Ten landmark Ukrainian theatre productions across 35 years of independence

Ten landmark Ukrainian theatre productions across 35 years of independence AI

Theatre scholar Darya Abamusova surveys ten landmark Ukrainian stage productions from 1993 to 2022, tracing shifts from post‑Soviet reinvention to contemporary attempts at decolonizing repertoire. The roundup highlights works from Kyiv's Dakh and Theatre on the Left Bank to projects in Kharkiv, Lviv and Dnipro. A useful primer for Kyiv audiences: several featured productions premiered or toured in Kyiv venues (Dakh, Theatre on the Left Bank, Scene 6), showing the city's role in recent theatrical change.

In a new essay for LB.ua, theatre scholar Darya Abamusova selects ten productions she calls emblematic of Ukraine’s theatrical path since independence. The list begins with Dmytro Bohomazov’s 1993 Charyvnitsa at the Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Left Bank and moves through radical early‑2000s projects such as Andriy Zholdak’s Hamlet. Dreams (2002) and Vladyslav Troitsky’s Macbeth Prologue (2004) at the Dakh laboratory.

Abamusova also charts theatre’s engagement with historical trauma and wartime experience: Dnipro’s documentary‑based Holodna krov (2008), Rostyslav Derzhypilskyi’s Solodka Darusia (2008), the independent Viy 2.0 (2014), and later works responding to full‑scale war such as the 2022 Vertep co‑production by Kharkiv and Lviv puppet theatres. Along the way she notes experiments in form, ritual, and participatory performance that helped shift Ukrainian theatre away from Soviet models.

The piece reads as a selective tour rather than a definitive canon: Abamusova frames these ten productions as signposts for the sector’s artistic and civic responses across three and a half decades.

Know what Kyiv knows.