Ukrainian director Svitlana Oleshko channels ‘cold, rational and constructive’ hatred on stage

Ukrainian theatre director Svitlana Oleshko wants audiences to experience what it’s like to live through and flee Russia’s invasion

As one of Ukraine’s pre-eminent theatre directors, Svitlana Oleshko has explored just about every aspect of human emotion during her 30-year career. But ever since Russia’s invasion of her homeland last year, Oleshko has been contemplating one overwhelming sentiment: hatred.

Oleshko, 49, was born and raised in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, where she founded the Arabesky Theatre in 1993. The Arabesky became one of the first avant-garde troupes in the country, winning acclaim for helping free Ukrainian theatre from its stiff Soviet roots.

A week after the first Russian bombs started falling last year, Oleshko left Kharkiv for the western Ukrainian city of Lviv with her parents, her sister, her sister’s two children and their dog. They eventually moved to Warsaw at the urging of the director of Teatr Polsk, Andrzej Seweryn, who Oleshko had worked with for years on various projects. Seweryn offered her a job and the use of an apartment in the theatre’s building in downtown Warsaw.

Since arriving in Poland, Oleshko hasn’t shied away from expressing how she feels about the war and Russians. “I feel rage – anger and rage. I’m still disgusted. But still, I also feel hatred,” she wrote last December in a Polish cultural magazine called Dwutygodnik, or Biweekly. “My hatred is cold, rational and constructive. My Ukrainian hatred defends democracy and freedom around the world, it turns into very concrete deeds and actions and has its own history.”

In an interview at the theatre where she still lives – her sister and children have gone to Germany and her parents live elsewhere in Warsaw – Oleshko expanded on her comments. Hatred “is a main feeling now I think for all Ukrainian people,” she said in a quiet voice. She offered the example of the last words of a 24-year old Ukrainian soldier who was killed in action. “He wrote, ‘We have to kill more Russians for our children because we don’t want that our children will kill Russians,’ ” she said. “I think this is very constructive.”

Oleshko has spent her life tackling difficult subjects and developing Ukrainian art and culture. She got her start in theatre in the early 1990s just as Ukraine gained independence from the USSR. She was studying Russian philology at the time and hanging out with friends in the theatre department of the Kharkiv Art Institute. In 1993, the group was asked to prepare a show at the Kharkiv Literary Museum for the opening of an exhibition celebrating the 100th birthday of Mykola Khvylovy, a Ukrainian novelist and poet. Oleshko wrote the script and directed the performance, which proved to be a hit. That laid the groundwork for the creation of the Arabesky Theatre.

The Arabesky was unlike any theatre in Ukraine at the time. Oleshko and her colleagues wanted to break free from the Russian influences they’d grown up with and delve into Ukrainian stories, music and images. “In Kharkiv there were six big public theatres,” she recalled. “It was Soviet theatre without any dynamic or any experiments. And we were the first independent theatre. And now, before February, 2022, in Kharkiv there were nearly 100 independent theatres.”

She has tackled the subject of hatred before, back in 2013 when she tried to put on a joint production of a play about the historic bitterness between Poles and Ukrainians. The animosity stems from the Second World War when Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered tens of thousands of Polish men, women and children, and Poles retaliated with revenge attacks.

The idea was for two directors – a Ukrainian and a Pole – to work with a group of actors to make a performance about Ukrainian-Polish hatred. The collaboration failed and instead the directors put on two separate shows. “Our aesthetic and political views turned out to be too different,” Oleshko said.

She revisited the topic again at Teatr Polski last December, only this time the production focused not only on Ukrainian-Polish relations but also the current conflict with Russia. The performance, she said, was made to help people understand why Ukraine is at war again and how relations between Poles and Ukrainians have changed since Russia’s invasion.

“The Polish actors and I grasp historical parallels and look at historical facts from the perspective of our time and the common experience of this war,” she wrote just before the show premiered. “And this perspective focuses on empathy, humanity, incredible support for one’s neighbour, leaving hatred on the other side of the Ukrainian border.”

In the interview at Teatr Polski, Oleshko marvelled at the support she and other Ukrainians have received in Poland since Russia’s invasion. “I think this Ukrainian-Polish hate is in the past now,” she said.

Her work at the Warsaw theatre has included other war-themed performances. Last May she put together a show based on two essays from the book Planeta Piolun by Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko. The writings were about deportations, Ukrainian emigrants and refugees.

Oleshko wanted the audience to experience what it has been like for Ukrainians to hide in their basements from Russian shelling and flee their homes with virtually nothing. She asked her Polish actors to pack a bag as if they were leaving as refugees. “I think it was not only a performance for them but it was very important political gesture of support not only for me, but for the whole of Ukraine,” she said.

Zabuzhko, who also now lives in Poland, attended the performance “and cried the whole time, one hour,” she added.

Oleshko also recently directed a performance based on the book Inconvenient by Polish journalist Magdalena Rigamonti. It’s a collection of 16 interviews of people who survived horrific experiences including the Warsaw uprising during the Second World War, Nazi concentration camps and the deportation of entire Polish families to Siberia by the Soviets. “We need this talk about war,” Oleshko said. “It’s very important, because if we don’t want talk about war, we’ll talk Russian.”

More performances are in the works and Oleshko has a contract that runs until August. But she isn’t thinking too far ahead.

She lives alone and mourns the loss of her long-time partner, singer and actor Mikhail Barbara, who died suddenly in October, 2020. She’s still furious that the cemetary in Kharkiv initially marked his grave in Russian and said Ukrainians have begun embracing their language. “We slept on 23 February in Russian language and woke up on 24th February in Ukrainian language.”

Aside from her theatre work, Oleshko gives regular media interviews and participates in public events to keep the world’s attention focused on Ukraine. And she urged Canadians not to forget about her homeland. “Zabuzhko in her book wrote that in this time we have to talk, to speak to the world about many, many important things,” she said. “Help us and hear us.”