together in a residence – to rehearse the new play. It is based on the life and works of Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet, human rights activist, dissident and nationalist hero who died in 1985 in a Soviet prison camp.
He lived in the Donetsk region when it was part of the former Soviet Union, and was prosecuted for his efforts to develop Ukrainian literature and language and for his outspoken opposition to Russian rule.
He was tried twice and died while on hunger strike in the Soviet prison in 1985. Ukrainian independence came just six years later, in 1991.
The Mariupol Theater itself wrestled with the legacy of Russian domination in the region, which often came at the expense of the Ukrainian language and culture. Two years ago, the theater switched to performance in Ukrainian, rather than Russian. The actors, many of whom speak Russian, are now committed to working exclusively in Ukrainian and see themselves as part of a broader cultural revival.
The opening night of the new play is scheduled for mid-July at the Uzhhorod Theater. Then the artists hope to take the show to a festival in Krakow, Poland, and possibly tour.
“It’s a little scary to perform this show,” she said. Kolosovych, the 58-year-old director, who co-wrote the play with others in the company. “The world is expecting a premiere of the Mariupol Theater Company.”
Anatoliy Shevchenko, 68, has performed with the Mariupol group for decades. During the siege, he sat with his elderly mother and sister in his basement for weeks – without electricity and limited food and water. Over the radio heard of the theater’s devastation.
Shortly afterwards, his mother died of a heart attack. He laid her body on the sidewalk, covered with a sheet, along with six other bodies, he said.
“I feel like a monster because I can not bury my mother,” he said through tears.
Finally, Mr. Shevchenko said Russian forces, under the barrel of a gun, took him and his sister out of their home and sent them to a filtration camp in Novoazovsk, a pro-Russian-occupied city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. . power.
“They think they are saving us,” he said of the Russian troops. In the camp, he was taken fingerprints, interrogated and treated like a criminal, he said.
They were then sent to Russia, but came out through Georgia, then to Germany, Poland and back to Ukraine.
After losing so much, he reminds himself of who he is to be part of this community, he said. But the new play also offers him a fresh start. He said he never wanted to return to Mariupol.
Mr. Shevchenko easily flipped through a number of different characters in the performance. In one scene, he delivered one of Vasyl Stus’ most famous poems in a booming bass that filled the rehearsal room.
“How good it is that I am not afraid of death // And do not ask how heavy my cross is,” he said.
Nataliia Metliakova Marchenko, 63, who has performed with the theater company for more than 40 years, was born in Russia, but her parents moved to Mariupol when she was a child. She still has a Russian passport.
She spent weeks alone in her home while the city was bombed before her son’s friends helped her get to the west.
“When the Russians came, they came to ‘liberate’ me,” she said, with the Russian word, with clear sarcasm in her voice. “And they freed me from everything. They freed me from the theater, from my apartment, from my house, from everything. ”
Some actors of the company have stayed in Mariupol, she said, and are involved in an attempt by Russian authorities to reopen the original theater in September with performances in Russian. This plan has been widely criticized in Ukraine; Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor, likened it to “a dance on the graves”.
Dmytro Murantsev, a 22-year-old actor, sought refuge with his girlfriend and her mother in the theater’s basement for weeks before the strike. He said it became so crowded that people had to sleep in shifts.
“We thought we would die there,” he said.
But the fighting was so intense in the surrounding area that they could not leave. They mark the days on the wall. “We were losing our minds,” he said.
The day of the attack, they heard a jet buzzing and the earth moving beneath them felt, he said. Dust flew from the floor through the air. The walls shook.
“People shouted for help, tried to get out, died before us,” he said. “Children tried to dig out their parents.”
He saw his girlfriend shout “I hate him,” over and over again – referring to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin – but he could not hear her as the noise of destruction drowned everything out. She also survived, he said, but fled to Germany with her mother and cat.
Even though the weeks have passed, Mr. Murantsev was still stuck in that moment. “I’m still processing it to be honest,” he said.