Visible Bullets: Shakespeare at the Ukrainian Front and Beyond

Abstract

The use of Shakespeare within warzones and at the frontline of conflict centralizes vital questions about the role of the arts during times of profound crisis, when lives and liberties are under direct attack. This article first considers Shakespearean productions linked to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, concentrating on the inaugural Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival and two documentaries that reveal how staging Shakespeare can serve humanitarian needs, promote political debate, and help individuals to process their wartime experiences. It then expands to include examples from other conflicts, including the First World War and the ongoing crisis in Gaza, and argues that warzone productions—in addition to embracing what theatre can achieve at times of conflict—also address its limitations. Warzone performances often acknowledge a gulf between representation and lived experience, between tragedy as a dramatic form and reality, which is reinforced when the individuals staging Shakespeare are also ‘actors’ in the war. This article proposes that what unites war and theatre is the power of narrative for shaping action and interpretation, and this recognition underlines the responsibilities of political and theatrical narratives at times of war, as well as the role of the critic.

1. Introduction

On 7 March 2022, less than two weeks after Russian forces invaded Ukraine under the direction of Vladimir Putin, the Ivan Franko National Academic Music and Drama Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk performed Hamlet in their basement-turned-bomb-shelter for those hiding from Russian air raids. It was the first theatre to reopen after the start of the invasion and instigation of martial law in Ukraine, and it aimed to help actors and audiences ‘cope with fear and stress’ while under attack (Harbuziuk 2022, para. 9). Director Rostyslav Derzhypilskyi’s experimental, neo-opera-horror production of Hamlet—first staged in 2017 in a Ukrainian translation by Yurii Andrukhovych—was well suited because it had been designed for the Ivan Franko’s basement, one of the theatre’s six performance spaces. But the play also resonates with larger issues, including the existential threat faced by Ukrainians that informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s invocation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on 8 March 2022. In a video address to the British Parliament, Zelenskyy used Hamlet to express the urgency of the crisis and the country’s resolve:

The question for us now is to be or not to be. […] This is the Shakespearean question. For 13 days, this question could have been asked. But now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.

(qtd. in Dowd 2022)

In this context, Shakespeare provided a means of reaching out to Western audiences. Zelenskyy’s address was part of an appeal for wartime assistance from Britain. He used similar strategies in subsequent meetings, including his address in Westminster Hall on 8 February 2023 that drew parallels with Britain’s experience under Nazi air raids during the Second World War and invoked British cultural practices, including afternoon tea, as a way of establishing a bridge between Ukraine and Britian that might help to secure planes and military equipment for Ukraine’s defences, mobilizing soft power to generate material support (Nye 2024, para. 10). The Ivan Franko Theatre’s production of Hamlet also aimed to raise global awareness. Filmed excerpts shared on social media tagged the UK Prime Minister’s Twitter account (@10DowningStreet) and featured a dedication to ‘the people of the UK for ongoing support of Ukraine & in recognition of the Blitz of WW2 in which the UK’s civilian population was also bombed’ (Ukraine/Українa @Ukraine 2022). During the first few weeks of the invasion, therefore, Shakespeare was mobilized as a cultural figurehead for political and individual resistance—as part of diplomatic efforts to reach international audiences, but also as part of local responses to the invasion within Ukraine.

Warzone and frontline uses of Shakespeare crystallize vital questions about the role of the arts during times of profound crisis, when lives and liberties are under direct attack. From the seventeenth century to the present day, Shakespeare has been invoked by individuals and communities at or near the frontline of conflict, suggesting that, even under such heightened circumstances, his work and cultural capital can resonate, in some measure, with the conditions of war. Shakespeare has been used by British and Patriot troops during the American War of Independence; by soldiers in the trenches during the First World War; by Iraqi performers in conflict zones at risk of insurgency attacks in the aftermath of the Iraq War; and, most recently, by civilians and soldiers in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion (Lidster 2023). Critical work often prioritizes high-profile political and theatrical users—such as state leaders drawing on Shakespeare or famous actors in high-profile wartime productions, including Laurence Olivier’s cinematic adaptation of Henry V that was dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain’ (Olivier 1944). This article, however, focuses on warzone performances involving actors (both professional and amateur), who have immediate experience of conflict as soldiers, refugees, and civilians under attack.

By concentrating on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and expanding to include examples from other conflicts, this article explores how Shakespeare and the theatre can assist two broad impulses: first, to reach outward and impact the war effort by serving humanitarian needs and promoting political change, debate, and diplomacy; and second, to look inward and help individuals cope with their wartime experiences, sometimes having a therapeutic effect. The exceptional conditions of warzone performance—where the actors in a production and the audience in attendance are also ‘actors’ in the war effort, where the threat to lives is ‘visible’ and immediate—centralize questions about the ability of theatre to respond to the magnitude and devastation of war. While there have always been firm advocates of Shakespeare’s wartime vitality—The Manchester Guardian during the Second World War, for example, claimed that there was ‘no better national service […] than to present Shakespearean repertory’ (‘A.S.W.’ 1939, p. 8)—some productions featured in this article consider the limitations of theatre and tragedy as a dramatic form to reflect modern experiences of conflict, at the same time embracing what the arts can achieve at times of war. Warzone productions can create—through design decisions and performance contexts—a parallel between the realities of conflict and the dramatic representation of war and crisis; but they often acknowledge a gulf between the two that prompts a dialectic about theatre’s wartime role and responsibilities. What seems to unite war and theatre is the power of narrative for shaping action and interpretation—and it is this recognition that underlines the responsibilities of political and theatrical narratives at times of war, including the role of the critic.

2. Mobilizing Shakespeare for the War Effort in Ukraine

Shakespeare’s cultural and political prominence during the ongoing Russian invasion may, at first glance, seem surprising, but it testifies to the dramatist’s long history as an oppositional figurehead for resisting Russian imperialism within Ukraine. Because, as Irena R. Makaryk discusses, access to Shakespeare’s plays in Ukrainian was ‘long forbidden’, the dramatist has a ‘special cachet […] associated with the desire for independent cultural self-expression’. Shakespeare’s global cultural capital can also assist the war effort by helping Ukrainians to ‘speak to the rest of the world through the [dramatist’s] amplified voice’ (Makaryk 2025, pp. 2, 4). For these reasons, recent Shakespearean productions are attentive to audiences within Ukraine who have direct experience of war and to those beyond its borders. Few of these performances, however, have actually been seen by audiences outside Ukraine. Rather, their ‘reach’ is enabled through media coverage, exchanges with theatre companies and universities in the West, and documentaries that have been disseminated globally—accounts that tend to spotlight the lives of Ukrainians affected by conflict. For audiences and theatre practitioners within Ukraine, Shakespeare’s plays can facilitate cultural and wartime expression that is at once distinctly Ukrainian and also part of a larger—and European—performance tradition that assists the de-Russification of Ukrainian culture. Within these warzone contexts, the collective, shared experience of theatre is especially vital, helping communities under attack to process their experiences of war, build connections with others, and promote political debate and resilience. Shakespearean theatre in Ukraine is ‘not some routine exercise’, as Michael Dobson suggests, but ‘really means something to the actors and the audience’. Reflecting on his experiences at the 2025 Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, Dobson suggests that the contrast between theatre in Britain and in Ukraine was ‘almost embarrassing’, because of its heightened urgency for those living within a country at war (Higgins 2025, para. 21). As this section will consider, a Ukrainian resistance is playing out on stage through Shakespeare, helping those within warzones to generate a personal and political opposition to the Russian invasion that reaches global ‘audiences’ through accounts that stress the individual and community impact of both Shakespeare and the crisis of war.

The scale of Russia’s invasion has transformed the Ukrainian stage into a site of wartime mobilization involving more than just performance. Theatres have become ‘volunteer hubs’ that raise funds, make camouflage netting and balaclavas, and gather ammunition, medicines, and other supplies for those on the frontline (Harbuziuk 2022, para. 5). Crucially, many theatres offer shelter for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to sleep, rest, and receive food, clothes, and other assistance. The Les Kurbas Lviv Academic Theatre arranged shelter on its stage, so that, as Maiia Harbuziuk puts it, the ‘space where William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Martin McDonagh were performed before the war became a place of refuge for nearly a thousand people’ (ibid., para. 8), while the Ivan Franko Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk developed a humanitarian logistics centre called ‘Movement of Resistance—Movement of Help’ to support soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and IDPs (Ivano-Frankivsk Drama Theatre 2025, para. 5). By serving humanitarian and material wartime needs, theatres are playing a vital role in the Ukrainian resistance that also informs their theatrical aims. The Ivan Franko Theatre asserts on its website—in Ukrainian and English—that the ‘code of the creative and public mission of the theatre is, first of all, Ukrainian patriotism, which does not involve any compromise’. Its activities reflect the changed wartime role of theatre: the company ‘tours both in Ukraine itself, exhausted by the war, and abroad, in the villages and towns of Prykarpattia, in the liberated cities of the war-scorched east, in the locations of the Armed Forces’, working ‘with veterans and volunteers of the Ukrainian-russian war’ (lower case in original; ibid., para. 12).

Across Ukraine, other theatre practitioners and artists have stressed the importance of a ‘resilient theatre’ (Bilińska 2022) that reflects the values for which Ukrainians are fighting. The Anima Art for Peace project, created in March 2022 by students and lecturers from the Department of Animation Theatre Acting and Directing at Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts, launched a manifesto that calls for new creative responses to promote peace:

It is a difficult time for us now, but we don’t lose the strength of spirit and faith that art can stop the war. We are ready to draw, write, and dance while we are sitting in shelters, we are prepared to lift the mood and fighting spirit, and we are ready to create while around destruction.

(Bilińska 2022, para. 10)

Similarly, when the ProEnglish Theatre, which performs classical and contemporary plays in English, decided to remain in Kyiv after the invasion began, company members relocated to the theatre’s basement bomb shelter, performing plays as ‘a tribute to the power of performance arts to stand above the reality of horror, to bring people together and to give them hope’ (Meerzon 2022, para. 4). Theatre’s heightened wartime role in Ukraine involves supplying material needs and striving to support the psychological needs of its actors and audiences.

While this resistance includes works by Ukrainian writers, Shakespeare occupies a unique position because fighting for ‘the right to stage [his plays] in Ukrainian’ has long been an important part of efforts to decolonize Ukrainian theatre from Russian influence (Makaryk 2006, p. 20). During the nineteenth century, tsarist governments prohibited Ukrainian translations of Shakespeare in favour of Russian texts, so when twentieth-century theatre practitioners sought to develop a Ukrainian theatrical space that emphasized its connection—‘genetically and mentally’ (Harbuziuk 2022, para. 14)—to European, rather than Russian, culture, new translations and adaptations of Shakespeare furthered that resistance (Makaryk 2006, pp. 16–17). During the 1920s, for example, director Les Kurbas’ Shakespearean productions—notably Macbeth—contributed, according to one of the actors, to ‘revolutionary movements’ and ‘feelings of national consciousness’, a note in the director’s journal recalling that some audiences claimed ‘they had only become conscious Ukrainians after having seen our productions’ (entry on 31 August 1920, translated and quoted in Makaryk 2006, p. 21). Kurbas’ commitment to Shakespeare and theatrical experimentation also reveals the personal dangers of cultural resistance in Soviet Ukraine. His work led to tensions with the Central Committee for the Control of the Repertory in the USSR, and he was eventually arrested, exiled to the Russian north, and shot on Stalin’s order to ‘“celebrate” the twentieth anniversary of the [1917] Revolution’ (Makaryk 2006, p. 33). Using Shakespeare for resistance during the ongoing invasion is, therefore, part of longstanding efforts to assert Ukrainian sovereignty, and helps to counter Putin’s repeated imperialist claim that Ukrainians are culturally and politically Russian (Putin 2021).

Held from 17 to 23 June 2024, the country’s first international Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival—hosted by the Ivan Franko Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk—testifies to Shakespeare’s oppositional currency in Ukraine and creates a cultural bridge to global audiences that aims to generate political support and soft power. While the festival had been planned before the invasion, its final programme, which included productions of Coriolanus, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and Hamlet, alongside discussions with Ukrainian and international scholars, reflects the conditions of a wartime festival that has a pressing political agenda. It was not to provide ‘a holiday of art’ or ‘entertainment during the war’, but to mobilize Shakespeare to serve the war effort, as expressed, in Ukrainian and English, on the festival’s website:

The aim of the festival is to create an international platform to talk to the world about our culture, our European identity, and this war that is taking the lives of Ukrainians every day. We strive to become part of the European network of Shakespeare festivals that exist in different countries so that our voices can be heard. […] We want to use the potential of art, which is underestimated by many today, as a driving force to change the perception of Ukraine’s role and place in the context of global processes. We know that this path is the only one possible today for every artist who has the privilege of peaceful work.

(Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival 2024)

This public statement of purpose crucially aligns Ukraine’s inaugural Shakespeare festival with European networks and identities, furthering the practices of earlier Ukrainian theatre practitioners to assert firm ties with Europe, rather than Russia.

The festival, which recently staged its second annual programme in June 2025, strives to be ‘an instrument of social and political change, a tool of public diplomacy and a platform for dialogue with the democratic world’ (Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival 2025), aims that are reflected through its featured productions and collaborations. The 2025 festival included even more lectures and discussions with international scholars and practitioners, which—although they were not broadcast beyond the festival—promote exchanges with Western institutions and media. In both festival years, the programme has favoured tragedy: the 2024 festival featured seven productions (including adaptations) of tragedies, alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Date with William (a collage of scenes from several comedies), and The Tempest in a production directed by Oksana Dmitriieva for the Maria Zankovetska National Theatre that used theatre machinery to emphasize Prospero’s authoritarian power (Bal 2024, para. 30–31).1 The 2025 programme included five productions of tragedies, two comedies, and a new play (When the Hurlyburly’s Done) about six women involved in Kurbas’ 1920 production of Macbeth.2 The festival seems, as Charlotte Higgins’s account in The Guardian puts it, ‘skewed towards tragedy’ (Higgins 2025, para. 10)—an emphasis that reflects the position of Shakespeare within Ukraine more widely. For some theatre practitioners, this preference for tragedy is to be expected. The festival’s director Iryna Chuzhynova suggests that ‘it’s important to have a place for tears’, while poet and Shakespearean translator Yurii Andrukhovych avouches that ‘there is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems: fear, hate, passion, betrayal, the human soul’ (ibid., para. 9–10), which tragedies help to facilitate. Indeed, one panel event at the 2025 festival examined the lack of repertoire diversity in Ukraine since the 2020s. Directors tend to ‘choose the four “great tragedies” [in recent years, notably Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet] and a few comedies’, while they ‘largely ignore [other] highly relevant’ plays, including Henry V, Measure for Measure, and Julius Caesar (Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival 2025, ‘William Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama on the Contemporary Ukrainian Stage: Quo Vadis?’). This event also sought to question why the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Marlowe, Jonson, and Fletcher, are ‘virtually unknown in Ukrainian theatre’, given that they are ‘an important part of the European repertoire’ (ibid.), again reflecting the festival’s aim to assert Ukraine’s ties to European, rather than Russian, culture.

The productions themselves do not prompt clear-cut political application between the Shakespearean text and the ongoing war or a ‘forensic reading’ that simplifies their engagement with wartime issues for the benefit of Western exposure and exchange (Litvin et al. 2016, p. 302). Indeed, performances were not broadcast to audiences outside Ukraine, so their wider exposure and soft power relies primarily on the circulation of reports and media coverage, assisted by collaborations with international artists and academics who attended the festival. Productions tended to centralize broad questions about political conduct, authority, and injustice that offer some parallels with the Russian invasion and a prompt for dialogue and debate. Dmytro Bohomazov’s Coriolanus, staged by the Ivan Franko Theatre National Academic Drama Theatre (Kyiv) and translated by Dmytro Pavlychko, emphasizes the conflict between ‘an individual and a society’ that, since its premiere in 2018, has been responsive to the changing political situation in Ukraine (Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival 2024). Reflecting on this negotiation, Nataliya Torkut and Svitlana Deineka suggest that ‘many playgoers in Ukraine perceive Ukrainian soldiers as resembling Coriolanus in their willingness to stand up to defend their motherland’, prompting admiration but also concern over ‘society’s failure to recognize its heroes’, which the 2024 production expanded through the representation of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (Torkut and Deineka 2024, pp. 547–48). The production received a standing ovation at the festival and its presentation of difficult questions about political diplomacy, stability, and compromise did not propose clear answers. Coriolanus was presented as a ‘warrior who did not seek power’, but became a ‘victim of political manipulations’, enhanced through the production’s two-storey, multidimensional staging that created a visible world and a hidden world separated by a glass wall, a threshold that characters could cross (ibid., p. 548). Torkut and Deineka, who attended the production, suggest that it encouraged audiences, many of whom responded emotionally to the performance, ‘to reflect critically on the realities of today and emphasized the need for responsible decision-making’ (ibid., p. 550).

Similarly, Derzhypilskyi’s production of Romeo and Juliet: Dramma per musica explores the wide-ranging consequences of war, especially for younger generations, and the attendant responsibilities of society for prolonged crisis. Performed in the Ivan Franko’s basement theatre in a translation by Andrukhovych that adds allusions to contemporary Ukraine, the production emphasizes the corruption within a post-apocalyptic Verona that propels the tragedy. The acting space was dominated by a large metal cage, and the production opened by showing Juliet within the cage, holding the dead body of Romeo as she sang ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ (‘Let Me Weep’) from Handel’s Rinaldo (Torkut and Shchukina 2024, pp. 535–37). This displacement of the play’s chronological time demonstrates—in a more visceral way than the Chorus’s opening prologue—the serious, uncontainable consequences of ‘civil broils’ and unrest, reinforced through the introduction of three Erinyes or Furies (Greek goddesses of vengeance), who enter with the witches’ lines from Macbeth (‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’; ibid., p. 536).3 When the two families reconcile in the concluding scene, the play anticipates the peace following war, but seems to reflect uneasily on the sacrifices (and sacrificed futures) required from its central protagonists.

The festival’s productions, therefore, introduce points of contact with the ongoing conflict that encourage contemporarily focused political debate, but without representing the war directly. Some productions do suggest firmer connections: the Teatrul Fără Nume’s Macbeth (from Chișinău, Moldova; dir. Mihai Țărnă) claims in its programme notes that the title character’s ‘bloodstained shirts […] can be associated to the inhumed people at Izyum and Bucea, […] waving their mummified arms in front of the criminal dictator whom the Kremlin walls can no longer hide from the fury of the universe’ (Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival 2024). Indeed, Macbeth has become the most popular Shakespearean play in Ukraine since the start of the invasion, likely owing to its depiction of tyrannical power (Higgins 2025, para. 12). Other productions are more equivocal, creating a critical dialogue that draws on Shakespeare to assert Ukraine’s identity as a European country and to ask ‘complex existential questions of a person and a nation’ (European Shakespeare Festivals Network 2024, para. 3). For actors and audiences within a warzone, the collective, communal experience of theatre also allows those involved to ‘seek asylum from the everyday horrors’—and as Ukrainian scholar Pavlo Shopin observes, theatre in Ukraine ‘has become much more popular during the war’: it is ‘much more immersive than film or other arts’ and ‘offers ways to work through this experience of war and its traumatic aspects’ (qtd. in Low 2024, p. 527). While the festival’s published aims emphasize political debate and cultural resistance that serve the war effort and raise awareness of Ukraine as a democracy under threat, its productions and events also assist those within warzones to process their personal experiences.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in two recent documentaries that follow individuals who have been directly affected by the war in Ukraine as they prepare to stage a Shakespearean adaptation. In both cases, two productions are involved: the theatrical staging of a play and the documentary account of that journey. This format allows a sustained reflection on whether and how Shakespeare serves a therapeutic role that helps individuals and communities to respond to the trauma of war. Director Dmytro Hreshko’s documentary King Lear: How We Looked for Love During the War (2023) follows the Theatre Studio of IDPs ‘Uzhik’ as they rehearse and stage a production of the play in Uzhhorod, where many sought refuge after Russia’s invasion. Local activist and theatre director Viacheslav Yehorov decided to form a company of internally displaced persons to stage King Lear: his actors are ‘former teachers, artists, engineers, sales assistants, and housewives’ whose lives have been uprooted since the conflict began (Hreshko 2023, synopsis). They were, as Yehorov reflects, ‘already actors in a real tragedy’ and, in his view, were ‘able to convey the feeling of what is happening better than [professional] actors’ (Hreshko 2023, 05:00–06:10; Royal Shakespeare Company 2024).

The play was adapted for a small cast—the conflict between Edgar and Edmund, for example, is transferred to Goneril and Regan (Khomami 2024, para. 13)—and the production highlights the devastating impact of war on individual lives. One staging decision involves overlaying the Fool’s body, stretched out supine on the floor, with Lear’s map of the kingdom (Hreshko 2023, 30:00–31:00). By marking out the division of the kingdom over the body of one of its subjects, this moment foreshadows the conflict that will unfold and have profound consequences not only for a state’s political leaders but for its citizens. The theatrical production also begins with a framing device that has the characters entering as refugees from across Ukraine, signalled through train whistles and an overhead speaker that announces their arrival from cities, including Kyiv, Lozova, Kharkiv, and Poltava (Hreshko 2023, 06:50–07:40). It therefore blurs the boundary between character and actor, showing how a newly formed community in exile has come together to stage a play about dislocation and the disintegration of a state. Hreshko’s documentary mirrors this structure, following the actors as they arrive in Uzhhorod and find shelter in a gymnasium repurposed for housing refugees. An English teacher from Irpin, who plays Lear, recalls that, before arriving in Uzhhorod, he was ‘a living target, […] falling asleep to the sounds of anti-aircraft missiles’ and fighter jets, while others reflect on the realities of a war that has uprooted their lives and plans for the future (ibid., 12:10–13:20).

The selection of King Lear resonates with the company’s experiences of exile and loss, but also, through the play’s tragic structure, provides an outlet for expressing emotion—however painful—that preserves a connection to human experience. Yehorov draws a parallel between Lear and his actors, suggesting that ‘they are the same as Lear who has lost everything’ (ibid., 11:00–11:30). The theatrical production and documentary show that one of the vital, broader roles served by tragedy as a dramatic form is maintaining a connection to humanity and human emotion that can be severed through war. In response to an actor’s emotional account of being confined for twenty-five days in a bomb shelter, one of the production’s advisers, Oleksandr Kutsyk, claims that the reason they are creating this project is so that ‘people could cry [and] touch each other’s souls’, rather than petrify or go numb (ibid., 17:00–19:00). The tragic structure of King Lear and the experience of staging it provoke an emotional response—for those involved in the production and in the audience—that ‘means that we are still normal people’ (ibid). Shakespeare becomes part of a therapeutic process of resisting the numbing effect and repression of trauma that can arise through warzone experiences where death, destruction, and displacement are part of everyday life.

Similarly, Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski’s documentary The Hamlet Syndrome (2022)—a Polish and German co-production—explores how the character of Hamlet can be used to deal with post-traumatic stress and wartime crisis. It was completed before the 2022 invasion: the documentary responds to the Russo-Ukrainian War centralized in eastern Ukraine that has been ongoing since the Maidan Revolution in 2014, which unfolded after then-President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from signing an association agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. Niewiera and Rosolowski recall how the ‘process of finding the cast took almost two years’, during which they met ‘about 80 young, socially active people who formed volunteer battalions, organized humanitarian aid, or were forced to flee from Donbas’, many of whom ‘went through the hell of war’ and fought on the frontline (Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022b, para. 3). One of the cast—Katya Kotlyarova—claims that the unfolding conflict left her with few options other than to fight against separatists and defend Ukrainian sovereignty: ‘I am not a soldier, I am just a woman at war, that is, someone who was forced to pick up a gun’ (ibid., para. 4). For the directors, Hamlet stood out as a meaningful, ‘archetypal’ figure who ‘collides with a brutal struggle for power in his homeland’ and suggested a parallel with ‘the dilemmas of a large part of the politically engaged young Ukrainian generation’ (ibid., para. 2). The project involved a theatrical production—The H-Effect—directed by Roza Sarkisian and based on Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977), a postmodern collage of scenes and quotations that emphasize ‘différance’ and transformation (Mancewicz 2022, pp. 125–45). It features a series of short monologues that use ‘motifs’ from Hamlet to create a new theatrical response that links aspects of the cast’s wartime experiences with ‘Hamlet’s dilemma’. The documentary follows the production’s development and rehearsal process, which makes frequent use of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy as a rhetorical template for responding to pressing questions raised through the cast’s experiences of war: to live or not to live; to be radical or not to be radical; to compromise or not to compromise; to leave Ukraine or not to leave Ukraine (Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022a, 07:00–10:45).4 Kotlyarova adapts Hamlet’s existential question to recount a dilemma her battalion faced—‘to go or not to go?’—when risking their lives to recover the bodies of friends who had been killed by separatists near Checkpoint 32 in October 2014 (ibid., 08:00–08:53).

The aim of this theatrical production and documentary is not, therefore, to stage a Shakespearean text, but to use it as a starting point that assists a therapeutic journey for the cast. For example, another actor, Yaroslav (Slavik) Havyanets from western Ukraine, uses Hamlet’s reflection on death to share his own experience when captured and tortured by separatists in Donetsk:

I was Hamlet on 21 January 2015. […] They put us in a row against the wall. They told us to say goodbye to life. In these last fifteen seconds I have left, I somehow felt lightness, freedom. Maybe because I didn’t have to decide anything anymore. All I could think was: God forgive us for all the hell that’s going on here.

(ibid., 12:30–16:15)

For the cast, Hamlet is a representative figure, confronted with an uncertain, painful reality and having to make difficult decisions. By beginning with the phrase ‘I am Hamlet, because…’, the actors use the character as a touchstone, helping them to express their own wartime dilemmas and post-traumatic stress (ibid., 29:55–33:00). It took a long time to build a team that was ‘emotionally ready’ (Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022a, para. 3) to use Hamlet to perform, as Ewa Bal puts it, a ‘tough national psychodrama, [as] a form of self-therapy that is urgently needed by the artist but also by the entire society’ (Bal 2024, para. 24). For the cast, several of whom have returned to the front since the 2022 invasion began, Shakespeare offers a tool for dealing with the aftermath of frontline fighting and persecution in eastern Ukraine.

The productions considered thus far reveal the significance of Shakespeare for Ukrainians under attack—to promote political debate, to boost resilience and unity, and to help process wartime trauma—but they are also attentive to a wider audience through efforts to disseminate materials, footage, and commentary. While the documentaries prioritize the therapeutic and community-building potential of Shakespeare to give voice to suffering and individual experiences of war, they are also the most attuned to a global audience through the documentary form itself, which is designed for wide circulation, assisted through the provision of English subtitles. Discussing King Lear: How We Looked for Love During the War at the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles, producer Polina Herman unites both aims, suggesting that the documentary reveals the therapeutic effect of art that can ‘really heal’, but also demonstrates on an international platform ‘what it means to be Ukrainian—that despite all the hardships, we don’t give up’ (Bagdasaryan 2023, 02:44–03:00). These Shakespearean productions have also led to further collaboration with Western theatres and audiences that expands their political charge and reach. The Royal Shakespeare Company invited the Theatre Studio of IDPs ‘Uzhik’ to perform King Lear at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it was staged, without surtitles, to Ukrainian refugees on 14 June 2024 and to the public on the next day (Royal Shakespeare Company 2024, para. 2).

While some productions—such as the festival’s Coriolanus—use Shakespeare to explore nuanced political debate, the productions and commentary that have been most widely disseminated tend to emphasize individual experiences of suffering, sacrifice, and resilience, rather than the negotiation of specific political issues. For example, Maria Hrunicheva’s Ukrainian adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed through Zoom and broadcast on YouTube, featured actors displaced across Kyiv, Odessa, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, and France. A collaboration with Stage UA, Butterfly Theatre Collective, and the Finborough Theatre, the production aimed to bring together ‘audiences from all over the world’, to ‘communicate through theatre, despite our differences, struggles, [and] separation,’ and to ‘find connection as we look with hope towards a brighter future’ (Finborough Theatre 2023). Audiences beyond Ukrainian borders are called to bear witness to the ongoing conflict through documentaries and other accounts that underline the human costs of the invasion. Such materials can activate, as Savas Patsalidis explores, an audience’s ‘tragic sensibility’, helping to generate support for Ukraine, raise funds, and debate the extent of Western involvement (Patsalidis 2022, para. 41–42). But they also introduce, as the next section explores, ethical questions about spectatorship, the coexistence of empathy and inaction that can accompany the staging of suffering, and the use of narrative to make war comprehensible.

3. ‘The Worst Is Not’: Wartime Limitations of Shakespeare and Tragedy

While recent wartime and warzone responses suggest that Shakespeare can serve an important therapeutic role during conflict, there are, nevertheless, limits to his relevance and reach, especially when the humanitarian costs of war are so high. Tragedies such as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, which have been favoured by Ukrainians, can help to process wartime crises, but they do not express them fully. This limitation is, in part, owing to the condition of theatre as an act of representation and imitation—and not the thing itself. Ewan Fernie considers how Jacques Lacan’s view of tragedy ‘proffers the existential payoff of a fuller and more vivid life’ that inducts the individual into ‘the Real’: the ‘most lively and profound plane of our experience’ (Fernie 2007, p. 34) that transcends reality. But the unique conditions of warzone performances highlight an unbridgeable gulf between tragedy as a dramatic form and reality, between representation and lived experience, which is reinforced by the fact that the individuals staging Shakespeare are also ‘actors’ in the war. As Patsalidis asks, ‘does the war [in Ukraine], or any war for that matter, imply the death of tragedy, at least for those who directly experience war compared to those who simply experience the echoes of war from afar?’ (Patsalidis 2022, para. 23). While Shakespeare has emerged as one of the most frequently invoked writers at times of war, this reception history also reveals a steady questioning of his appeal and whether his works resonate with the horrors of war.

To give an illustrative example from an earlier conflict, published letters, diaries, and literary accounts of frontline and warzone experience during the First World War sometimes reveal limitations in Shakespeare’s appeal that qualify claims about his enthusiastic mobilization (both at the time and in subsequent criticism). In Contemptible, a short book published under the pseudonym ‘Casualty’ in 1916, a soldier attempts to use Hamlet to understand death and ‘What Happens—after’; but he ends by ‘hat[ing] Hamlet’, concluding that those fighting at the frontline were ‘a great deal nearer to death and vital, elementary things than Shakespeare had ever been’ (Anon (‘Casualty’) 1916, p. 143). Similarly, in Wilfrid Meynell’s Aunt Sarah and the War, an epistolary fiction between soldier Owen Tudor and his family in England, Tudor questions the frontline relevance of Shakespeare, claiming that he ‘find[s] no longer any comfort’ in the poetry: ‘It doesn’t seem the real thing when read with the guns for chorus (even when they’re silent, one goes on hearing them). It’s too exotic for the trenches’ (Meynell [1914] 1915, p. 34). Author E.E. Cummings, who was an ambulance driver during the First World War, claimed that ‘Somehow or other, reading Shakespeare did not appeal to my disordered mind. I tried Hamlet and Julius Caesar once or twice, and gave it up’ (Cummings 1922, p. 263). At other times, performances of Shakespeare staged through the ‘Concerts at the Front’ initiative that provided entertainment for Allied forces were not enthusiastically received—despite organizer and actor Lena Ashwell’s claim that a performance of Macbeth in 1916 had ‘thrilled [the troops] with horror over the murder of Duncan [and] impressed them as being far more terrible than any of their own experiences’ (Ashwell 1916, p. 773; see also Ashwell 1922, pp. 48–49). Fractures in Shakespeare’s appeal arise, of course, from a constellation of different issues, such as his dismissal as too serious or ‘highbrow’ for the frontline, or as a hegemonic ‘English’ writer who has been used to advance colonial and imperial aims (Lidster 2023, pp. 159–97). This section will concentrate specifically on the sometimes-fractured ability of Shakespeare’s plays to respond in a meaningful way to the harsh realities of war that applies more broadly to questions about the value of tragedy as a dramatic form.

Although Shakespeare retains a vital wartime role through the productions considered thus far, a gulf opens up between the representation of suffering in plays such as Hamlet and King Lear and its reality for those with immediate experience of conflict. Yehorov stresses the significance of King Lear for displaced Ukrainians in his production, but also acknowledges the disassociation between tragedy on the stage and during the war:

For me, the war in Shakespeare, it’s on paper and that’s one thing, but the tragedy that happened in real life is absolutely different, it’s a different level. We need to learn that war is the equivalent of death. That it means just death.

(qtd. in Khomami 2024, para. 14; see also Hreshko 2023, 1:18:00–1:20:00)

While proponents of tragedy as a dramatic form stress its contribution to self-knowledge, growth, and pleasure, Yehorov questions its ability to give shape or meaning to real experiences of conflict and resists the use of narrativizing strategies to make sense of them. A similar tension between wartime reality and dramatic tragedy is directly explored in Tamara Trunova’s HA*L*T, a metatheatrical play that shows a group of actors attempting to stage Hamlet, but finding themselves unable to continue, choking and faltering over the lines. This inability to play Hamlet emerges as a symbolic consequence of the war and the fact that several of their company are fighting at the frontline. It responds to Trunova’s own difficulty, as director of the Kyiv State Drama and Comedy Theatre on the Left Bank, to go ahead with a production of Hamlet after the 2022 invasion (Bal 2024, para. 25), creating, instead, this topical new collaboration with the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin that has since been performed in Ukraine, Germany, Poland, and Romania. The title indicates the German word ‘halt’, meaning ‘stop’, as well as evoking a faltering Hamlet through its use of asterisks. Trunova’s response to Shakespeare therefore demonstrates how the place of theatre at times of crisis can become fractured, as individuals struggle with the realities of a war that is having such a devastating impact on their daily lives and communities.

Looking beyond Ukraine to the ongoing and catastrophic conflict in Gaza, Palestinian actor and playwright Ali Abu Yassin’s dramatic monologue ‘From Gaza to Shakespeare’—performed and published in November 2023 as part of the Ashtar Theatre’s Gaza Monologues project—appeals to Shakespeare as a friend, imagining him sharing in the suffering being experienced in Gaza:

Help me, my friend, how can you be present after more than 500 years? You jump before my eyes with every image and every cry. I hear you screaming with the children and sharing their crying with the mothers. Dressed in black like Hamlet’s father, emerging from under the rubble carrying a child’s toy. You appear from above the church bells ringing them, warning of their destruction. […] Get up, Shakespeare. Help me, my friend. I’m really tired. Resist with your wise pen, full of love, joy, revolution, humanity, hope, and freedom openly, maybe we will all become brothers under that blue sky.

(Yassin 2023)

The monologue does not invoke a rallying, militaristic Shakespeare—one that often has a renewed currency at times of war. Rather, Shakespeare is imagined as Old Hamlet, a ghostlike figure that warns of imminent destruction, rather than inciting revenge, while the speaker also reflects how a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet ‘warns of the ugliness of conflict […] and that everyone will pay the price’. Shakespeare is a voice of resistance that—through writing—can promote love, hope, humanity, and empathy. But Yassin’s monologue also suggests that the dramatist cannot be used to comprehend the real crisis unfolding in Gaza:

The vision has changed, my friend. It has become much more difficult. The sound of rockets makes the heart jump in fear. The smell of gunpowder and carcinogenic smoke forcibly penetrates your lungs. Phosphorus bombs, which are banned internationally, burn the green and dry land. Seeing your loved ones in pieces. Your heart that is torn a thousand times every day as if it were a piece of rubber.

(ibid.)

This severance between Shakespeare and twenty-first-century war in part relates to modern weapons and technologies, including the damage they wreak; but it also suggests that Shakespeare and tragedy cannot adequately represent or grapple with the devastation of war.

The connection between tragedy and trauma is a critical one. Judith Butler argues that trauma is ‘not capturable through representation’, while twentieth-century theorists and practitioners, writing after the Holocaust and two world wars, have explored the role of tragedy—as a dramatic form—to acknowledge what is unsayable (Butler 2004, p. 146). Tragedy could, therefore, as Catherine Silverstone proposes, ‘be said to share certain structural affinities with trauma with respect to the “impossibility” of representation’ (Silverstone 2007, p. 278). While, in Macbeth, Malcolm implores Macduff to ‘give sorrow words’—the ‘grief that does not speak | Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break’ (Shakespeare 2016, 4.3.210–11)—King Lear seems to stage a recognition of language’s inability to articulate profound suffering. Edgar, encountering his blinded father, Gloucester, reflects that ‘the worst is not | As long as we can say “This is the worst”’, ruminating that ‘worse I may be yet’ (ibid., 4.1.25–26). The play explores how suffering can surpass the ability of language to give voice to it, culminating in Lear’s entrance, carrying the body of Cordelia, and crying out ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’ (ibid., 5.3.253). But there is also a tension between tragedy that stages this recognition within a dramatic structure that implies these experiences are meaningful and the real trauma of war, which, for many, resists comprehension and refuses narrative explanation. The Hamlet Syndrome reveals this tension, as some actors challenge the aims of the project. Roman Kryvdyk, a combat medic at the frontline of the war in eastern Ukraine, admits that he is ‘sick of all this theatre’:

One thought is on my mind: words have lost their power. There’s nothing left to say. I could talk about anything, but there’s nothing to say. My brain is so worn out that it’s starting to shut down. It’s in … safe mode. In survival mode.

(Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022a, 1:16:00–1:17:40)

Although Shakespeare, tragedy as a dramatic form, and the theatre as a site for representation can acknowledge what is unsayable, they can also become implicated in a process that nevertheless aims to impart narrative shape and meaning to war.

This separation between the representation and reality of war is one aspect that troubled William Hazlitt in his reading of Henry V. In Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Hazlitt criticises Shakespeare for ‘labour[ing] hard to apologize for the actions of the king’ who resolved ‘to destroy all that he cannot enslave’ during the French campaign, while laying ‘all the blame of the consequences of his ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny’. But Hazlitt also suggests that Henry V comes across as likeable, as ‘a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant’, because the play’s representation is not real (Hazlitt 1817, pp. 203–6). Hazlitt’s point is not simply an acknowledgement of the practical limitations of the theatre and staging practices that might not convey war and suffering vividly—similar to the Chorus’s imperative that audiences ‘piece out our imperfections with your thoughts’ (Shakespeare 2016, Prologue, 23). Rather, it depends on key material distinctions: that stage blood is not real blood spilt by a human body; that stage suffering is not real suffering; that stage death is not real death. For Hazlitt, there is no real jeopardy in this ‘splendid pageant’:

We take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boasts and feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage and are confined to lines of ten syllables; where no blood follows the strike that wounds our ears, where no harvest bends beneath horses’ hoofs, no city flames, no little child is butchered, no dead men’s bodies are found piled on heaps and festering the next morning—in the orchestra!

(Hazlitt 1817, p. 206)

Drama is, by definition, an act of (embodied) imitation, but what disturbs Hazlitt, writing in the aftermath of the prolonged and destructive Napoleonic Wars, is that such representations could compromise the gravity of what is staged: that the horrors of war might become sanitized or, indeed, glorified, and that theatre could contribute to the dehumanizing of others, especially enemy combatants. In certain scenes, Henry V acknowledges war’s extreme costs: the soldier Williams questions the justification and conduct of Henry’s war. He asserts that ‘there are few die well that die in a battle’ and vividly describes such suffering as soldiers crying for a surgeon and mourning the fate of wives and children ‘left poor behind’ (Shakespeare 2016, 4.1.133–36). While these views are at odds with a glamourized vision of militarism and self-sacrifice, the play’s central focus on Henry and a providentially guided campaign punctuated by rallying, rhetorically dexterous speeches often, on balance, deflects attention from its critique of war, especially during performance (Henderson 2008, p. 227). Through its dramatic structure, a play can impart meaning to wartime crises and sacrifice—and even lessen the severity of troubling or unethical conduct, such as the threats of a warmongering leader or the escalation of political conflict that will enact huge costs on civilian lives.

The mimetic value of drama and storytelling—its ability to explore aspects of human experience, including the most painful ones—is, of course, part of what informs the wartime uses of Shakespeare considered in this article. But the gap between reality and representation should also give us pause. In his ‘Notes on the Way’, published during the Second World War, George Orwell reflects on the importance of culture for supporting the abstract concepts for which soldiers would fight:

If whole armies had to be coerced, no war could ever be fought. Men die in battle—not gladly, of course, but at any rate voluntarily—because of abstractions called ‘honour’, ‘duty’, ‘patriotism’, and so forth. […] All that this really means is that they are aware of some organism greater than themselves, stretching into the future and the past, within which they feel themselves to be immortal.

(Orwell 1940, p. 358)

Shakespeare has been used—during periods of conflict from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century—to ‘activate’ these abstractions, not only through the plays themselves, but through the dramatist’s capital as a cultural figurehead around whom individuals and states might rally. During the First World War, the British Expeditionary Force’s hybrid production of Hamlet and Henry V, staged just a few miles from the firing line in 1915, ended with Henry V’s rallying address at Harfleur and had an ‘electrical’ effect on its audience, motivating them for frontline action by making them feel as if they were part of something larger: ‘our hearts were stronger, our minds brighter, our courage high, and in the quiet stars above brooded the certain promise of victorious and lasting peace’ (Anon 1915, p. 9). The production activates the abstractions that Orwell describes; but the evidence of this response comes from a printed account in The Times, which suggests the frontline production had a uniform, homogenous impact on its actors and audience. It constructs a tidy narrative that is necessarily a fiction and is perhaps more attentive to readers of The Times and their expectations, than documentary accuracy (Lidster 2023, pp. 1–3). A play such as Henry V can be used to make sense of war, which, for Yehorov, means ‘just death’, through the appeal of honour, duty, and partnership with the king, values that are rousingly expressed at critical points in Henry’s campaign. These abstractions—activated through the play itself, the collective act of staging a production, and the narrativized accounts of its design and reception—can impart meaning to wartime experiences in a way that soothes and reassures. Especially from a post-war perspective, there is something unsettling about the optimism of the BEF frontline account that simplifies and homogenizes. It displaces the individual experience in favour of a constructed collective one, while letters, diaries, and other records of those at the frontline reveal a much more complex view of war.

While Henry V is often invoked at times of war, recent Ukrainian productions favour Shakespearean tragedies that are much less excited by conflict and, instead, emphasize its costs and consequences, especially for young generations. Henry V concentrates on the experiences of an invading monarch and his forces, whereas the representation of exile, betrayal, and loss in Yehorov’s King Lear, for example, offers a point of connection with the actors’ own experience as internally displaced persons. But these productions still demonstrate a division between their representation of war and its reality, between the staging of suffering and the lives of those directly affected by conflict, even—or especially—when those individuals are actors within the productions. What does unite the staging of Shakespearean tragedy and the warzone experiences of its actors is a desire to use language and narrative to structure events on the stage and in real life. The Theatre Studio of IDPs ‘Uzhik’ performs King Lear to, as the documentary subtitle puts it, ‘find love during the war’ and make connections with other internally displaced persons; the cast of The H-Effect uses Hamlet to process wartime suffering and post-traumatic stress; the Ivan Franko Theatre (Kyiv) stages Coriolanus as an act of resilience and political probing that resonates with the goal of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival to promote change. Some practitioners acknowledge that war can compromise a production’s aims, including its artistic and political unity: the directors of The Hamlet Syndrome, for example, reflect how the 2022 Russian invasion fractures the documentary’s sense of resolution and a trajectory for its cast that anticipates their rehabilitation. But there remains a human interest in narratives that give tragedy meaning both on and off the stage and effect a positive transformation.

This desire for narrative crystallizes ethical challenges about the spectatorship of tragedy—both as a dramatic form and as lived experience, especially when productions reach audiences at a distance from warzones through reports, documentaries, and, indeed, literary criticism. The risk is an oversimplified reading, one that, in the manner of the wartime abstractions underlined by Orwell (and mobilized in a play like Henry V), creates a neat narrative about the power of Shakespearean tragedy during conflict and gives a meaningful shape to suffering. This issue is heightened for the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, because—at the time of writing—their resolutions are uncertain. Shakespeare can be used to construct, as in the account of the 1915 frontline performance, a reassuring narrative about the trajectory of a war as it is unfolding—one that might be especially convincing for those at a distance from the frontline. Indeed, the appeal of narrative also controls public interest in a war. In December 2023, Lionel Shriver posited that Ukraine’s defensive setbacks and escalating losses were puncturing Western interest in a war that was ‘not satisfying our fictional appetites’, including the desire to see an invaded democracy swiftly defeat a powerful aggressor, rather than accept concessions, after prolonged resistance, in order to secure peace (Shriver 2023, para. 7). The Shakespearean tragedies considered in this article shed light on a double failure—first, tragedy’s own acknowledgment of what is unsayable when confronted with profound crisis, and second, the unbridgeable gulf between tragedy’s representation and the reality of wartime experience. Overlooking these fractures can promote confidence in the eventual and satisfying resolution of war, as well as a meaningful narrative about the sacrifices endured by those most immediately affected. The role of the theatre critic is not to smooth over these cracks and use Shakespearean tragedy to reiterate comforting claims about the power of warzone theatre to reflect resilience and anticipate the rehabilitation of the oppressed.

Rather, some of the productions considered in this article emphasize the significance of complex, shifting, and conflicted responses to Shakespeare and the theatre. The most vital moments of contact between a Shakespearean production and the real warzone experiences of those involved occur around the generation of shared empathy—with the tragic characters, with fellow cast members, with audiences—that, rather than simplifying, embraces complexity and nuance. Before working on The H-Effect, Havyanets had never met an LGBTQ+ person, and his shared experiences with Oleg-Rodion Shuryhin-Herkalov, a refugee from Donetsk, persecuted for his sexuality, develop during the documentary into a meaningful bond that challenges the stereotypical views that Havyanets had previously encountered. For him, ‘Hamlet unites Ukraine’ at a local level through the cast’s collective experiences that dismantle pre-existing assumptions and generate greater understanding among individuals from different backgrounds (Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022a, 58:50–1:02:50). During times of war, theatre can also sensitively question the invocation of patriotism and the difficulty of reverentially homogenizing and glorifying individual sacrifice. The generation of patriotic values—as expressed in the mission statement of the Ivano-Frankivsk Theatre—is important for those living and fighting within warzones. Western critics must be cautious about applying a ‘post-heroic mentality’ to an evaluation of cultural responses within Ukraine, because, as Jürgen Habermas points out, ‘scepticism of military violence hits a prima facie limit when it comes to the price exacted by a life stifled by authoritarianism’ (Habermas 2022, para. 16; Bal 2024, para. 19). In The Hamlet Syndrome, Kotlyarova defends the priority of ‘patriotic values’: at the frontline, ‘the national values, the anthem, the flag, were very important to me’ (Niewiera and Rosolowski 2022a, 1:18:00–1:22:20). But actor Oksana Cherkashyna’s segment within The H-Effect questions these values and the meaning of the Ukrainian flag, which ‘becomes a gag in her mouth during a rape scene’. As Bal puts it, the staging of this scene asks ‘whether being a rape victim is an act of patriotism in defence of the motherland, or just death and annihilation’ (Bal 2024, para. 23). The cast bond over the negotiation of difficult questions and the process of working together on the production. Rather than propagating confidence in the war effort and individual sacrifice, the production shows how the collective experience of theatre can generate complex questions that promote positive transformation at a more local level than overarching wartime narratives that simplify and reassure.

4. Conclusions

In The Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney recalls Plutarch’s account of the tyrant Alexander of Pherae in a way that reveals both the power and limited power of tragedy as a dramatic form. While Pheraeus had ‘without all pity […] murdered infinite numbers’ and was ‘not ashamed to make matters for tragedies’, a performance of Euripides’ Trojan Women—a play about the costs of war focused through the experiences of women and children—drew from him an ‘abundance of tears’ and prompted him to leave the theatre, withdrawing himself, as Sidney puts it, ‘from hearkening to that which might mollify his hardened heart’ (Sidney 2002, p. 230). Even as this example suggests, theatre can generate shared empathy, prompt different perspectives on war and its extreme costs, and catalyse individual and collective action—but that potential can also be resisted. For warzone productions—often performed by and for individuals who are also actors in the war effort—the significance of theatre as a catalyst of change seems especially pressing and reveals a similar tension between action and inaction, between effect and affect.

Looking back to Lacan, it may be more apt to suggest that the ‘realness’ of tragedy and its immediacy lie in the ideas it asks us to explore and that enable complex debate to take place. Warzone Shakespeare is on the threshold between reality and representation, between action and an arresting of the mind that can accompany the tragic experience on stage. Helena Grehan suggests that ethical spectatorship occurs when a performance can ‘challenge spectators in ways that encourage them to probe difficult concepts surrounding their positions in the world and their relationship to others’ (Grehan 2009, p. 21). Spectatorship can also move and motivate audiences to action. For those within warzones in Ukraine, theatre can build meaningful connections, facilitate humanitarian aid, and promote resilience; for those beyond its borders, access to online performances, media reports, and documentaries of Ukraine’s wartime Shakespeare has the potential to catalyse action, rather than simply generate affect: it can help to raise funds and political awareness, to promote exchanges and collaborations with Ukrainians, to lobby support from international governments to assist a democracy under attack. If attended to carefully, warzone Shakespeare can create a space for debate, discussion, and transformation to happen among its actors and audiences—and the responsibility of the critic engaging with these productions is to draw together the networks of production and reception that reveal their significance and complexity, without, however, falling back uncritically on reassuring narratives about resolution and reconciliation.