CHERNIHIV, Ukraine— The 43-year-old Ukrainian actor took to the stage wearing a black leather jacket and with a moustache painted on her face. Ruslana Ostapko was performing in multiple traditionally male roles in a recent production of the Chernihiv Regional Youth Theater. With so many men serving in Ukraine’s armed forces to repel Russia’s invasion, the theater has adapted to the realities of war, and women are taking the spotlight.
“We were rehearsing Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ when suddenly our men were taken to the front,” said the theater’s 52-year-old director, Roman Pokrovskyi. “We only had the female part of the troupe left. So we thought, ‘Well, if men played women in Shakespeare’s times, why not give it a try?’”
The efforts of the theater in Chernihiv, the capital of a region that borders Russia and Belarus, reflect a broader reality in Ukraine where women are stepping into roles once dominated by men, sustaining not just their industries but the spirit of national resistance.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, four of the theater’s male actors and five stage workers have joined the army, leaving the troupe short-handed. Only two men still perform on the stage, and most stage work is done by women. But the troupe has reinvented itself by adapting its repertoire, transforming its space into a hub for art and wartime volunteer work, and casting women in most roles.
A new take on a storied pro-independence figure
An all-female cast is taking on “Hetman,” a play based on the life of Ivan Mazepa, a 17th century Cossack leader who defected from the Russian Empire’s army to side with King Charles XII of Sweden.
Mazepa’s role as the pro-independence leader, and the theme of Ukraine aligning with European states to resist Russian control, remain salient in Ukraine more than 300 years later.
Ostapko burst into tears when asked about her friends and colleagues fighting at the front.
“This is pain, the pain of the entire nation, our pain,” she said while preparing for a performance. “But our guys are doing well. We keep our fingers crossed for them. We help.”
The theater’s predominantly female actors and staff — including cloakroom attendants, cashiers, cleaners, and cafeteria workers — spend much of their time supporting Ukrainian soldiers, weaving camouflage nets in the theater before opening the doors to audiences at night.
The team also regularly raises funds to supply their deployed colleagues with necessary kit for the front lines. But some of those colleagues will never return to the stage.
“Our actor, Kostiantyn Slobodeniuk, went missing. Our sound operator, Dmytro Pohuliaylo, disappeared in the Pokrovsk direction at the end of 2024,” said Oleksii Bysh, 52, one of the theater’s few remaining male actors.
Standing by a photograph of one of his former colleagues, sound engineer Vyacheslav Shevtsov, Bysh describes how he was killed in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Russian region of Kursk last August.
