I Will Return: Play brings to life stories of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia | Ukraine

IIn a small underground theater in central Kiev, the audience watches – sometimes with completely silent attention, sometimes with loud laughter – a story so raw and painful that it’s hard to believe it has already found its way onto the stage.

Playwright Oksana Grytsenko’s “I Will Return” is a drama about three children from Ukraine who are stranded at a summer camp in illegally occupied Crimea and unable to return home.

The story is a snapshot of ongoing national trauma. Official government statistics suggest that since the full-scale invasion began, nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly removed from occupied parts of Ukraine and deported to Russia itself or to areas such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Only a few hundred have made it home after parents or guardians, often with support from the Save Ukraine charity, tracked them down and made the dangerous journey to collect them. Some had their names changed and were put up for adoption.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for alleged unlawful deportation of children.

Grytsenko based her piece on detailed interviews with six teenagers who were brought illegally to Crimea, ostensibly to protect them from the dangers of war, and then stranded there while parents and guardians struggled to reach them and produce the correct documents to bring her home. She merged characters to protect the privacy of her interviewees and took care to get as close to the real situation as possible.

However, the piece contains a surprising twist that visibly touched the audience at a performance in Kiev: one of its characters doesn’t come home.

It doesn’t reflect what happened to her own interviewees, but “it’s truer because the majority of these children didn’t return,” Grytsenko said.

The play’s unlikely comedy derives in part from the jokes and mischief of the teenage characters. Her interviewees, said Grytsenko, “laughed, were confident, told stories, they were like any other teenagers.” And I realized that I didn’t want to write a story about suffering children. I wanted to write a story about kids who are kind of rebellious.”

The play’s director, Anna Turlo, recalled that the four cast members were shocked by the jokes on their first read-through. “I said, ‘But my favorite actors, do you remember the beginning of the full-scale invasion? We were all confused and scared, but at the same time we were making crazy jokes on the internet – the darkest humor I’ve ever seen in my life? This is for our mental health – this is our tool to combat horror.'”

Remarkably for a play written and performed during an all-out war, it also brings characters from the aggressor nation onto the stage and gives them a voice. These include a summer camp teacher, a police officer and a social worker, all played alternately by the same actress, Kateryna Vyshneva.

“I didn’t know how the audience would react,” Vyshneva said. “We have a lot of soldiers and veterans who come to the theater and are not only physically injured but also psychologically injured. It’s a small theater – you could physically reach me. My husband serves in the army – I joked that he should send me a body armor.”

Viewers will receive content warnings, said director Turlo. “I’m afraid of traumatizing people again, and that’s why we have these notifications everywhere that one of the characters speaks Russian: that can be triggering for some people.”

Vyshneva herself, who switched entirely to using the Ukrainian language in her personal life after the large-scale invasion, finds this unpleasant. Upon first reading through it, she began to feel uncomfortable. “There was a joke that I was allergic to the Russian language, but it wasn’t just a joke,” she said. “Every time I play it, I feel some kind of physical reaction.”

The main character she plays is a summer camp teacher – a clownish character with red lipstick who spreads absurd Russian propaganda.

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“But as the play progresses, their characters become darker and darker,” Turlo said. “And if she plays a clown at the beginning, she ends up playing a normal woman.” This is the part of the drama in which Vyshneva portrays a Russian social worker who, with the stroke of a pen, seals the fate of children according to her country’s laws. “She is cold, educated, smart and knows exactly what she is doing,” Vyshneva said.

Grytsenko also worked as a journalist: she could have written the story as an article instead of putting it on stage. But in a play, Turlo said, “suddenly those characters are no longer letters on white paper.”

“As an audience member, when you have that experience of living with the actors, you can suddenly say, ‘Okay, this kid is just like my childhood friend.’ And the story becomes personal, it becomes understandable, you can touch it, you can see it right here, right in front of you.”

That sense of connection is important, Turlo said, because the true story of the children taken to Crimea and Russia can be complicated and difficult. Sometimes parents are blamed for taking their children to summer camps. Sometimes children have settled in and don’t want to come back.

“When we talk about teenagers who have spent time there in Russia, they get propaganda in their heads, which we understand – but at the same time our society is not ready to deal with these children.” She is not ready to say, “I understand , for two years you have been listening to stories about Ukrainians being Nazis.”

On the evening of the performance seen by the Guardian, some of the seats in the theater were occupied by Vyshneva’s teenage drama students. They replaced at the last minute a group that had a more important task that evening: bringing home nine more deported Ukrainian children.

• I Will Return will be performed on October 12th at A studio Rubin, Prague.