For the Finnish theater director and producer with Ukrainian roots Viktor Drevitski, the implementation of the Theater against War project will be a mission, happiness and honor. Founded by him a few years ago in Helsinki, the VIKART Theater, thanks to a grant, will gather under its roof dozens of Ukrainian actors, directors, set designers and other theatrical figures who found themselves in Finland as part of many thousands of Ukrainian refugees. They will rehearse and play in Ukrainian with a Finnish translation anti-war, humanistic performances filled with their human reaction to the events taking place in Ukraine right now!

Because the plays sent to Viktor Drevitski, as the coordinator of the project, by one of the partners of the Ukrainian League of Authors from Kyiv, are being written by playwrights literally these days – at the front, in a bomb shelter, in a hospital.

As part of this project, the League organizes a drama competition in its homeland, in Ukraine, and the staging of four performances in different cities of this country. These performances will be brought to Helsinki and shown at the big festival of Ukrainian theater and drama in the fall of 2025. The festival, which is the culmination of the entire project, will be organized, coordinated and conducted by the Finnish VIKART Theater, its director Viktor Drevitski, who will show six performances of the most significant Ukrainian new plays by young authors.

Two more performances will be brought to the festival in Helsinki by the third participant of the Theater against War project, the KIBBUZ Center for Culture and Education from Germany. The performances there will be staged by young, but already well-known, very creative and talented directors, with their theatrical colleagues-refugees, for whom it is a great happiness to participate and work in this project. Thus, twelve performances of the project will be staged within 24 months, and every two months a premiere will be held in one of the three participating countries of the project.

All twelve performances will gather in Helsinki for the festival of Ukrainian New Drama. The festival itself should become a significant cultural event in Finland, introduce people to Ukrainian wartime plays staged by the Finnish VIKART theater, the German KIBBUZ, and give an opportunity to see authentic Ukrainian theaters that will come here with performances staged within the framework of the project.

Our team will do everything possible to popularize the Ukrainian New Drama not only in Finland and Germany, but also in Europe as a whole, of which Ukraine will become a full member in the near future. Directors and managers of theaters who make up the repertoire, cultural figures and politicians will be invited to watch the performances. All productions can be viewed on the project’s YouTube channel. We want and strive to ensure that every Finnish city theater has at least one performance by a Ukrainian playwright. The same applies to Germany and other European countries.