Daily Times

A boy flees his war-scarred hometown, leaving his mother behind. A gay youth struggles for acceptance from his parents. A gang harasses a young black footballer. These and other dramas took centre stage in a show in Kiev this month, which brought together teenagers from the east and west of Ukraine to write plays.

“It is moving,” said 15-year-old Filip Kazlauskas, who wrote one of the pieces, a rock opera entitled “Romeo from Avdiivka”.

“I wanted to achieve the effect of making audiences sad and making them burst into tears.” The play is named after the teenager’s eastern hometown, which lies on the frontline of the conflict dividing the country.

Performed by professional actors, it won a standing ovation from the audience.

But the event was really about the young playwrights — in a bid to bridge the cultural divide in the war-scarred country. “This project positively affects the future… it establishes a dialogue between the east and west” of Ukraine, one of the organisers, Natalya Vorozhbyt, told AFP as spectators filed into the auditorium in Kiev city centre. “When young playwrights from different parts of the country meet and find common themes, then dialogue emerges, and an understanding that they have much in common.”

Backdrop of war

The “Class Act” theatre project was born three decades ago in Scotland and has migrated to various countries. It first came to Ukraine in 2016. Twenty pupils aged 14 to 16 came to Kiev from Avdiivka, a government-controlled eastern town, and from the western town of Chop.

The 10 short plays they devised were produced by professional directors and staged back-to-back. “We worked very easily,” Valentyn Yelizaryev, a 15-year-old from Chop, told AFP. “I really liked it, I’ve learned a lot from being here.” In post-Soviet Ukraine, cultural differences persist between the Ukrainian-speaking west and the mainly Russian-speaking east. A Moscow-backed insurgency broke out in two industrial eastern provinces in 2014 and has claimed more than 10,000 lives. That is the backdrop for “Romeo from Avdiivka”.

The government-controlled town of 20,000 inhabitants lies right on the frontline. It suffers near-daily armed clashes between Kiev forces and pro-Russian rebels. “A son fled the country but his mother opted to stay there as the war rages,” says Kazlauskas, the young playwright.

Published in Daily Times, July 25^th 2018.