In a small, underground theatre in central Kyiv, an audience is watching – at times with perfectly still attention, at times with roars of laughter – a story that is so raw and painful that it is hard to believe it has already found its way on to the stage.
I Will Return, by the playwright Oksana Grytsenko, is a drama about three children from Ukraine who find themselves stranded, unable to return home, in a summer camp in illegally occupied Crimea.
The story is a snapshot of an ongoing national trauma. Official government statistics suggest that nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly taken from occupied parts of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, deported to Russia itself or to areas such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Only a trickle of a few hundred have come home, when parents or guardians, often helped by the charity Save Ukraine, have located and made the perilous journey to collect them. Some have had their names changed and been put up for adoption.
The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the alleged unlawful deportation of children.
Grytsenko based her play on detailed interviews with six teenagers who were taken illegally to Crimea ostensibly to protect them from the dangers of war, and then stranded there as parents and guardians struggled to reach them and produce the correct documents to bring them home. She merged characters to protect her interviewees’ privacy, taking care to stay as true to the real situation as possible.
That said, the play contains a gut-punching twist that visibly affected the audience at a Kyiv performance: one of her characters does not come home.
It does not reflect what happened to her own interviewees, but “it is more truthful, because the majority of these kids, they have not returned”, said Grytsenko.
The unlikely comedy of the play comes partly from the jokes and mischief-making of the teenage characters. Her interviewees, Grytsenko said, “were laughing, self-confident, telling stories, they were like any other teenagers. And I realised that I didn’t want to write a story about suffering kids. I wanted to write a story about kids who are kind of rebellious.”
The play’s director, Anna Turlo, remembered the cast of four were shocked by the jokes at the first read-through. “I said: ‘But my dearest actors, do you remember at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we were all confused and scared, but at the same time, we had crazy jokes going around the internet – the darkest humour I have ever seen in my life? This is for our mental health – this is our instrument to fight the horror.’”
Strikingly for a play written and performed during a full-scale war, it also puts characters from the aggressor nation on the stage and gives them a voice. These include a teacher at the summer camp, a police officer and a social worker, all played in turn by the same actor, Kateryna Vyshneva.
“I didn’t know how the audience would react,” said Vyshneva. “We have a lot of soldiers and veterans who come to the theatre, who are injured not just physically but also mentally. It’s a small theatre – you could physically reach me. My husband is serving in the army – I was joking that he should send me a flak jacket.”
Audience members receive content warnings, said the director, Turlo. “I’m afraid of traumatising people one more time, and that’s why we have these notifications everywhere that one of the characters is speaking Russian: it can be triggering for some people.”
Vyshneva herself, who switched fully to using the Ukrainian language in her private life after the full-scale invasion, has found it uncomfortable. During the first read-through, she began to feel unwell. “There was a joke that I was allergic to the Russian language, but it wasn’t entirely a joke,” she said. “Every time I play her I have some kind of physical reaction.”
The main part she plays is a summer camp teacher – a clownish figure with a smear of red lipstick who spouts absurd Russian propaganda.
“But with the progress of the play, her characters become darker and darker,” said Turlo. “And if at the beginning, she plays a clown, at the end, she plays a normal woman.” That’s the part of the drama in which Vyshneva portrays a Russian social worker, who seals children’s fates according to her country’s legislation with a flick of her pen. “She’s cold, well-educated, smart and she knows exactly what she’s doing,” said Vyshneva.
Grytsenko has also worked as a journalist: she could have written up the story as an article, rather than put it on the stage. But in a play, said Turlo, “suddenly those characters are not letters on white paper any more.
“When you have this experience, as an audience, of coexisting with the actors, you can suddenly say: ‘OK, this kid is just like my childhood friend.’ And the story becomes personal, it becomes understandable, you can touch it, you can see it right here, right before you.”
That sense of connection was important, said Turlo, when the real story of the children taken into Crimea and Russia can be complicated and difficult. Sometimes parents are blamed for allowing their children to be taken to summer camps. Sometimes children have settled, and do not wish to come back.
“When we are talking about teenagers, who have spent some time there in Russia, they get propaganda in their head, which we understand – but at the same time our society is not ready to deal with those kids. It is not ready to say, ‘I understand, for two years you’ve been listening to the stories about how Ukrainians are Nazis.’”
On the night of the performance seen by the Guardian, some of the seats in the theatre were taken by Vyshneva’s teenage drama students. They were last-minute replacements for a group who had a more important task that night: bringing home nine more deported Ukrainian children.
I Will Return will be performed at A studio Rubin, Prague, on 12 October.
