In a studio theatre tucked into a courtyard behind Kyiv’s main Khreshchatyk Street, six playwrights and six directors were hammering out a fraught question: how to write plays about war, during the war.

One unexpected outcome of their workshops was: through jokes.

“In Ukraine, it’s very important for people to laugh about the war. It’s a way to survive,” said playwright Oksana Grytsenko after the final session in their week-long laboratory. “If you keep on crying every day, about every lost life, you cannot live.”

Three of the six drafts that writers brought to the group were comedies, said Grystenko. The plan was, at the end of the workshops, to give them staged readings in theatres in different parts of Ukraine, from Sumy in the north-east to Lviv in the west.

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