“Will you allow me to rape Ukrainian sluts?” the Russian soldier asks his wife on the phone. The question amuses her. That’s okay, but “don’t tell me anything about it and use condoms,” she asks her husband. The recording of the phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families back home, which the Ukrainian secret service intercepted, is not the only part of the evening’s theater at the Berlin Schaubühne where you can briefly get sick. In their documentary production, Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov and his dramaturge Pavlo Arie work their way through the horror of war in their homeland. “We don’t do propaganda, we tell about people’s feelings. Everything we show is the daily reality of this war,” said the director in an interview with the SZ the afternoon after the premiere.
“With our work, I tell people in Germany what is really happening in the Ukraine,” says the director
The title of his production, “Arming Against a Sea of Plagues,” is a quote from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. Zhyrkov actually wanted to stage the play at his Left Bank Theater in Kyiv in February, when Putin’s army marched in. “In the first week of the war I thought that I would never do theater again. What should theater do in a situation like this?” says the director. “But I don’t want to fight with guns in my hands, I can’t. So I have to defend my country in other ways. I tell people in Germany, in Poland and other countries with our work what’s really happening in Ukraine .” Zhyrkov continues to fuss, this is his weapon. But many of his friends and colleagues volunteered for the Ukrainian army: “Actors from our theater are now fighting at the front. One of them has been missing for two months, another was seriously wounded.” These are hard, bitter sentences. Stas Zhyrkov, a thoughtful, serious person, says it completely unemotionally: That’s the situation, everyone has to try to cope with it somehow.
For Zhyrkov’s production, two actors from his Kiev theater, Oleh Stefan and Dmytro Oliinyk, come together with Holger Bülow from the Schaubühne ensemble. The sparse stage design (Jan Pappelbaum) shows that this is not a show, but a search for the truth: film cans are stacked on a long table. Its color, orange, is reminiscent of the Maidan revolution, the Ukrainian uprising against Russian hegemony. First, the two Ukrainians explain that for a long time it hardly mattered whether someone saw themselves as Russian or Ukrainian. People just entered some nationality in the Soviet passport. One has to admire Oleh Stefan and Dmytro Oliinyk for the comedic power and the lightness of their game: The world is terrible, let’s crack some jokes. Apparently, Ukrainian humor is not the worst weapon to use in order not to lose your mind in this situation.
The play also soberly records the brutalization of the Ukrainian side
Of course, the two Ukrainian actors wanted to study at the famous theater school in Moscow when they were young, and of course they don’t resist the little joke that they felt like the characters in Chekhov with their famous, eternally unfulfilled sigh of longing: “To Moscow, to Moscow…” The childhood memories of two actors from Kyiv are enough to show how terribly absurd Putin’s war is. Holger Bülow, the German actor, speaks on behalf of the audience about his own insecurity when he first met his colleagues from the Ukraine: “For me, war only ever happened on the television news and was far away.” It’s over.
The most important element of the evening are the interviews with the actors from Kiev who are now fighting as soldiers. “I was afraid that I would break down mentally if I didn’t report for the army now,” says one of them. “You know that you can die and that you might kill other people. You have to understand that and find a balance.” This comes without heroic poses, they are soberly recorded facts: “It feels like you have no other choice.” Hate is reported almost as laconically. None of the soldiers interviewed felt sorry for the Russian soldiers, on the contrary: the “enemy”, the “Russian bastards” should simply die or disappear. In his diary, dramaturge Pavlo Arie, a civilian, enjoys his violent fantasies of shooting down the “Russian orcs” like in a computer game. Part of the director’s honesty is that he soberly records the brutalization of his own side, his friends and theater colleagues: that’s what the war made of us.
“I don’t know how many years it will take to get out of this prison of violence.”
Interspersed between these interviews from the battlefield are old pictures of theatrical performances by the actors who are now serving in the army. The discrepancy between the beautiful, crazy, exuberantly vital theatrical scenes in the photographs and their accounts of how they holed up in burrows under artillery fire is hard to bear. As a spoiled Western European, you sit very helpless and at a loss in the auditorium of the Schaubühne that evening.
When asked if there is such a thing as hope, Stas Zhyrkov, the director, returns a few of his dry, illusion-free sentences. “I am very grateful to the Ukrainian army. It will be a hard road for everyone in Ukraine. We have to rebuild our country after the victory. I have many questions for my country. I don’t love every one of our political leaders, there are many shitheads . I don’t know how many years it will take to get out of this prison of madness, this prison of violence. It’s a long struggle. And I hope our theater is a part of that struggle.”