The play “Shalene” focuses on different periods of war and atrocities committed in towns and villages around Ukraine’s capital in February and March 2022: from the initial helicopters advance in Hostomel up to the subsequent attacks on civilians. The screenplay is based on victims’ testimonies that were personally documented by the play’s creators.
The story is told by the characters of two Ukrainian “babusia” (senior rural ladies) who survived the Russian invasion and the following occupation of the Kyiv region. The two women, Ania and Ninka, share the horrors they witnessed in an absurd, yet reality-based, amusing fashion, sing the survival instructions, selflessly dance to the explosions, scream at the skies to shoot down the jets. The two ladies keep living despite the constant presence of an impalpable grey-green hostile military mass, the ‘shalene’ (crazy, furious, insane), that persistently crawls towards their homes. At first, Ania and Ninka struggle to identify this obscure ancient evil that keeps pushing closer and closer, but later on they detect and clearly identify the adversary wearing helmets with a Z sign on. It is in this moment of materialization of the evil that the fear disappears and they know how to deal with the enemy.
A dream-like oneiric play in which the humor has a firm stand against the brutality and in which the Ukrainian vitality fights against the Russian evil.
REGIE Iryna Lazer (Mavka) WITH Iryna Lazer (Mavka), Ivan Doan, Daniil Zverkhanovskyi
ON 24th february, 8pm NEUES HAUS
On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine
