UZHHOROD, Ukraine – Dressed in black, the actors moved through a sparse rehearsal room to prepare a new play – the story of a dissident Ukrainian who died decades ago in a Russian prison camp. As they took a break, they gathered in a circle with their arms around each other, laughing and chatting.
Although the play is set decades ago, the subject matter is close to the hearts of these actors, and the fact of the rehearsal alone is a triumph. They survived the siege of Mariupol by Russian troops earlier this year – and the destruction of their home theater.
“There is a saying, ‘The king is dead. Long live the king’”, says Liudmila Kolosovych, the acting director of the theater company. “So the theater died. Long live the theatre.”
Mariupol’s Academic Regional Drama Theater was destroyed by a Russian airstrike on March 16 during the week-long siege of Mariupol, one of the first examples of Russia’s shocking brutality in the war in Ukraine. Before the attack, the word “children” had been spelled out on the ground outside as a warning in large white letters. Hundreds of people hid in the theater during the siege, including four members of the theater company.
On Thursday, an Amnesty International report called the attack a “clear war crime”, finding that the strike killed at least a dozen people “and probably many more”. The exact number of casualties was impossible to determine as the city remains under Russian control after falling to those troops at the end of May.
Vira Lebedynska, 64, an actress, remembered the day the theater was hit.
“There was an explosion, walls started to crumble and then I heard screams,” Ms Lebedynska said. “We couldn’t move.”
She sought safety in a basement office with a colleague and that woman’s family, but even before the strike, food and water were low. Ms. Lebedynska said nearly 1,000 people had gathered in the theater when the rocket hit, and she thought hundreds of people died.
After the initial collision, her colleague’s husband ran up a crumbling staircase and came back to say, “There’s no more theater.”
Finally, Ms Lebedynska and her group fled on foot to a nearby town and joined a humanitarian convoy that took them to safety.
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In all, 13 members of the Mariupol group survived the weeks of bombing their city. Some were taken to Russian filtration camps; others were driven from their homes. Some took refuge in cellars. Some were unable to bury relatives who died next to them.
In recent weeks, the group has gathered again in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod – where they live together in a dormitory – to rehearse the new piece. It is based on the life and work of Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet, human rights activist, dissident and nationalist hero who died in 1985 in a Soviet prison camp.
He lived in the Donetsk region when it was part of the former Soviet Union, and was persecuted for his efforts to develop Ukrainian literature and language and for his outspoken opposition to Russian rule.
He was tried twice and died during a hunger strike in the Soviet prison in 1985. Ukrainian independence came just six years later, in 1991.
The Mariupol Theater itself has struggled with the legacy of Russian dominance in the region, which has often been at the expense of Ukrainian language and culture. Two years ago, the theater switched to performing in Ukrainian instead of Russian. The actors, many of whom speak Russian, have committed to working exclusively in Ukrainian and see themselves as part of a wider cultural revival.
In mid-July, the opening night of the new play is planned at the Uzhhorod Theater. After that, the artists hope to take the show to a festival in Krakow, Poland, and possibly tour.
“It’s a little scary to stage this performance,” said Ms. Kolosovych, the 58-year-old director, who wrote the piece in collaboration with others in the company. “The world is expecting a premiere by theater company Mariupol.”
Anatoliy Shevchenko, 68, played with the Mariupol group for decades. During the siege, he squatted for weeks in his basement next to his elderly mother and sister – with no electricity and limited food and water. He heard on the radio about the destruction of the theater.
Shortly afterwards, his mother died of a heart attack. He laid her body on the sidewalk, covered with a sheet, alongside six other corpses, he said.
“I feel like a monster for not being able to bury my mother,” he said through tears.
In the end, Mr Shevchenko said, Russian troops took him and his sister from their home at gunpoint and sent them to a filter camp in Novoazovsk, a town in Ukraine’s Donetsk region occupied by pro-Russian forces. .
“They think they are saving us,” he said of the Russian troops. In the camp, fingerprints were taken, interrogated and treated like a criminal, he said.
They were then sent to Russia, but went through Georgia to Germany, Poland and back to Ukraine.
After losing so much, being part of this community reminds him of who he is, he said. But the new piece also offers him a fresh start. He said he never wanted to return to Mariupol.
Mr. Shevchenko easily switched between a number of different characters in the performance. In one scene, he performed one of Vasyl Stus’ most famous poems into a booming bass that filled the rehearsal room.
“How good that I am not afraid of death//And don’t ask how heavy my crotch is,” he recited.
Nataliia Metliakova Marchenko, 63, who has been acting with the theater company for more than 40 years, was born in Russia, but her parents moved to Mariupol when she was a child. She still has a Russian passport.
She spent weeks alone in her house while the city was bombed before her son’s friends helped her west.
“When the Russians came, they came to ‘liberate’ me,” she said, using the Russian word, with obvious sarcasm in her voice. “And they set me free from everything. They freed me from the theater, from my apartment, from my house, from everything.”
Some of the company’s actors have remained in Mariupol, she said, and are involved in an attempt by Russian authorities to reopen the original theater in September with performances in Russian. That plan has been much criticized in Ukraine; Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor, likened it to “a dance on the graves.”
Dmytro Murantsev, a 22-year-old actor, took refuge with his girlfriend and her mother in the theater’s basement weeks before the strike. He said it got so crowded that people had to sleep in shifts.
“We thought we were going to die there,” he said.
But the fighting in the area was so fierce they couldn’t get away. They marked the days on the wall. “We were losing our minds,” he said.
On the day of the attack, they heard a fighter jet overhead and felt the earth shift beneath them, he said. Dust from the floor flew through the air. The walls shook.
“People were screaming for help, trying to get out and dying right before our eyes,” he said. “Kids tried to dig their parents out.”
He saw his girlfriend shout “I hate him” over and over — referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — but he couldn’t hear her because the noise of destruction drowned out everything. She also survived, he said, but fled to Germany with her mother and her cat.
Even when the weeks are over, Mr. Murantsev is still stuck in that moment. “I’m still processing it to be honest,” he said.