«What Will Become of Kyiv?»

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

Women from Kyiv frequently appear on German television news. There, they usually show up as the ones giving a brief comment — say, after one of the many Russian missile strikes on residential blocks in the Ukrainian capital. But what rhythm their everyday life follows during the war, what weighs on them, how they still manage to enjoy things despite everything — in other words, how these people actually live — we rarely learn from good reporting.

The play «Women in the Dark» at Berlin’s Acud-Theater aims to change that. Watching three women from Kyiv suffer from warm theater seats could feel somewhat voyeuristic. But Satchel Reemtsma’s staging of the piece by Iryna Serebriakova and Masha Denisova repeatedly creates distance from itself, making trauma accessible through gallows humor and interruptions. The dissonant string interludes and the electronic beat by multi-instrumentalist Niki Yaghmaee help achieve this.
First, a masked young woman appears, dancing in place and shadowboxing to monotonous techno music. «On the day the long power outage began, I crept down the stairs from the eighth floor,» says actress Edda Lina Janz. The endless back-and-forth between light and dark later drives her to madness («it’s better to live like that, not even knowing what a generator is»), and a lecherous ex-KGB pensioner from the sixth floor does the same to her.

Tanya Kargaeva and Mariia Riaboshapka, her two Ukrainian fellow actresses, likewise present — in German, English, partly Ukrainian — reflections from their damaged lives. «What if my favourite barista gets killed?» one of them wonders, while the other dreams of binge-watching a series. In the end comes the realization: «I love life less than civilization.» Darkness — devouring a cream cake — then bomb impacts: the sense of space and time is lost. Kyiv is gone. The plot disintegrates, hacked apart like the stage set with an axe. What’s left for the audience are fragments of flaring aggression, despair, and dreams of carefree indulgence, flickering through their heads.