Stage camouflage at the Kherson Theatre

On the evening before the outbreak of a war, every effort is made; one action is as good as another, for it is not a personal choice that will change the mind of an individual who has already made all the necessary preparations to watch a nation go up in flames. On the evening of 23 February 2022, in Ukraine, some people locked themselves away in their homes, some went to bed as usual, and some simply did not believe that an invasion could take place. And there were those who went to the theatre and, for the last time, took to the streets of their city, which could still be called free. The Mykola Kulish Theatre in Kherson was staging Milorad Pavic’s play "Forever and a Day More", which has a unique feature: it allows the audience to choose between two different prologues and three endings. And on 23 February four years ago, the audience at the theatre in Kherson had chosen a happy ending, without ever having discovered what the others might have been like. Alena Movchan, a poet and playwright at the theatre, was present on that opening night. She can still picture it clearly and recounts it in a completely different setting, in the bare hall of a school that has become the safest haven for Kherson’s theatre life: “We would split into two stages, then move to other rooms; the whole building was involved. Then the audience would choose an ending and watch it.”

Everyone in the room knew what might happen – if not that very night, then soon; if not a matter of hours, then days. The decision to opt for a happy ending is perhaps more a human choice than a military one. “It was an incredible evening; some journalists even wrote that it seemed like witchcraft. The director, Serhii Pavljuk, did a brilliant job.” And in the midst of her excitement as she described it, Alena added: “Then we woke up to the sound of explosions – the war had begun.” The fiction on the theatre stage the night before had given way to a staggering, surreal reality: hard to put into words, especially in a place like Kherson, where fiction ended and reality began – harsh, pervasive, ready to disrupt everyone’s lives, even those who had taken part in the staging of "Per sempre e un giorno in più"; never has a title been more fitting for that last night of peace.

In war, you cease to be who you were the day before. This applies to people, and it applies to buildings. The Mykola Kulish Theatre became a place of refuge and a centre of resistance, where ordinary citizens, actors, directors, sound and lighting technicians, scriptwriters and set designers gathered, lived and organised themselves. In the theatre’s basement, many of the posters that Ukrainians displayed on the streets of Kherson were created to tell the Russians that they were not welcome and had to leave. The theatre’s director, Oleksandr Knyha, was abducted in the early days of the invasion whilst in his hometown, Oleshki, on the left bank of the River Dnipro, which remains under occupation to this day. “He was taken to a basement, where the Russians asked him to collaborate,” says Alena, who has dedicated a book, “Kherson under Occupation”, to the story of the theatre and its director. Oleksandr Knyha was released, but his hometown of Oleshki remains under occupation, at the mercy of Moscow’s decisions, paralysed and destroyed; it is home to around a thousand people – a thousand survivors held hostage amidst the ruins, without hospitals and with no alternatives. In the midst of the war, Alena, too, ceased to be the person she had been until the day before: “I decided to stay in Kherson, with my husband and my son.” The baby, Dobromir, had been born in January and Alena still needed to regain her strength – she’d had some complications – but her decision to stay was dictated not by her health, but by her determination not to abandon Kherson. Dobromir skips around us; he’s now quite at home in the makeshift theatre that his mother and the old Mykola Kulish troupe are looking after. He’s a lively child, a child of war, who has grown up with the sound of drones and explosions to the point where he no longer takes any notice of them.

Alena lets him play on his own; she doesn’t want her anxiety to rub off on him, so she lets him run about the rooms of the building. “Until recently, I used to let him play in the streets, but then one day, in a small playground near our home, we found a landmine. I can’t let him go out like that anymore.” That’s how she’s got used to being a mother; her first few months were spent under occupation, and her pram, with tiny Dobromir sleeping inside it, also served as a cover. When Alena recounts how she used to wander the streets of Kherson during the months of the invasion, it feels as though you’re right there with her. Her name even ended up on a ‘traitors’ list – a chat group containing full names where someone even posted a photo of Dobromir’s little feet covered in blue and yellow socks. Blonde, with a gentle gaze and very youthful features, an unarmed poet, with her child running around her and showering her with attention – in Moscow’s definition, Alena, too, is one of the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’. In the Kremlin, anyone who betrays is a Nazi; nowhere is the term further removed from its historical meaning than in Russia. Alena betrayed, and she did so proudly. She sought out betrayal on the streets of Kherson. “I used to wander round the city’s cafés, taking Dobromir with me – whom she calls Dobromirchyk, in keeping with the sweet-sounding tendency in many Slavic languages to use diminutives – My husband is a firefighter and sometimes had to work for two days on the trot, so I’d go back and forth across the city with the child. We used to live in the city centre, but it soon filled up with Russians, so we moved a little further out, where my parents were also living.”

In those days, there were quite a few residents of Kherson trying to sabotage the occupiers. One of the reasons Ukrainian soldiers managed to liberate the city was also down to the internal resistance movement: it is difficult to liberate a territory where every citizen could be an enemy spy. There are some, there have been some and there still are some, but the majority of Kherson’s inhabitants were waiting for liberation and carrying out small, everyday acts to ensure that the Ukraine that remained – the Ukraine they felt in their hearts – was not suffocated within that occupied space. Alena, too, was among those building this resistance; with her young child, she did not take part in the protests, nor did she go to the theatre’s basement to draw posters against the occupiers, but she would take the bus to a venue in the city centre to join Zoom meetings and discuss Ukrainian culture. “I didn’t take taxis; I made do with whatever public transport was left. I felt safer that way – in those days we feared the Russians were running the taxi services and it could be dangerous. So I’d go into the city centre and hold online literary meetings.” She spoke about Ukrainian culture, and it might seem like a trivial matter to go to a café to discuss books, but it isn’t if the books being discussed are in a banned language: “People from various parts of Ukraine were connected via Zoom; in Kherson, there was almost no internet anywhere, so sometimes I used the Russians’ networks. Once, a poet from Ivano-Frankivsk started saying: ‘We must kill the Russians just as they kill us’.” A statement which, when uttered in Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, represents a widely held view that can be voiced openly, could have cost him imprisonment, a conviction and even his life in Kherson. “The situation was telling: I could see the Russian soldiers right at that moment whilst he was speaking; I could see them sitting in the restaurant next to the café where I was sitting. I was taking part in the conversation; I was wearing headphones and no one could hear what they were saying on the other end, but you could tell from my reactions. I was lucky to be sitting in a café full of people I knew.” Not the café owners, but someone had mentioned Alena’s name to the Russians; moreover, some of her conversations with other authors were posted on YouTube, so tracking her down and finding out what she thought wasn’t difficult.

Alena had been managing the literary scene since the occupation: “At a certain point, I realised I would have to start thinking about what to do in case the Russians came to take me away. My husband worked almost all night; he wouldn’t have got there in time for Dobromir, so I just hoped that if it happened, I’d have time to warn my parents.” The fact that the war and the occupation might not seem real is a recurring theme in the accounts of many Ukrainians. Having lived through, suffered and endured these events does not make this feeling any less strange; the horror seems too unreal to have actually been experienced, despite the nightmares and the wounds, and Alena admits: “I felt a certain sense of responsibility; even when I found out I’d been put on the list of traitors, I carried on with my online meetings. It was as if I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening, even though I was convinced I was, because in that life under occupation, in that slow suffocation of an entire city, I was right in the thick of it. Sometimes I imagined that their weapons were made of plastic, like toys. That’s how my mind works, even though horrible things were happening around me and I knew it.” There were stairwells used as torture chambers; there were Ukrainians who were searched during the night, even just to check their tattoos. “My husband was once called out to put out a fire set on a woman’s body; she was completely naked, with the clothes that had been stripped from her still lying beside her, whilst she was burning.” It was hard not to know: “It was as if you were sitting at home, in your living room, and suddenly someone came in and wanted to make you feel like a stranger.” The whole of Kherson’s life during those eight months of occupation was then brought to the stage.

The Mykola Kulish School is now located in one of the most heavily targeted areas of Kherson; drones circle around it, harassing it; many windows are broken, and parts of the walls have been destroyed. For this reason, after a few months, the company decided to move most of its performances to the school, which no longer functions as a school – lessons are still all online – but has been reborn as a theatre, thanks to a hall with a stage that, whilst lacking the trappings of a true historic theatre, allows theatrical activities to continue. Many plays about the war and the occupation are being staged, and not just those set in Kherson. One of the first productions staged after the liberation was about a refugee from the Donbas, who recounted her decision to leave, to abandon the territories where Moscow has moved in and cast a shadow over everything. “We lived through it; they cut off our communications and the internet. They had closed the banks so that we couldn’t withdraw cash. In September, the Russians tried to open a Russian school and had also set up a job centre; they wanted people to work for them.” Memories from that dark period have begun to resurface, and at the theatre, Ukrainians also want to see their own history and their present reflected. “Reflective pieces, veterans’ stories, accounts from the occupied territories. We currently have two productions running: ‘Hero for a Day’, written and performed by an actor who was wounded and tells the story of a friend of his who died on the very first day of the war, on the front line. Then there’s ‘Nel seminterrato’, also by a veteran. We continue to stage the classics; sometimes we blend them with current events – we’ve combined Hemingway with the tragedy of the explosion at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station. We do most of our rehearsals online, to minimise risks and because many of us live outside Kherson.”

The first time the Mykola Kulish Theatre reopened after the occupation, a lady went up to Alena and asked her: “Please, don’t stop.” And they haven’t stopped. On stage in uniform, on stage with grief, on stage with drones. There is a secret that Alena does not hold back; she does not confess it aloud, but it slips out as she speaks: Kherson survived because it held on to Ukraine within itself, whilst Russia hung up its flags, imposed its anthems, its schools and its roubles – in the corners of the city, in private conversations, on public transport, in socks hidden inside shoes – Ukraine survived and was preserved. Now that Kherson is free – even if it has been reduced to ashes, even if it has been struck down, even if at times it lies reeling – what the inhabitants are asking for is this: let’s talk about ourselves, let’s take to the stage, let’s shout out our name, our pain, what saved us; let’s take ourselves to the theatre. It is a necessary moment of self-centredness; the present, or what has just passed, takes to the stage.

Alena hears that sound in the distance – the motor of a scooter buzzing like a drone. She grows worried, pricks up her ears towards the sky and runs off after saying: ‘I think they didn’t take me away back then because I was always with my son; they thought I was just a mother out and about with a child.’ He saved her; she runs off to save him. It’s not just drones that make that drone-like noise: a tractor appears in the distance round the bend. At the theatre in Kherson, there’s even a chance to have a laugh.