Postkarten aus dem Osten

Four friends are celebrating their reunion. They first met in 2014 in Mariupol where the two Germans in the group were undertaking research for an academic project. That year, the four were caught up in the beginning of the war and fled the city together. Afterwards, they kept in touch, wrote and visited each other. In 2022, they experienced the renewed attack on Mariupol in different locations: Maria as a secondary school teacher in Berlin; Lukas while filming his new documentary in Chile; Anastasiia at the law faculty in Kyiv; and Orest while preparing for a festival in Mariupol — he managed to catch the last train out of the city before it was surrounded.
Now the four gather in a spacious flat in an old apartment block in Berlin and recall their student days. Lukas has cooked a meal, Maria and Orest are finally a couple and Anastasiia is missing her husband who is not permitted to tell her where he is currently fighting. They are no longer students. How should they behave in the face of the war? What suffering, but also what new paths through life are being created by the war? In what ways is it possible to exert resistance against injustice?

Stas Zhyrkov works as a director in Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland and Lithuania. From 2014 to 2019, he was artistic director at the Golden Gate Theatre in Kyiv; from 2019 to 2022, he worked in the same capacity at the city’s Left Bank Theatre. He is currently a member of the artistic management team at the State Small Theatre of Vilnius. He already directed at the Schaubühne last season with »To Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles (ОЗБРОЮЮЧИСЬ ПРОТИ МОРЯ ЛИХ)«. His new work with ensemble members and Ukrainian performers is part of a joint project by European theatres »Resistance & Collaboration« which looks at how resistance and collaboration shaped the course of Nazi injustice in different places in Europe. This question is being addressed by an association of European theatres funded in the Bildungsagenda NS-Unrecht by the German Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. In cooperation with the Teatro Joven in Madrid and the National Theatre of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki, the project explores collaboration with and resistance to Nazi injustice.