As one of the characters puts it in The Hamlet Syndrome, it’s not about choice, it’s about responsibility. She is one of five actors who have returned from active military service on the Donbass frontline, even before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, to perform in a play loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy. For them, the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has immeasurable poignancy and weight in existential terms, as the directors tell BDE.
The bulk of Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’s The Hamlet Syndrome takes place within the first fortnight of intense rehearsals prior to the public performance of a theatre play “based on motifs within [Shakespeare’s] Hamlet.”
In the 2020 performance, five participants, two women and three men, prepare to reflect on their role in the war in eastern Ukraine. None of them had ever planned to be a military combatant or a medic, but the existential threat both to themselves and their country determined that defence of their country was the only option.
We meet Katya (34) from Kharkiv who was active in the Maidan protests in 2013, after which she joined one of the first volunteer battalions, fighting in the subsequent war for 18 months. Since 2016, she has worked for the East Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives, for which she documented war crimes.
Thirty year-old Sławik (pictured above) fought in Donbass, where he saw many of his comrades die, before he himself was taken prisoner, eventually released.
Actor Roman (36) became an army medic and spent a year and a half on the front line, pulling wounded soldiers off the battlefield, often at great risk to himself. After returning from the war, he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rodion (27) is a stylist and film costume designer from Donbass and is heavily involved in the LGBTQ community in Ukraine, having suffered discrimination all his life, as much from his family as from the authorities .
Oksana (34) is a theater and film actress and vocal feminist who has continually lobbied for changes in what she considered to be a corrupt and lawless theatre set-up which, at least in the past, has avoided issues of key importance to Ukraine audiences.
All five characters underwent therapy after their experiences of war, which was a core consideration in their participation both within the stage play and the film. “We made the decision that they are the right protagonists to go through this process…because all of them made therapy before. This was very important for us,” says co-director Elwira Niewiera, adding how once the actors immersed themselves into the play, it then became “an artistic process.”
Nevertheless the artistic process is also harrowing, in which emotions are raw and memories of battle and/or incarceration shocking. “[They] went through the hell of war, confronting their own trauma and trying to find their place in life,” Niewiera says in her notes for the film. “We wanted to create a situation in which our characters, on a theatrical stage, could go through a process of reflecting on what they had experienced in recent years….It took us a very long time to find people who had undergone therapy and could return on stage to their wartime experiences. The motivations for our protagonists to take part in the film and in the performance varied, but all of them, without exception, wanted the world to know about what they had experienced during the war as soldiers, which they never wanted to be!”
The choice of Hamlet as the character against whom the players are asked to measure their response to war is inspired. The Danish prince is a young man assailed by angst and a desire both to right wrongs and to avenge an enemy. He is thoughtful and lyrical, albeit within an environment where death is, if not an inevitability, then a persistent possibility.
“Fascinated by Ukraine’s ‘Maidan Generation’, we came to the conclusion that the archetypal figure of Hamlet – a twenty-something boy whose life suddenly collides with a brutal struggle for power in his homeland – is a parallel for describing the dilemmas of a large part of the politically engaged young Ukrainian generation,” agrees co-director Rosołowski.
“In the case of The Hamlet Syndrome it was also clear to us from the beginning that we didn’t want to make a journalistic film, we didn’t want to record interviews with our protagonists in which they would talk about their experiences during the revolution and the war in Donbass. That is why we accepted the challenge of creating a theatre play based on the motifs of Hamlet, in which the participants will account on stage for their traumatic events of recent years.”
In one striking moment each actor in rehearsal proclaims why they are Hamlet, exploring the complexities and nuances that both they and the eponymous character can explore. ‘Because I fight, because I am a feminist, because I have doubts, because I’m still alive, because I’m an actress, because I’m a woman,’ are just some of the responses they rattle off to each other at breakneck speed.
Some of their testimonies are shocking, such as Roman’s recollections of work as a medic, describing himself as “an ordinary man who was dragged into war,” filling body bags with human remains covered in excrement. The smell of petrol, even on a bus, is likely to trigger a PTSD attack.
When recording testimonies, even the seemingly battle-hardened Katya, who continues to wear army fatigues, almost faints when she hear an account of a female doctor and spy who was captured, stripped naked and hung by her hands from a pipe, and then tortured. When Katya meets her own mother, she concedes of war, how “it was better not to sleep because the nightmares would have been horrifying.”
Słavik explains how, in captivity, a prisoner would regularly be given the choice to save himself by shooting a comrade. The alternative being that both men would be shot.
Rodion, meanwhile, has suffered at the hands of bigots all his life who have derided him and physically attacked him for his sexuality – even the police in the past threatened to baton rape him. Nor did he ever receive any support, nor seemingly much love, from his mother. While we are presented a touching scene in which he playfully chides her in the rain, both of them under an umbrella, she still doesn’t given an inch by way of comprehension or remorse.
Oksana, who at points during the rehearsals expresses how her feminism doesn’t “resonate” within the group, faces an altogether different choice when offered a job in Poland, which leads to an accusation from her boyfriend, who remains behind, that she is putting her career above all.
Of course, for each character, the war rages on, and their involvement remains as intense.
“Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Katia, Słavik and Roman are fighting in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army. They are in hell again and are fighting for their country, for their freedom. Thanks to this film, we can experience first-hand what this means. Rodion…sews military uniforms in Lviv. Oksana, in turn, emigrated to Poland. She is an actress in the Powszechny Theatre and organizes humanitarian aid,” say the filmmakers.
The film world-premiered at the Krakow Film Festival 2022, for which this interview was first published in Business Doc Europe.
