Actress from the DPR: “When I go to the theater, I understand that I will stay with my legs, I will still work”

At the acting song festival in Yekaterinburg, where young cheerful actors gathered, she stood out sharply in the crowd of prize seekers, but you can’t immediately tell what. She somehow especially looked, estimated, listened. And she looked different on stage when she sang. It felt like she knew more than anyone else. Actress Ekaterina Gulay from the Donetsk Youth Theater really knows more than her peers, because she lives in a different reality. What does it mean to live and work under incessant shelling, how to defend yourself and what to hope for, we talk with Katya after she finished her performance at the gala concert. The jury recognized her work.

– I was born in a small village, thirty kilometers from Makeevka, and now I live in Makeevka itself, on the border with Donetsk. This is the very shelled area – Kyiv and Gvardeysky, they are closest to Avdiivka. In the past, our theater was called the National Drama Theater, and performances were mostly in Ukrainian. But a Russian troupe always existed separately in it, which after the Great Patriotic War separated and moved to a separate building. And now it has been renamed the Youth Theater, and under the Ukrainian authorities we continued to work in Russian.

– What does the most shelled area mean? Every day, every hour arrives?

– Shooting constantly. If we talk about Donetsk and Makiivka as a whole, then these are incessant shelling. Now they are shooting here, and in a minute it will explode there.

“You talk about it so calmly because you are already used to living with such monstrous danger?”

– It feels like we live and play, probably, some kind of Russian roulette. But I can’t call us normal people from a purely mental point of view, because when you go to work in the morning (I don’t have a car, I ride a bus) through all the shelled areas, you understand that if you don’t arrive now, I get into theater for training. And if he arrives … Well, that means I won’t get in. If I stay with my legs, then it will still be possible to work.

Now we have practically no normal infrastructure in the city, there are small shops, there are no bank cards.

Is the connection working?

— There is a telephone connection. Our government is trying to do a lot to provide us with a more or less decent life. For example, in Donetsk and Makiivka there is no water, but we still get it every three days for a couple of hours. And this has been going on for a year now.

– What about drinking water?

– It is in stores, they bring it, but with technical complexity – there is simply nowhere to take it. Not only is the Seversky Donets-Donbass canal now located on the opposite side (in territory not controlled by the DPR. — M.R.), but even if it is ever recaptured, it will take a long time to restore it, as they say, five years.

Our theater is small, but there are five hundred seats in the hall, and there are 52 artists in the troupe. I have been working here for only two years, but before the start of hostilities I managed to play one or two children’s performances for the audience. And so my acting career began with tours: it turns out that I played all the big roles on the territory of the Russian Federation. In two years we have already traveled half the country.

In Moscow, on the stage of the RAMT, I played a one-man performance, and thank you for this opportunity – the theater is dying without an audience. We were well received everywhere, and especially in Moscow, at RAMT, because there is a wonderful director (Sofya Apfelbaum. – M.R.). When we entered the theater, we saw a poster, it was written by hand: “Welcome, we were waiting for you!”

– Are there only Russians in the troupe or are there Ukrainians? And what is your relationship like?

– Yes, we are all, in principle, partially Ukrainians. We play in Russian, we have no political differences. If in 2015 there were some other disputes, conflicts in the theater, in the city, even between relatives, now there is no such thing. Everyone is looking absolutely in one direction – at Russia, because there is no point in looking at Ukraine. All bridges are burned.

Are you receiving threats? Like that: we will return and settle scores with you?

– Directly not, but, I think, purely between people … In any case, there is such a thing in social networks. People are angry at what is happening in their country, they are not to blame that Kyiv and Kharkov are not sleeping peacefully. My sister lives in Kharkov, and we have a great relationship with her, but I understand how scared she was on the night of February 29, and how scared I was a week later.

Are there any victims among the cast and other theater workers?

– Many guys from the assembly shop and other technical services are fighting with us. The aristos have not been touched yet. And in other theaters, many artists were taken away, up to ballet dancers – from the drama, from the opera and ballet theater in Donetsk. In social networks they write that one died, another died, a musician …

The war itself directly affected me: my father died, he was killed … I had to grow up and at the age of fifteen think not about how wonderful it will be for me tomorrow, when I go to college, all roads are open to me, but just to survive.

– The scariest day of your life?

“I don’t think it was a really scary day, but I felt it that way. When I was fourteen years old and I was walking with my friends on the street, suddenly the shelling began. I remember these gaps and how I, a little one, run home in a panic. I run and understand that I don’t have keys, that my parents aren’t at home, and if I don’t climb somewhere now, then I’ll stay lying dead here. Then this began to be perceived differently, I got used to it.

I want to say that everything that is happening now between Russia and Ukraine was inevitable. When I was little, I didn’t understand much. But now, when you watch television recordings of speeches by the then current president of Ukraine and other politicians, they sound like a concrete genocide of Donbass, a genocide of the Donetsk people. Even then they said that “…your children will learn to live in basements, rot underground, while our children go to kindergarten, joyfully go to school, get an education.” And there were a lot of such statements that it is time to teach us all a lesson, Donbass is stunned and brazen. Therefore, now everyone is looking absolutely in one direction – at Russia.