Editorial

Olga Danyluk

“In the dark times, will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.”

—

Bertolt Brecht, “Motto” (Motto)¹

In contemporary warfare, we confront a dual reality: physical destruction, including loss of cultural heritage and unprecedented hyper-visibility. The ongoing war in Ukraine is often described as the most documented war in history. Notably, platforms such as the Ukraine War Archive have collected over 26 million open-source files, archived 3,500 channels, and registered 36,000 events and potential war crimes.² Hyper-visibility produces what might be called a monolith of war that risks overriding the realities on the ground. Theatre is now entangled in this landscape, as a part of an ecosystem of documentation, testimony, and possibly archival witnessing. In inviting online interventions, we sought to place them in dialogue with the academic essays in the print issue, which offer theoretical and reflective frameworks for thinking about theatre in the context of an ongoing war. The interventions respond to the same conditions with urgency and immediacy. Operating closer to the present tense of conflict, they engage practices that resist closure, testing how theatre and performance might act within and against the hypervisibility of mediatised war.

Across both, we return to a shared question: can theatre and performance practices offer something radical in their simplicity against the backdrop of mediatised war?  Perhaps, an unmediated encounter, embodied co-presence, and the act of witnessing provide forms of attention and connection that oppose abstraction and numbness.

The war in Ukraine is not only fought on battlefields but also permeates the fabric of culture itself, shaping how we remember, portray, and analyse the conflict. This underscores that culture is a vital site of resistance to Russian aggression. Since the full-scale invasion, cultural workers in Ukraine have remained at the forefront of civic mobilisation, demanding space for complexity, nuance, and human perspective. The works gathered here challenge simplified understandings of culture in wartime, examining not only its capacity to act, intervene, and resist the enemy, but also the pressures exerted by political discourse, state narratives, and the expectations placed on artists during prolonged conflict. The cultural front has emerged as no less important than the battlefield, especially in countering Russia’s ongoing effort at erasure. Russia’s deployment of cultural narratives with its appeals to imperial mythology, linguistic dominance, and ‘civilisational missions’ aims to justify aggression and erase Ukrainian identity. Theatre’s role in the war as a form of Ukrainian resistance against Russian weaponisation of culture became one of the core themes of discussion.

For instance, Kathleen Gallagher, in conversation with Andrew Kushnir, a queer Ukrainian Canadian playwright, director, and activist, highlights the cultural aspect of the war, challenging the Canadian theatre community to confront its entrenched, often uncritical veneration for Russian literature and drama. He argues that the concept of the ‘Great Russian Writers’ as an unquestioned cornerstone of the global cultural canon acts as a metaphorical barrier that blinds us to the atrocities currently committed by Russia. To describe these works as apolitical in the present context, he contends, is profoundly shortsighted, as it overlooks the extent to which they have been (and continue to be) exploited by tyrants. The situation demanded much greater international public engagement with Ukrainian culture and history, a cause that Ukrainian playwrights had already been campaigning for some time against both cultural domination and the persistent narrative that Ukraine is merely Russia’s ‘little brother.’

The war on multiple fronts has prompted the emergence of numerous new theatre spaces across Ukraine and the diaspora. These are creative environments born from an urgent desire to create, act, witness, and share Ukrainian culture—its love, strength, courage, and the many values currently being rearticulated through artistic practice as discussed in Theatre as Cultural Resistance: Kasia Lech in Conversation with Sofiia Onishchenko, Daria Bogdan, and Vasylyna Martseniuk. Three Ukrainian actors who found refuge in Poland and formed the independent theatre GAS in response to the urgencies of displacement, cultural continuity, and artistic survival articulate their raison d’être for making art in wartime. They reflect on the evolving role of such spaces—not only as sites of expression and storytelling, but as spaces of clarity and intensity in which personality and consciousness can be shaped, expanded, and confronted with complex, often unbearable questions. These dynamics intersect in the theatrical space, where the tenderness of both spectator and creator becomes the medium through which brutal truths can be held and witnessed

The role of theatre during wartime extends beyond opposition and resistance; it also seeks to return the vastness and abstraction of war to a recognisable human scale—in Kathleen Gallagher’s words, ‘to bring the monolith of war to human scale.’ In Staging Testimony: Josephine Burton in Conversation with Anastasiia Kosodii on The Reckoning, the authors examine testimony and its ethics within theatrical responses to war, asking how such accounts can be presented to audiences without collapsing into reductive ‘victim’ tropes. These are urgent questions about theatrical form, ethical practice, and the changing role of the audience as witnesses. The conversation between the playwright and director reflects on the overwhelming experience of working with the archive of testimonies documenting Russian war crimes collected by the Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) in Ukraine.³ They discuss both the challenge of the archive’s vastness and the moral responsibility of remembering that these are real people and real lives still in existence. One key challenge lies in managing audience expectations of how a ‘victim’ should be portrayed—an expectation that remains deeply ingrained and difficult to unsettle. As they note, this is still an ongoing process, because it ultimately concerns the degree of agency afforded to those whose stories are being told: how much agency the audience is prepared to recognise, how much the theatre is willing to grant, and how much can responsibly be spoken about in the first place. This brings a question about the forms of theatre to represent a horrific life experience and audience engagement as witnesses. Ukrainian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii complicates the notion that the theatrical process should always align with the ‘healthy,’ well-meaning advice so often attached to creative practice. For her, discovery frequently requires a creative struggle: an insistence on pushing further, entering difficult or shadowed territories rather than being protected from them. This stance becomes particularly significant in the current climate, where international interest in Ukrainian theatre has surged, but the demand has been strikingly narrow. What is often sought is a simplified representation of the country’s experience at the expense of the far more nuanced, contradictory, and self-effacing world of contemporary Ukrainian playwriting. The pressure to conform to an easily marketable narrative restricts the complexity of theatrical voices emerging from Ukraine. As Kosodii suggests, this environment partly explains why we see relatively few ‘good’ Ukrainian plays on global stages.

Amid the war, Ukrainian artists are increasingly compelled to assume political roles, functioning as de facto cultural ambassadors who carry the country’s voice, visibility, and narrative into international arenas. This imperative, however necessary, raises critical questions about authorial autonomy—questions that playwright Vitaliy Chenskiy addresses in Lack of Artistic Autonomy: The Restriction of the Discourse of Ukrainian Playwriting During War. Chenskiy argues that even as contemporary Ukrainian playwriting experiences a remarkable surge in new works and the emergence of a dynamic new generation of authors, this flourishing is accompanied by a subtle yet powerful narrowing of permissible discourse. The author argues that genuine artistic autonomy in wartime Ukraine does not involve withdrawing from politics but resisting the pressure to conform to dominant state-aligned narratives. While theatre is widely seen as a means for social transformation, many playwrights have interpreted this as a duty to support cultural weaponisation and promote the ‘correct’ ideological viewpoints. The author questions the artistic value of this stance, pointing out that debates about ‘how to write about the war’ often reveal an internalised expectation to represent the nation rather than explore more complex or challenging artistic directions. The concern is that the political aspect of Ukrainian playwriting is becoming increasingly marginalised. He believes that wartime pressures, particularly the push for unity, the resolution of internal conflicts, and the dominance of military-administrative hierarchies, have overshadowed more significant or investigative political activities within the theatre.

Building on this concern, Olga Danylyuk’s contribution, You Can’t Say That…, interrogates the conditions under which political theatre is rendered unsayable rather than marginal. While acknowledging the urgency of unity and survival during wartime, she shifts attention to the less visible consequences of this consolidation, such as the narrowing of discursive space. Furthermore, the contribution examines how wartime national myths rooted in sacrifice and endurance have become both a necessary defence mechanism and a constraint on critical reflection. Tracing this logic from Maidan to the full-scale invasion, the author argues that martyrdom has been elevated into political capital that might silence marginalised voices and colonise inner life. Over time, unreflective myth-making and sacralised hatred normalise violence, elevating sacrifice as the highest moral good, and turn culture into a “front” tasked with defending a coherent national image. In such conditions, questioning dominant narratives risks being read as betrayal rather than civic responsibility. Against this backdrop, Danylyuk positions theatre and performance as vital counter-archives: embodied, fragile, and resistant to simplification.  For instance, Evacuation 2022 commemorates the innocent targets of Russian missile strikes, primarily women and children, who gathered at a railway station in the hope of fleeing heavy shelling in the Donetsk region but never reached safety.  Through this work, she argues that performance can honour victims without instrumentalising their deaths, preserve living memory against propaganda, and create space for multiple truths. Ultimately, she insists that a resilient nation is not one that silences doubt, but one capable of holding contradiction and critical self-reflection even in wartime.

This editorial argues that culture, and theatre in particular, is a vital means of safeguarding humanistic principles in the face of political necessity. Culture cannot be reduced to affirmation or reassurance during wartime without risking the erosion of its ethical and critical force. While calls for unity are inevitable under conditions of existential threat, a cultural field that permits only consensus inevitably narrows the space for complexity. Theatre matters precisely because it can sustain uncertainty and resist closure, offering a site where memory is lived rather than monumentalised and where individual experiences are not absorbed into heroic abstraction. By holding open difficult questions and refusing simplified narratives, performance becomes a form of resilience, protecting human plurality at a moment when it is most vulnerable. In this sense, survival is secured through fidelity to one’s inner convictions and moral imagination as the war continues.

Dr Olga Danylyuk is a British Academy Researcher at Risk Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD). She is a researcher, curator, and theatre director specialising in performance, conflict, and intermediality. Her fieldwork in Eastern Ukraine included frontline documentation, humanitarian aid, and devising theatre projects with young people affected by war. Her recent documentary performance, A Visit to the Minotaur, was presented at the Voila Europe Festival, London (2022), followed by street performances Evacuation 2022 in Prague, Brussels, and Paris (2023), and EMETA: The Legend of Golem at the International Theatre Festival Golden Lion in Lviv (2023).