play brings to life stories of Ukrainian children taken by Russia

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/12/i-will-return-play-brings-to-life-stories-of-ukrainian-children-taken-by-russia

I Will Return: play brings to life stories of Ukrainian children taken by Russia

Journalist Oksana Grytsenko’s play based on interviews with teenagers is imbued with the dark humour of a nation living with tragedy

Charlotte Higgins in Kyiv
Sat 12 Oct 2024 05.00 EDT

In a small, underground theatre in central Kyiv, an audience is watching – at times with perfectly still attention, at times with roars of laughter – a story that is so raw and painful that it is hard to believe it has already found its way on to the stage.

I Will Return, by the playwright Oksana Grytsenko, is a drama about three children from Ukraine who find themselves stranded, unable to return home, in a summer camp in illegally occupied Crimea.

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The story is a snapshot of an ongoing national trauma. Official government statistics suggest that nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly taken from occupied parts of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, deported to Russia itself or to areas such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Only a trickle of a few hundred have come home, when parents or guardians, often helped by the charity Save Ukraine, have located and made the perilous journey to collect them. Some have had their names changed and been put up for adoption.

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The unlikely comedy of the play comes partly from the jokes and mischief-making of the teenage characters. Her interviewees, Grytsenko said, “were laughing, self-confident, telling stories, they were like any other teenagers. And I realised that I didn’t want to write a story about suffering kids. I wanted to write a story about kids who are kind of rebellious.”

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Grytsenko has also worked as a journalist: she could have written up the story as an article, rather than put it on the stage. But in a play, said Turlo, “suddenly those characters are not letters on white paper any more.

“When you have this experience, as an audience, of coexisting with the actors, you can suddenly say: ‘OK, this kid is just like my childhood friend.’ And the story becomes personal, it becomes understandable, you can touch it, you can see it right here, right before you.”

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