Усні історії про окупацію, препаровані в українській драматургії 2022–2024

Abstract

The article is devoted to the work of contemporary Ukrainian playwrights with witnesses and victims of Russian crimes committed during the occupation of Ukrainian villages, towns, and cities. In fact, the dramaturgical comprehension of the occupation began in March 2022, and Ukrainian drama is constantly growing in the array of texts in which it continues. On the one hand, playwrights collect a lot of factual material, ‘documenting’ the war in their own way, and on the other hand, they organize this material into different textual strategies. The article examines such strategies of the Ukrainian playwrights’ work with people’s oral testimonies as documenting the war (texts by Tetiana Kitsenko), docudrama (texts by Kateryna Penkova, Andriy Bondarenko, Lena Kudaieva), presenting testimonies as a stereoscopic polyolog (text by Oleksandr Havrosh and the collective text of the Kherson Regional Music and Drama Theater named after Mykola Kulish), and artistic interpretation of testimonies (texts by Neda Nezhdana, Volodymyr Rafienko, and Oksana Hrytsenko). The article shows different approaches of the authors to the organization of the artistic whole in each of these strategies. The authors also focus on the main discourses in which the drama of the period 2022–2024 inscribes people’s testimonies about the occupation: the deadly force of the occupiers, their grinding of all living things – people, animals, villages, cities; spontaneous resistance to the occupiers by Ukrainians of various types; the help of pro-Ukrainian people under occupation in collecting the necessary data about the enemy and in passing it on to Ukrainian defenders; the changed state of consciousness of a person under occupation; the dilemma to break out of the occupation or stay at home; sexual discourses of different nature; abduction of Ukrainian children by the occupiers; waiting for the arrival of Ukrainian troops and life in the deoccupied territories. In addition to the already mentioned playwrights, the plays by Ihor Bilytsia, Natalia Blok, Andriy Bondarenko, Oleksandr Vitra, Natalka Vorozhbyt, Yulia Honchar, Nina Zakhozhenko, and Artem Lebedev are also in the field of view. The works of the following playwrights are also taken into consideration: Lena Liagushonkova, Olena Malyarenko, Oleh Mykhailov, Yulia Nechai, Ihor Nosovsky, Valerii Puzik, Anastasiia Prykhodkina, Maryna Smilyanets, Artur Sumarokov, Liudmyla Tymoshenko, and Iryna Feofanova.