I spent the first week of the war with my family in the metro in Kharkiv, where we fled to safety from the Russian shelling. We went down into the metro expecting to only spend a few hours there, but it turned out to be almost a week.
The events in the first few days developed incredibly fast and we didn’t know what would happen next. I just sat on a bedsheet in the middle of the platform and read the news on my phone. There were lots of people around me, all doing the same thing. Children and animals didn’t understand what was happening. To be honest, we adults didn’t either.
Time dragged. There were so many people. At first, they saw the metro station as a temporary refuge, but then they settled in. Folding chairs turned up, mattresses, washing lines and millions of extension cables, so that the people could charge their phones and powerbanks.
Special taps were immediately installed on the platform so people could get water and cook with it. Volunteers brought us food. The entrances to the metro station were guarded by soldiers with machine guns.
A few days passed. I quickly lost my glamour and elegance. I didn’t think about the theatre anymore, I was no longer interested in Brecht, Kurbas or Artaud. I was less concerned about the European future of the Ukrainian theatre than a bottle of water.
I slept right there on the platform and sometimes in a carriage, on the floor, without taking off my outer clothing and shoes. Both my clothes and my shoes were dirty and unsightly, I turned from a provocative public figure into an unshaven, sleepy and crumpled one.
Sometimes I volunteered to help with little things, carried boxes of sausage, built a barricade with some other people near the metro station, brought the rubbish bags out. And once, just as I was carrying out a large bag, I heard someone call my name.
“Oleksandr!”
A woman was running along the platform after me.
“I recognised you. You’re here too?”
“Yes.”
I put down the rubbish bag.
“You’re Oleksandr, the director, right?”
I looked at her with surprise.
“Yes, I’m a director. Hello.”
“I’ve seen your shows. I really liked them. Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
It was a strange encounter, because I suddenly realised that I was a director. Cold and unshaven, with a rubbish bag in my hand, after four nights on the floor of the metro, for somebody I was still a director, whose productions had once made an impression on them.
“Shame that you quit.”
“That’s not very important right now. But thanks.”
“Do you need anything? Maybe a powerbank?”
“No thanks, I have one.”
Three months after the outbreak of war, I had managed to quit the theatre I had worked at as a director for the previous four years. I had the reputation of being a provocative young director who causes scandals, and my quitting also cause a big stir. I quit because of censorship and then for weeks I was caught up in a scandal.
It was a large state theatre in the centre of Kharkiv, where there had been many conflicts and a lot of opposition and which, despite my various attempts, stubbornly refused to reform and become more modern.
My productions frequently caused outrage in the theatre world and sometimes also with the public. This woman in the metro was sorry I had quit, but I can also remember another encounter.
“Hello, are you the director of that…?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Ah, I see. You’re still very young. You know, I hope you die. Preferably by guillotine or something, but in some very painful way.”
I was neither surprised nor angry.
For the Ukrainian theatre audience, theatre was always somewhere between a library and a cinema. Certainly more interesting than books, but not capable of competing with Marvel movie premieres, it nonetheless had earned the absolute trust and even respect of Ukrainians. I looked at her with a smile.
“What a kind wish. Try wishing that for the new year.”
“And now you’re making jokes. That’s my favourite play…”
I wonder what fate this woman met and whether her attitude to death has changed during the war. I hope she’s alive and well. I wish her that.
The Ukrainian theatre and the audience have always lived separate lives, without really knowing much about each other. The audience had become used to a safe space, where the “great themes” were dealt with traditionally, while the theatre concentrated on solving its own internal problems.
That didn’t bother me and didn’t stop me either. Change can’t happen that quickly, I told myself. It will just take more time, my time too, and since theatre is my passion, I didn’t mind investing my time. I was easy-going and cheerful, worked a lot and knew that I had taken the European path. The happy days before the war when we made theatre.
Then the artistic director of the theatre changed. My production was immediately cancelled and I quit amid a scandal. Then the war started. I was living in the metro, sleeping on the ground and carrying out the rubbish. And then I remembered that I was a director.
“Are you bringing out the rubbish?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Alright then, I don’t want to hold you up. My family and I are over there, at the pillar, you see? The fourth carriage.”
“Yes.”
“If you need anything, just come over.”
“Thanks a lot. Bye.”
I brought out the rubbish and went back to my bed sheet. Unbelievable, I’m a director…
I wrote my first play about this war in Kharkiv under Russian fire. The play is called “We’re Ready for the War” and tells the story of one Ukrainian family’s evening shortly before the invasion.
This is a very important and emotional topic for Ukrainians, because now that everything has happened, it’s a special kind of pleasure to remember their feelings just before. Or rather, it’s a mixture of pleasure and pain. A little bit masochistic.
In the play, a completely normal family tries to understand whether there will be a war and what they should do if it does start. It was like that in my family and in millions of other families. The Ukrainians remember this very well, how for one whole month the entire country lived with the news of a possible war and talks about emergency bags and shelters.
Why did I write this play? Firstly, because I needed it myself. I wanted to learn to write about war. I had to start with something that I first of all understood myself. Secondly, I had the feeling that the audience needed a play like this. It’s a very light and at the same time very emotional play. I’d like to believe that it has a therapeutic effect.
Later two Kiev theatres organised readings of this play and collected donations. That makes me very happy, because the more practical use art has in the war, the better.
When the scheduled, daily bombings of Kharkiv began, I was living on the ninth floor of a high-rise building and along with the rest of city, was playing a deadly lottery. Every day at ten o’clock at night, the Russians fired several rockets at the city, which would definitely hit residential buildings and kill someone. When the rockets hit their target, the Russians calmed down and took a break for exactly one day.
So all of us, everyone who lived in Kharkiv, never knew exactly who would die, but we knew that it would definitely happen at ten at night. Then they changed the schedule and we knew that someone would die at midnight. Then, that it would be at four in the morning. Every day. The whole summer long.
There was something psychedelic about it. Some of us nearly went crazy, others just didn’t get enough sleep anymore. Even the idea of a schedule like this had something unnatural about it.
With the impressions of what was happening at that time, I wrote “Steps”, a lyrical play about two adults, neighbours, who live across from each other during this bombardment. A strange feeling develops between them, which they can’t explain to themselves. It’s not love, it’s something else. It has been created by the war and the wish to cling to one another, to survive.
In October, I came to Munich on the invitation of the Residenztheater. For the first time for more than six months, I was in absolute safety and peace.
Munich impressed me not so much by its beauty, but more with the feeling of a totally healthy life. A life that I once had in Ukraine.
I had three months to write a play about the war in Ukraine, but first I was supposed to introduce myself at the opening festival of the Welt/Bühne (World/Stage) project. I could have read an older play, but I wanted to use every opportunity to tell people about the war in Ukraine.
That’s how “Waves” was written. The play is the result of my circle of acquaintances in Munich, people I got to know here. I walked through the city for hours and listened to it. I heard the Ukrainian language in the crowds, I saw Ukrainian flags on the buildings everywhere, felt like the topic of the war was important here.
I saw that the war was present, but only in images, sounds and colours.
I wanted to write a play about refugees and the sea. Because in my memory, Munich has remained a sea, in which I and other refugees from Ukraine floated in like jellyfish on the waves.
Following the theme, the sea carries the jellyfish to the European coast and they all have very different fates: some are taken back out to sea, while others dry out in the sun.
The “Waves” was translated into German and presented to the German audience. It was a strange experience to hear your own writing and not understand it because of the language. But the main thing is that the Germans sitting in the auditorium understood something. They understood the play and maybe something about the war too.
I also wrote my biggest and most complex play about the war in Munich, where I lived for three months, allowing me to grow accustomed to a life without explosions and war outside the window again. Of course I was still part of the war, I read the news and was in contact with my family, but I noticed that the war was far away now and I was no longer in its epicentre, only in its vicinity.
That troubled me. It became a challenge. I was planning to write a big play, consisting of several parts, dozens of characters and plotlines, but I would be writing it without feeling the breath of war, its rhythm. I didn’t know whether it could work and whether it would be the same war that was actually happening.
Luckily it turned out to be not so important where I was, and that everything I wanted to describe in the play was preserved in my mind in quite exact detail. Yes, it took me a lot of time and effort to combine the plots and characters in a particular way, but the main thing was that I had brought the most substantial impressions of the war with me to Munich.
There, in Kharkiv, I knew that one day I would write a play about the war, so I captured the faces, actions and the atmosphere. There were so many impressions that each of them seemed important, deserving of its own entire play. Even small details of everyday life during war later became important documentary details in the play.
I’m very proud of the eerie and at the same time beautiful Bosch painting that I have created. “The Long Life” is about people living in Ukraine during the war and getting older every day, not just biologically, but also psychologically.
Every dead person and every wounded person make me age. Every building destroyed and every city destroyed make me age. Even the smallest events now have an effect on me and make me older. A terrible counter that adds up my years. That’s what war feels like.
That what it felt like to me when I was living in the metro station or in my apartment in Kharkiv with the daily bombings. We needed only one year to grow older.
We needed one year to stop telling another person we wish they were dead because of a play. To change our attitude to death. To no longer worry about the future of the theatre, but about the future of our fellow human beings at last.
The war has taken away my desire to say heroic things. Sometimes I still do, but automatically, out of habit, without believing in them. Before the war, people said a lot of heroic things in the theatre, but as it turned out, they couldn’t stop the violence.
I’m thinking a lot about this question and at the same time, I’m not. Like everyone else. Sometimes I talk to Ukrainian actors. They all want to get back onto the stage as fast as possible. And then they say that they don’t want to.
Some actors I know have taken up weapons themselves and gone to fight, to defend the country. I’m proud of these people, they’re heroes for me. They don’t see themselves as heroes, they just want to come back alive.
They want that. We want that. I want that.
Oleksandr Seredin is a Ukrainian theater director, playwright, screenwriter. Artistic director of the first digital theater "Manufactura" in Ukraine. Born March 7, 1991 in Kharkov. He worked as a director at the Kharkiv Pushkin Drama Theatre in Kharkiv and Kyiv Academic Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the left bank of Dnipro. Staged more than 10 performances (Gymnastic goat, Pushkin. Tribe, Hero of our time, Nihilists, Eurydice is gone, Romance, Three comrades, House of engineer Yakov Filin, Lyusya, Three sisters). Participant of theater festivals (I and Sela Bruk, Parade-fest), as a director and playwright. Organizer of the theater laboratory "Trajectory" (2020). Author of plays (Crab in a funny cap, Gymnastic goat, We are ready for war, Steps, Waves, Long-liver), dramatizations (Romance, House of engineer Yakov Filin, Lyusya), scenarios of digital performances (Valentina Escort, Samvidav). Winner of the dramaturgy competition "The week of the actual play" (2016, 2017). Participant of the Welt/Bühne 2022/23 project at the Residenztheater.