CHAMPAIGN – To be or not to be in Ukraine? That was the central question of the award-winning documentary “The Hamlet Syndrome,” which was screened at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign earlier this month.
The film follows a group of young Ukrainians preparing a modern stage version of Hamlet, exploring how the play’s themes intersect with their experiences with war and political change. Their performance of Hamlet happened a few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
The screening was organized by U of I’s department of Slavic languages and literature. David Cooper, head of the department, visited Ukraine in 2018. Cooper said it was still possible to live a normal life then, even with the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine after Russian forces invaded Crimea in 2014. But after the full-scale invasion, that is no longer true.
“It doesn’t matter where you live in Ukraine. You’ve been touched by the war. There’s nowhere where you can be outside of the war zone,” Cooper said.
Work for the film began in 2018 as a response to the ongoing war since 2014. One aspect of the film explores the confrontation between people who have experienced the war firsthand, such as soldiers, and those who have not.
Though much of it was filmed before the full-scale invasion, Cooper said the film is still relevant to Ukraine’s present climate.
“It’s a document of its time, because it’s still hard to talk about war and the traumas,” Cooper said. “That particular situation where you had that split in Ukrainian society doesn’t exist anymore. This film is a reminder of that as well.”
Valleri Robinson, head of the department of theater at U of I, led a discussion following the film screening at the Main Library. This is not the first time she has worked with protest theater; she’s had experience with Belarusian documentary performances that came out of the 2020 fraudulent elections and the aftermath of those events.
“Theater can form communities, theater can reenact and re-engage, because it’s so human,” Robinson said. “It’s such a human art form and it brings people together in a public space, to hold performances, to tell their stories, to mourn together, to grieve, to build national solidarity and identity.”
One of the film’s many themes is the concept of revenge. In the play, Hamlet’s position is that he was called upon to seek revenge because his ghostly father comes back to tell him such. Robinson said that three actors in the film previously served as soldiers and found a connection between their personal lives and Hamlet’s.
“These soldiers, in a way, [it] was the same thing – you’ve been attacked, you had no choice,” Robinson said. “One of the questions that Hamlet asks [is], ‘Do I even have a choice here? What is the choice? What kind of choice do I have?’ So, how to enact solidarity with Ukraine, how to enact patriotism and some of those things – it felt like it was forced upon them.”
Robinson said it is important to remember that “The Hamlet Syndrome” was made before the full-scale invasion, and it would have been much different if it had been made after. She said the current performances in the Playwrights’ Theatre in Kyiv are much more rage-filled and defiant.
“Russia has tried to suppress the flourishing of a unique and distinctive Ukrainian culture, and so for these actors and for this film and for the participants in the theater process, they were able to celebrate the aspect of their own culture and tell their own stories,” Robinson said. “It’s really important that Ukrainian narratives, Ukrainian stories, Ukrainian artists continue to find a voice in a way of using their language, using their history, using their artistry to develop and continue to make sure that their cultural products thrive.”
One method of sharing the culture is the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, a global initiative that translates works by Ukrainian playwrights and mounts readings of them in theaters around the world. This global initiative was launched by John Freedman and the Center for International Theater Development. It works to explore Ukrainian national identity and resilience and call for international support for Ukraine, while also providing a way to raise donations for Ukrainian charities.
Cooper said the importance of the film is to remember Ukrainians’ humanity, especially amongst prevalent talks of U.S. involvement in the war.
“Understanding the experience of war, what Ukrainian people are going through, the kind of trauma that the country is experiencing as a result of the full-scale invasion – it’s important to have that human understanding of that as well, and not let the geopolitical perspective be too abstracted or too divorced from a desire and an understanding to assist Ukrainians in a very existential, fraught moment in their history,” Cooper said.