Actors from the Mariupol Theater and new recruits rehearse Poets Lived Here and show how lives have been changed by the war. Photo: Kasia Stręk/The Guardian
When the bombs hit the Mariupol Drama Theater, Vira Lebedynska heard no boom or explosion. From the recording studio in the theater's basement, where she sheltered with a few other theater employees, the sensation was more like a vacuum.
"There was a whooshing sound and the feeling of the air being sucked out of the room," she recalls. A few seconds earlier, her cat Gabriel suddenly tensed, perhaps having sensed the sound of an airplane overhead. Then chaos ensued: shouting, screaming, panic.
The 65-year-old actor and singing trainer was one of about twenty theater employees among the more than a thousand people who took shelter in the theater when the Russian army besieged Mariupol in March 2022.
The attack, believed to have been carried out with two 500kg bombs dropped by a Russian aircraft, took place despite widespread knowledge that this was the largest civilian shelter in the city. Estimates of the number of people killed in the strike vary widely, from "at least 15" (Human Rights Watch) to 600 (Associated Press).
On Saturday, the second anniversary of the strike, occupied Mariupol will vote in Russia's presidential election, a tightly controlled spectacle aimed at giving Vladimir Putin another six years in power. Meanwhile, in Kiev, Lebedynska will perform in Mariupol Drama, a play based on the memories of four actors who hid in the theater, all of whom talk about their own experiences from the stage.
The four are among a small group of actors and theater staff who revived the troupe in Uzhhorod, in Ukraine's far west. The performances take place in the huge, square hall of the city's main theater, which has served as a stage for the Mariupol troupe. There are also occasional guided tours; Saturday's performance is the Kyiv premiere of Mariupol Drama. Props are minimal, while costumes are sewn from scratch or purchased from local thrift stores, but the spirit and sense of duty are high.
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"The body of our theater has been destroyed, but its heart still beats here in Uzhhorod," said Hennadiy Dybovskiy, the theater's recently appointed 63-year-old director, who is originally from Donetsk.
In Mariupol Drama, each of the actors brings to the stage a real artifact that reminds them of their time in the theater. For Lebedynska the wardrobe number is 392; Theater staff wore the tags around their necks to identify themselves to others who might need help finding their way. For 24-year-old Dmytro Murantsev, this is the one-piece Spider-Man pajama suit he wore during the siege because it was his warmest piece of clothing.
Also on stage in the play are Ihor Kytrysh, 43, and his wife, Olena Bila, 42, both of whom have been performing at the Mariupol Theater for more than twenty years. They left the theater the day before the explosion and risked a ride across the front lines to leave the city.
They are grateful to have made it out with their son, but like most people from Mariupol, they feel a sharp sense of loss for all they left behind. They had saved for twenty years to buy their own apartment, bought it in the months before the war and had just finished its renovation. They never got the chance to move in.
For them, one of the most disturbing memories is the sense of the erosion of authority and societal norms at the beginning of the siege. "We could see this moment where normal human relationships broke down, this point where people's self-preservation instincts kicked in and part of the population started looting and panicking. We have played roles in plays about this kind of social disintegration before, but nothing prepares you to see it in real life," Bila said.
Lebedynska said that in the run-up to the war, she ignored her son's pleas to leave Mariupol because she believed full-scale war was not possible. When hostilities began, she packed a backpack with important belongings and Gabriel the cat and headed to the theater. She and a few other theater colleagues set up camp in the basement recording studio, which had a portrait of Mozart on the wall and a couch for sleeping.
"At first there weren't that many people, but then someone opened the theater doors and people poured in. They had heard that there was going to be an organized evacuation from the theater, but it never happened, so everyone ended up staying there. she remembered.
People cooked food outside on open fires and carried various sets and props from the storerooms to sleep on. Occasionally some people would try to leave and drive out of Mariupol, but often they would return a few hours later saying they had been shot at.
Lebedynska does not remember the aftermath of the strike clearly, with only a few searing snapshots in her mind: parents punching a young girl in the face in an attempt to revive her; people staggered into the streets covered in blood. Gabriel, the cat, had disappeared. She didn't have time to look for him.
She walked for two hours through the devastated city, wearing a dressing gown, before stopping to spend the night in an apartment on the outskirts of Mariupol with the windows knocked out. Her onward journey was an odyssey of extreme stress, discomfort and checkpoints.
It can feel strange to play with a skeleton group in a largely empty hall, in a theater a thousand kilometers from Mariupol, in the opposite corner of Ukraine. But Dybovskiy said it was an important act of defiance to continue. "This is the only professional collective flying the flag of the Donetsk region. We will not allow the Russian Orcs to usurp our Donetsk theater traditions," he said.
However, such talk masks a difficult reality. Of the nearly 200 theater employees before the war, only about 50 left Mariupol, joined various Ukrainian theaters or moved abroad. The rest stayed behind and some joined a new theater established by the Russian occupation authorities, called the Mariupol Republican Order of the Decoration of the Russian Drama Theater.
Kytrysh and Bila said they were shocked by how many of their former colleagues made that decision. "The war showed who is who. There were people who left, but then went back; There are people who we thought would definitely leave, and they ended up working for the Russians," Kytrysh said.
Former theater director Volodymyr Kozhevnikov lost several close relatives during the siege and told his colleagues that he stayed behind because he wanted to bury them. He is now head of the music department of the new theater, which plays in a temporary hall in Mariupol because the original theater building was destroyed beyond repair during the strike.
The newly Russianized group has already made several trips to Russian regions, and Moscow has sent actors and directors to work in occupied Ukrainian territory. The theater regularly takes part in 'patriotic' concerts dedicated to Russian national holidays and the orchestra is called in to play military marches.
Moscow-based theater director Nika Kosenkova recently directed Aleksandr Pushkin's Feast in the Time of Plague, a short play about grotesque celebrations in a time of death and illness, apparently an unironic choice. Footage broadcast on local television showed her explaining to the actors that "the most important thing is to understand Pushkin's text and its intonation... to speak well and be well-educated people," before they sound of a Ukrainian accent in Russian parodied as an example of how not to speak.
Lebedynska said that in the months after she fled to the Ukrainian-controlled area, she continued to keep in touch by phone with fellow actors who had stayed. "I think many of them had simply been waiting for the arrival of the 'Russian world'. People told me that the theater had been blown up from the inside. I told them, 'I'm not going to argue with you, just think about what you're saying,'" she said.
Murantsev said he thought these views were more of a coping mechanism, for people who couldn't bear to leave their hometown. "I don't think there were many super pro-Russian people, I think they just feel 'out of politics' and want to stay quiet," he said.
Those in Uzhhorod wonder if they will ever be able to return home, and are left with both the terrible memories of the siege and a sense of longing for a place that no longer exists.
'Time has not healed me, although I certainly feel a little further away from it. But I still wake up at night with excruciating panic attacks. This all stays with you, within yourself," Lebedynska said.
