This year’s World Theatre Day on 27 March 2022 is dedicated to solidarity with Ukraine. On the initiative of the German Stage Association, the voices of cultural workers from Ukraine will be made audible. Together with the International Theatre Institute ITI Germany, the Ukrainian playwright Natalia Vorozhbyt was asked to express her views on the situation in her country, based on the image of the destroyed theatre in Mariupol:

For the last eight years practically all Ukrainian theatre people, and actually all Ukrainian artists have been dealing with the war. We have been doing this since 2013 and I’m honestly exhausted by it, I would love to do something else. 

But right now it is clear that we will be forced with all of our creative energy to deal only with this subject which is in the zone of pain and despair, pain and injustice.

Look at the photos: On one you can see the theatre in Mariupol, and on the other only its ruins. You can’t see it in the photo but underneath the ruins there is an air-raid shelter where hundreds, almost a thousand people, civilians, children were hiding. Some of them got out, others stayed there forever.

The buttons that set the rockets in march on our theatres, cities, people are pressed by the fingers of ordinary Russians to destroy us. They are deliberately committing genocide against Ukrainians and that in the 21st century, today.

We are not going to celebrate the World Day of Theatre this year, we are not going to celebrate 
any holidays. 

We will only count the days of war and our first holiday will be Victory Day. But it is very difficult for 
us to win.

I ask you for support – in word and deed and not to forget that also the Russian intelligentsia bears responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine right now.

I ask you not to get used to this war, not to get used to evil. We are neighbours on the same European road, we have common theatres, common European values. Let us defend these values together on the art front until we win! Thank you!