Theatres of War: How Ukrainian Playwrights Confront the Invasion

In the midst of artillery fire and air-raid sirens, on stages hastily rebuilt in basements or framed in candlelight within cultural centres, Ukrainian playwrights are scripting a different kind of resistance. Since the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s theatre has emerged as a vital force in articulating national trauma, chronicling heroism, and interrogating the private and public dimensions of a war that has not spared the realm of art. The new Ukrainian theatre is at once intimate and defiant, political and deeply personal—a space where grief, rage, absurdity and hope are staged for both domestic audiences and the world beyond.

Here we explore how Ukrainian playwrights and directors are responding to the full-scale war with Russia, the forms and themes that have emerged, and how this theatrical movement is shaping not only cultural discourse but the very language of national identity.

Theatre in a Time of Total War

Theatre in wartime Ukraine has not disappeared—it has adapted. In cities under fire, such as Kharkiv and Mykolaiv, theatres were closed or repurposed as shelters. In Kyiv and Lviv, performances resumed with curfews and air-raid interruptions. Touring companies began travelling to displaced persons’ shelters and front-line settlements. Meanwhile digital performances proliferated, allowing plays to reach audiences in Poland, Germany, the UK, and Canada.

For many playwrights, the war has brought a clarity of purpose. The central question is not only how to tell the story of war but whose story to tell. Some focus on the soldier, the medic, the volunteer. Others centre the grandmother who refuses to flee, the child watching cartoons in a subway shelter, the Russian-speaking Ukrainian forced to redefine herself in the face of destruction.

The plays emerging from this period are not mere reportage. They are artistic responses—layered, uncomfortable, often unresolvable. Humour is present, sometimes dark and corrosive, sometimes absurdist. So too is silence: the unsaid, the unsayable, the moments in which grief overwhelms articulation.

Prominent Voices and Emerging Themes

A new generation of Ukrainian playwrights has come to the fore since 2022, building on foundations laid in the post-Maidan cultural renaissance. Among them are Natalka Vorozhbyt, Sasha Denisova, Pavlo Arie and Liudmyla Tymoshenko, each with distinctive styles but shared urgency. Vorozhbyt, whose earlier work Bad Roads was acclaimed for its depiction of the 2014 Donbas conflict, has continued to write about the emotional fragmentation of wartime relationships and the absurd rituals of survival. Denisova, who fled to Poland in the early months of the invasion, has written from exile, turning the experience of displacement into ironic, poignant reflections on belonging and estrangement.

One recurring theme in this new wartime theatre is the collapse of certainty—of language, of identity, of safety. Many plays feature characters grappling with the erosion of personal histories: “Where am I from, if my village is now a crater?” “What does my Russian mother tongue mean when Russian bombs fall on my roof?” This crisis of identity plays out not as polemic but as quiet disorientation.

Another theme is memory—how war is remembered, misremembered, or silenced. Some plays reframe episodes from Soviet history or earlier invasions, implicitly contrasting Ukrainian resilience with Russian imperial nostalgia. Others depict the banality of war bureaucracy: the lost paperwork, the Kafkaesque queues for military registration, the sudden normalisation of death notices.

Perhaps most powerfully, there is a fierce resistance to pity. These plays do not seek sympathy from Western audiences—they demand attention, understanding, and solidarity. They assert agency even in grief, creativity even in ruins.

New Forms and Hybrid Spaces

Ukrainian theatre under invasion has not only changed in content but also in form. Traditional proscenium stages have given way to minimalist set-ups, staged readings and documentary verbatim plays. These latter are crafted from interviews with soldiers, displaced persons, doctors, or volunteers, and retain their raw immediacy. They serve a dual function: bearing witness and defying erasure.

Other productions experiment with digital formats. Ukrainian directors have staged livestreamed performances on YouTube and Zoom, subtitled for international audiences. These productions, often created in collaboration with theatres abroad, have found resonance in Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom and beyond. They have made theatre portable, borderless, a tool of cultural diplomacy as much as self-expression.

In a striking example, Pavlo Arie’s At the Beginning and End of Time was performed in a Berlin underground car park with the audience listening on headphones, mimicking the dislocation and claustrophobia of wartime sheltering. In another, Sasha Denisova’s My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion was staged in London’s Royal Court Theatre, blending satire and testimony in a confrontation with war’s psychological toll.

Theatre as Witness, Mourner, and Weapon

Theatre in wartime Ukraine plays several overlapping roles. First, it is a witness. By giving form to the emotional and experiential chaos of war, playwrights preserve what might otherwise vanish into numbness or abstraction. As Ukraine confronts mass displacement, trauma and loss, the act of storytelling itself becomes defiance—an assertion that lives matter, that stories survive.

Second, theatre is a mourner. Many plays are elegiac in tone, particularly those centred on fallen soldiers or destroyed communities. They resist the sanitisation of heroism, insisting on the grief behind the medals, the silence after the gunfire.

Third, and increasingly, theatre is a weapon—not in the sense of propaganda, but as a moral and intellectual counteroffensive. It challenges simplistic narratives, whether Russian myths of fraternity or Western clichés about victimhood. It also confronts the darker corners of Ukrainian society: corruption, prejudice, trauma-induced violence, even the exhaustion of faith.

The International Reception

International festivals and theatres have embraced Ukrainian plays with a mixture of solidarity and admiration. Yet there remains a risk that Ukrainian work will be reduced to “war content”—appreciated only for its topical urgency rather than its artistic merit. Ukrainian artists themselves have resisted this framing, insisting that their country’s theatre is not a side-effect of war but a central expression of national consciousness.

Many plays now appear in translation, and Ukrainian cultural institutes abroad have actively promoted them. The war has paradoxically given Ukrainian theatre unprecedented global visibility, but also placed it under the pressure of continual relevance—a tension that artists must navigate carefully.

A Stage for Survival

In the face of destruction, Ukrainian theatre has not collapsed. It has multiplied. From repurposed shelters to livestreamed monologues, from dark comedies about displacement to intimate testimonies from the front, Ukraine’s playwrights have responded to war with ferocious creativity and moral clarity.

Their work does more than describe the war—it shapes how it is remembered, understood, and resisted. As Ukraine fights for her territory and future, her artists fight for the soul of her experience. In the theatre of war, the stage is not an escape. It is a front line.