Eighteen months ago, Alina Sarnatska was serving as a combat medic on Ukraine’s frontline – including in the hellish battle for Bakhmut – and had barely been to the theatre.
Six months later, she was preparing to watch the premiere of her first play in Kyiv. Now Sarnatska, 38, has several dramas under her belt and is emerging as one of Ukraine’s most powerful voices in the theatre.
It is a dizzying transformation for a person who, though she had loved writing when she was young, associated the word “playwright” with distant figures such as Shakespeare, rather than anyone like herself.
She attributes the sheer speed of her emergence to the war. “I think Russians will kill me, maybe after two years, maybe after three years, by drones, rockets or in the street,” she said. “So I don’t have time. I need to do everything right now and right here.”
Her first performed play, Military Mama, was written as part of a programme called Theatre of Veterans. The scheme, co-founded by the dramatist Maksym Kurochkin, who himself fought in the eastern region of Luhansk in 2022, aims to transform soldiers and veterans from theatre novices to performed playwrights – bringing their battlefield experiences to the stage.
Sarnatska was one of 15 selected for the scheme after an open call. Military Mama was a standout script and was produced on one of Kyiv’s main stages at the Left Bank theatre.
It tells the story of an ordinary woman’s experience in the army, tackling motherhood, sexism in the military, relationship breakdown, mental health problems and desertion – unheroic subjects that, while not exactly taboo in Ukrainian society, are largely absent from official narratives.
Her frankness as a writer and refusal to adopt a simplistic, morale-boosting position does not always go down well. A performance this month in the frontline city of Dnipro of her prize-winning play Balance, about the often horrific experiences of a battlefield medic, was attended by priests and officials from the city council who then complained to the theatre.
“After the performance, the director came out to apologise for the swearing and the realism,” she said. “But it didn’t help, and the theatre representatives were summoned to the city administration and scolded for the performance because it was sad, not heroic, and contained bad language.”
But her plays are also welcomed by theatregoers for their brute honesty about the realities of the frontline. Some audience members were in tears after a performance of Military Mama this summer in Kyiv, and the cast took part in a post-show discussion. One woman, whose husband was at the front, and another audience member, the father of a veteran, thanked the actors for helping them understand something of life in the trenches.
It is a play in which “all soldiers can recognise themselves because it’s about very ordinary military life”, said Sarnatska. But it does not hold back on its criticism of civilian characters, who go about their lives oblivious to the horrors their compatriots are living, or dying, through.
In some after-show discussions audience members have asked whether she hates civilians, she said. “Every time I’m asked that I stay silent,” she said. Instead, she lets the more emollient director take the question.
A new play, Penelope, based on women waiting for their loved ones to come home from the war, premiered this summer at the Lesya Ukrainka theatre in Lviv.
It is partly inspired by Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife, who, in Homer’s Odyssey, waits for him to return from the Trojan war for 20 years. Its cast of seven women, as well as its director, Svitlana Fedeshova, all have partners who are serving.
“I could write some heroic story, saying everything is OK,” she said of the play. “But I don’t want a situation where a woman who is waiting for her husband comes to the theatre and sees some kind of fairytale telling her everything is OK, and then she leaves, and she still waiting. That’s what I want to avoid.”
Sarnatska – who was a sex worker for several years, including while she was studying for a degree in psychology – was working with NGOs as a social worker before Russia’s full-scale invasion, supporting female victims of violence and those with substance addictions; and campaigning for sex workers’ rights.
Since her departure from military service, she has been working on her PhD, organising protests to improve soldiers’ rights, and working with a support network for wounded soldiers and their families. She is now undertaking a writing residency in Germany, where she has been working on a novel.
Before being accepted for the Theatre of Veterans programme, she said she knew nothing about theatre or dramatists. “I knew Shakespeare was a dramatist, and that’s all.”
But she posted prolifically on social media during her time as a combat medic, often writing pithy and memorable dialogues as part of her fundraising efforts for her unit. It was because of those dialogues that a friend urged her to apply for Theatre of Veterans.
That said, she is still not much of a theatre fan herself. “I hate theatre,” she said. “OK, by now I have seen some interesting things. But it’s not something to do in my free time.” Her writing god is, in fact, the novelist Stephen King. “If you write a good story, it will work on the stage,” she said.
A further play, Menstruation, is due to premiere at the end of the year at Molodyy theatre in Kyiv. It is about the experiences of sex workers as the tide of the 2022 invasion crashed around them – stories that have rarely been aired publicly in Ukraine.
She has recently completed a play called Fat, set in the present day and the 1930s, that connects disordered eating in modern Ukraine with the Holodomor, the human-made famine in which up to 3 million people died in 1932-33 – a result of Stalin’s brutally enforced grain quotas.
