Since Alina Sarnatska’s first play premiered a year ago, she has documented wartime Ukraine with unflinching frankness
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.”
