Creating Rules of the Game for Contemporary Ukrainian Theater

When Dmytro Ternovyi and his wife Olga Ternova set out to establish their own theater in 2007, they landed at a school at the edge of a forest. Nothing but trees stood between the school, their theater, and Russia, 14 miles away. The Theatre na Zhukah (Theater on the Beetles) seemed aptly named, given the woodlands outside its door. The pair joked that their little theater was the easternmost theater in Europe. The next theater to the east was already someplace else.

Ternova has brought several works to the stage, while Ternovyi has won numerous national and international awards for his writing. He earned special notice for his libretto for the rock opera Taras Bulba. Word of their theater spread, and audiences found their way there from central Kharkiv and further afield.

The school has been destroyed by Russian bombs now, but the theater, though damaged, has survived and is waiting to be brought back to life.

Ternovyi has come gradually to accept war, along with the strong belief that life must continue. The paradox for Ternovyi and other Kharkiv artists has been that even when the city was semi-encircled in the first year of the war, and when there were almost no people left, culture turned out to be very important for those who remained.

Denied his own stage, Ternovyi has turned to supporting and promoting works written for the Ukrainian stage since the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion. His efforts—together with those of scores of others—is reconceiving how Ukrainian theatrical life will be structured once peace arrives. 

In December 2023, Turnovyi joined other theater leaders to launch the Showcase of Ukrainian Drama held at the Playwrights’ Theater in Kyiv’s Podil’ district. This gathering presented readings of several plays that had won various dramaturgical competitions across Ukraine in 2023. Those works, in turn, were published in an anthology that, hopefully, will become the first in a series of almanacs celebrating the year’s best Ukrainian plays. Directors and publishers have been working to create the Ukrainian Drama Network in order to promote Ukrainian theater at home and abroad. At least two of the works have been staged in full. These and other plays may be found in 13 languages on the Ukrainian Drama Translations web portal.

Ternovyi and his colleagues are looking to change how Ukrainians and others see contemporary drama. He has written that Ukrainian theaters paid little attention to his plays, despite a decade of winning various competitions at home and abroad. The writing, staging, publishing, and competition cycles supporting new works have remained separate and distinct. The goal now is to connect playwrights and their works to theater companies so that they can come to life on stage. To do so, various processes must support one another. The December showcase promoted the necessary connections by bringing together a professional audience from across Ukraine’s regions, with the support of the Goethe Institute, for a moment of shared free expression and networking.

In addition to seeking out contemporary works for productions in Ukraine, these efforts include competitions for theatrical translation. This kind of contest has yielded the first English publication of Ivan Franko’s Stolen Happiness, and the first German translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s The Blue Rose. 

Ternovyi and his collaborators are working to ensure that these events become annual events. Their hope is to change the rules of the game for Ukrainian theater in a way that nurtures a professional, understandable, transparent, and reasonable environment for everyone. With luck and perseverance, the unending traumas of war can lead to new opportunities on the stage by nurturing a cooperative spirit throughout the theater community.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.