In a small basement theatre in central Kyiv, wounded soldiers, wives and widows are turning their wartime pain into plays that leave audiences in tears.
One of them is Twenty One, staged at the Veterans’ Theatre and centred on Maryna, a refugee from Russia-annexed Crimea who wants only one thing, for her soldier husband Petro to come back alive.
In the play, villagers whisper that Maryna kept a black hen’s egg under her armpit to hatch an evil critter that grants wishes. She becomes fixated on incubating the egg after the hen lays it and drops dead. Living modestly in a rural house, she raises tens of thousands of dollars online to buy drones, weapons and power generators for the front line. She sees it as a ransom for Petro’s life, paid to a woman in a black leather coat who personifies death.
Despite its magic realist touches, the play is “our reality,” actress Kateryna Svyrydenko, who plays Maryna, told Al Jazeera.
“There is enough of everything, one can cry, laugh, think,” she said between a rehearsal and a performance in the packed theatre.
Founded in 2024, the Veterans’ Theatre runs as a four-month school for servicemen, their wives or widows who want to become playwrights. Other veteran students and professional instructors discuss their work, then stage the plays at graduation. After that, the productions move on to other Ukrainian theatres.
The soldiers-turned-playwrights write about wounds, amputations, contusions and captivity. Their wives and widows put on stage the pain and fear that often sit behind the hardships faced by the men.
Svyrydenko’s husband went missing on the front line in 2022, six months after Russia’s full-scale invasion began.
“I can’t express in words how difficult, how heavy it is. The waiting and the incognisance,” she said, still wearing her character’s blue-and-white dress.
She said what hurts even more is the silence of her seven-year-old son, Semen.
“He very rarely allows himself to cry at night. Very rarely,” she said.
Twenty One is an autobiographical work by Olha Murashko, a publicist and campaigner who raises money for arms and gear for the front line, where her husband still is.
Director Kateryna Vyshneva said the story speaks directly to soldiers’ wives and widows.
Some tell her that “if there is no happy end in my life, for a split second I believed that a happy end is possible,” Vyshneva told Al Jazeera.
She said the theatre is also trying to record the war in the words of the people living through it.
“We have to talk about the war using the words of its participants, through the eyes of those who survived it,” Vyshneva said.
“It’s important to document the here and now while it hurts, while it’s hot, it’s burning, while it means something.”
Last year, 36-year-old veteran and documentary filmmaker Oleksandr Tkachuk staged his first play, A Military Mom. Written by military medic Alyna Sarnatska, it tells of her struggle between the front line and her child.
Tkachuk said reliving pain on stage can work as therapy, as “a side effect of art”.
“They realise [their trauma], they break it down, they relive it, let it pass through them, not just in flashbacks, but as a clear, calm memory.”
In Twenty One, the title refers to the 21 days it takes an egg to hatch and for a human fetus to develop a heartbeat. Maryna knows that after miscarriages and lost hope before the birth of her daughter, Alyna.
Alyna has never lived in peace. While pregnant with her in 2014, Maryna joined crowds at Kyiv’s Independence Square during the anti-government protests known as the Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan Revolution.
In the play, the current war sharpens Alyna’s teenage confusion and rebellion. She argues with her mother, clashes with a neighbour, draws Ukrainian flags on asphalt, and waits for calls or messages from her father.
Then he goes silent for more than two weeks.
At the same time, on the other side of the stage, two soldiers from his unit try to evacuate a dying fellow soldier and are killed in a Russian strike.
As Maryna breaks down in pain and tears, much of the audience does too. Vyshneva calls it a collective catharsis.
“They reached a unison, a resonance” with Maryna, “breathed with her, and waited for her husband with her,” she said.
The agony breaks when Alyna cries out: “Daddy called! Looks like the egg hatched!”
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