As a collaborative, ruminative artform, theatre isn’t geared to react rapidly to current events. A bleak, incidental side effect to the protraction of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine — a supposed five-day “special military operation” now in its fourth grinding year — is that it’s lasted long enough for playwrights and directors to formulate a response.
At Theatre 503 until March 7, Olga Braga’s play Donbas unpicks complex knots of ethnicity and loyalty in the titular region where the war was fomented. Here at the Arcola, director Nicolas Kent has marshalled five short plays by British and Ukrainian writers examining different aspects of the conflict. Necessarily scrappy and piecemeal, they remind us of horrors to which we’ve arguably become inured: the massacre of Bucha, the destruction of Mariupol, the abduction of an estimated 20,000 children.
