KYIV — In a crowded basement theatre in central Kyiv, a small play mixes folklore and frontline reality to striking effect. Twenty One follows Maryna, a refugee from Crimea who believes an egg laid by a black hen will hatch an otherworldly creature that grants wishes. Her single wish is for her husband, soldier Petro, to return alive. She clutches the egg under her arm, scrambles online to raise money for drones, generators and weapons, and imagines visits from a woman in a black leather coat who becomes the face of death.
The production, anchored by actress Kateryna Svyrydenko, moves between grim realism and touches of magic realism. Svyrydenko says the story feels like lived truth: it makes people laugh, cry and think, she told Al Jazeera between rehearsals in the packed, intimate space.
The play was born out of the Veterans’ Theatre, founded in 2024 to teach a four-month playwrighting course for servicemen, their partners and widows. Participants workshop scripts with fellow veterans and professional instructors; the shows are performed at graduation and then travel to other stages across Ukraine. For many involved, the process is as much therapy as art. Soldiers and medics transfer the rawness of wounds, amputations, shell shocks and captivity into scenes; wives and widows give voice to the quiet fear that often sits beside a man’s suffering.
Svyrydenko brings additional weight to the role: her husband went missing on the front in 2022, months after Russia’s full-scale invasion. She speaks of the heavy toll of uncertainty and the numbing silence that settles over her seven-year-old son, Semen, who rarely allows himself to cry. Those private strains inform her performance, making Maryna’s waiting and dread palpable.
Twenty One is written by Olha Murashko, a publicist and campaigner who herself raises funds for equipment sent to the front while her husband still serves. The story taps into familiar patterns: a daughter born after protests in Kyiv, a mother who has already endured miscarriages and loss, and the lingering anxieties of growing up amid conflict. Murashko uses the symbolic twenty-one — the days it takes an egg to hatch and the milestone when a fetus develops a heartbeat — as a throughline for hope, grief and fragile renewal.
Director Kateryna Vyshneva says the theatre aims to capture the moment from the perspective of those who live it. Putting these stories on stage, she argues, documents the war in real time and preserves the voices of participants for future generations. The plays seek to register the present while it still burns, not later when memories have cooled.
For many veterans, staging their trauma offers unexpected relief. Documentary filmmaker and veteran Oleksandr Tkachuk directed A Military Mom, written by medic Alyna Sarnatska, which explores the wrenching choice between serving at the front and caring for a child. Reliving painful episodes in performance can, Tkachuk says, break down trauma into something clearer and calmer: a memory that can be looked at rather than endlessly replayed.
On stage in Twenty One, Maryna’s domestic panic collides with frontline loss: two comrades attempting to evacuate a dying soldier are struck down by a Russian attack. The audience shares Maryna’s grief — a communal release Vyshneva describes as collective catharsis. In that shared breathing and waiting, the small hall reaches a common resonance.
The play’s climax folds sorrow into a sudden, fragile relief. Maryna’s teenage daughter, Alyna, who has never known peace and who grew up amid the 2014 Maidan protests, bursts in with a cry that her father has called. ‘‘Looks like the egg hatched,’’ she exclaims. The room exhales: tears remain, but a small, uniting sigh of hope ripples through the basement theatre.