‘Our destroyed theatre’s heart still beats’: Mariupol’s actors return to the stage, two years on

Actors from Mariupol theatre and new recruits rehearse Poets Lived Here, depicting how lives have been changed by the war. Photograph: Kasia Stręk/The Guardian

When the bombs hit the Mariupol Drama theatre, Vira Lebedynska did not hear a boom or a blast. From the recording studio in the theatre’s basement, where she was sheltering along with a few other theatre employees, the sensation was more like a vacuum.

“There was a whoosh, and a feeling that the air was being sucked out of the room,” she recalled. A few seconds earlier, her cat Gabriel had suddenly tensed, perhaps sensing the sound of a plane overhead. Then there was chaos: shouting, screaming, panicking.