WYWH: “The Reckoning: Summer Salad of War and Art” (London, UK)

July 7, 2025

The Reckoning Written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton Directed by Josephine Burton

By Juliette Groothaert and Jagna Schmude

 

Between 29 May and 28 June 2025, Arcola Theater in London served some food for thought – a play with multi-sensory components (smells and tastes included) as well as after-performance conversations with many UK-based writers, lawyers, thinkers grappling with the meaning and toll of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Reckoning is a bilingual, documentary-style drama which follows a Ukrainian journalist and her encounters with Ukrainian civilians bearing the losses and trauma resulting from the Russian invasion. The play offers a powerful alternative to traditional modes of understanding and documenting evidence, questioning the role history books and courts serve in ensuring collective remembrance.

Directed by Josephine Burton, Artistic Director and Chief Executive at Dash Art, and co-written with Ukranian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii for Dash Arts, The Reckoning presents a searing portrait of war drawn from first-hand testimony. Developed in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, a verified archive of witness testimonies documenting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the play transforms harrowing real-life accounts into an immersive theatrical experience. These testimonies, collected by grassroots investigative journalists collaborating with lawyers to build prosecutions for war crimes, form the heart of The Reckoning. While these accounts of lay persons with first hand experience of loss and injustices of war are being used to support legal action, on stage they serve a dual purpose: namely, to invite the audience to bear witness in the court of public opinion.

From the moment of entering the auditorium, the experience feels immediately immersive. Designed by Zoë Hurvitz, the set evokes the quiet intimacy of a Ukrainian home. Net curtains part to reveal a home marked by peeling floral wallpaper, embossed Soviet-style wall art, exposed brickwork, and a worn, patterned linoleum floor. Yet the structure is visibly damaged. A collapsed wall exposes its interior, belongings are strewn haphazardly across the stage floor, and the actors are already moving quietly through the wreckage to restore what has been broken. As the audience whispers and settles into their seats, a broader question hangs over the auditorium: how do we sit by, both literally and metaphorically, as our contemporaries, ordinary people, struggle to rebuild their lives?

The production starts with a recurring prompt: ‘Why don’t you start with when the war began for you?’ It is the line that opens many of the interviews conducted by the journalists behind the project, and it echoes throughout the four-person cast over the course of the 90-minute performance.

Actors Simeon Kylsyi/Danylo Shramenko and Olga Safronova, all evacuees from Ukraine, bring raw truth to the stage. They speak about their own evacuations, but then go further, taking on the words of other lives that have been shattered. Later on, they act as Russian soldiers, not as caricatures but unapologetically responsible human beings. There is no choreographed violence nor shallow dramatic posing; only a genuine portrayal of those caught in the machinery of war. Marianne Oldham, the actress who plays a reporting journalist, interprets dispatches related to her in Ukrainian, and Tom Godwin, playing a man from Stoyanka, a small war-torn village by Kyiv, prepares on stage a Ukrainian summer salad while conversing with a Ukrainian reporter about his trauma and survivor’s guilt. This interlaying of the common place/ domestic and the horrific becomes a muted but intense motif. The trestle table, the centerpiece of the home, is gradually reimagined- at one moment symbolsing warmth and ritual, and at another, morphing into a line of machine guns.

The production never shies away from brutal detail. One particularly chilling anecdote describes a woman who received a phone call from the number of her missing husband in February of 2022, only to be met with a stranger’s voice on the phone informing her that the phone had been found next to a body, wrapped in a tarpaulin. Yet even in its darkest moments, the play is dashed with flashes of dark humour, a human impulse toward resilience that refuses to be extinguished.

The sensory experience is full-bodied. During the interview scenes with the journalist, a summer salad, from a recipe from the Ukrainian London-based chef, Olia Hercules, is intermittently prepared on stage by the unnamed man from Stoyanka. This act, unhurried, unfolds alongside staggered testimonies performed around it. There is the aroma of fresh dill wafting through the air. The vibrant colours of the salad conjure up the suggestion of a summer promise and new life. There are jarring sound bursts, tactile shifts in atmosphere, and an emotional sincerity that never feels unconvincing. Certain scenes are offered entirely in Ukrainian, adding to the sense of dislocation and authenticity from the invasion. The minimal props and fluid transitions create a rhythm that does not seem contrived. The play closes as the fourth wall slips: the salad is shared among the audience in an intimate space of no more than 50 seats, and guest speakers are invited on stage for final reflections.

Each performance and tasting of The Reckoning, was followed by a brief conversation with a special guest, versed in the current events, laws governing sanctions, news coverage, culinary and cultural specificities of the region.

After the performance on June 23rd, Peter Pomerantsev, a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, shared his experiences in creating media content about Ukraine. As a son of Ukrainian immigrants exiled from their country to the UK, Pomeranstev returned to Kyiv in the second week of the war. Walking around almost a ghost-like city, the only people he encountered were journalists. Everything was shut, apart from a high-end patisserie, which was still working and preparing magnificent cakes. To him, The Reckoning came from “the desire to do more than just write”. He felt that simple recording of the events for the media was not enough. The vision of the play was to go beyond documentation.

Pomerants shared his experience that as a journalist, he worked with lawyers to take testimonies from Ukrainian civilians and build cases to prosecute for war crimes. Wanting to build on “this desire to do more” and “make the guilt productive”, he, with other journalists, entrusted the archive of collected testimonies to Dash Arts to spread the resistance further and create the play. During the post-performance discussione, he observed that “the war does not start when the invader comes, rather a war starts and becomes a war, and not just an occupation, when we resist.” The main people resisting the Russian invasion are the Ukrainian army and civilians. Yet, turning their testimonies into a UK play serves as a way of transferring political resistance into cultural memory. The play invites the audience to witness and thereby participate in their shared act of resistance. As we relive the experience of the Russian occupation together with the characters, we become part of this resistance as well.

Special guests on the 26th June were Lord Charlie Banner KC, a British barrister and member of the House of Lords (the UK’s upper chamber of Parliament, similar to the US Senate), and Tetyana Nesterchuck, the first Ukrainian barrister practicing in the UK. When they came on stage to offer some final thoughts, Tetyana began by recounting her own memories of the early stages of the war, which for her dated back to 2014. In May 2014, she travelled to Donetsk and witnessed first-hand the growing divide in the city. One moment in particular stood out; she was outside the city administration building playing with her one-year old niece when she saw a group of men in military uniforms and bulletproof vests gathering nearby. The symbolism of that image, a child at play against the backdrop of a militarised civilian space, marked a turning point. Shortly after she left, the Donetsk airport was bombed on May 26. What had once been a peaceful and familiar place by the river quickly became, as she described it, ‘the most dangerous place on earth.’ Her childhood village was reduced to ruins in a matter of weeks. Tetyana also paid tribute to a Ukrainian writer and friend, Victoria Amelina, who was among the first to report on war crimes committed during the conflict. Amelina died in June 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on Kramatorsk. Her work, ‘Looking at Women, Looking at War,’ earned her the Orwell Prize for Political Writing posthumously in June 2025. More on the book can be found here. Following Tetyana’s remarks, Charlie Banner KC highlighted one line from the play that stayed with him: ‘I’m here. I didn’t die.’ For him, it captured the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian people and the power of survival as an act of resistance. He also issued a warning; if the West allows Putin to succeed, he said ‘he will not stop there.’ The need for legal accountability and international solidarity is in his view ‘non-negotiable’.

The play has drawn enthusiastic praise for its powerful performances. Mark Lawson for The Guardian, rating the play four out of five stars, called the drama “shattering” and powerfully reflective of the horrific reality of the Russian invasion.^[1] The Stage, also giving the play four stars, notes that it is “powerful and important” in its artful construction of an indictment of war crimes in Ukraine.^[2] Scoring a five-star review in Theatre & Tonic^[3] and A Young(ish) Perspective^[4], the critics’ favourable review of the play highlights the need to amplify these stories and encourage everyone around us to watch it, thereby participating in collective resistance and remembrance.

Ultimately, The Reckoning makes clear that justice is not the sole domain of courts. By placing real testimonies into the hands of artists and in the minds of audience members, it extends accountability into the public realm, asking us, theater goers, to carry the weight of what we have just heard. The journalists who gathered these stories did more than document events. They also created a space for survivors to speak out without fear and for posterity. On stage, this trust is honored with care.

Art, and theatre in particular, offers something the law cannot provide so easily. Emotional proximity, human connection, and a place where memory becomes shared experience. Both can be theatrical, allowing for crafting narrative, but art does not only rely on carefully drafted arguments or verdicts but also on the simple act of sharing and including members of the public in the discourse, to listen to and be moved by real-life voices of the war. In so doing, theatre as court, makes testimony palpable, it opens a door not just to understanding, but to empathy too. The Reckoning disrupts us from our daily routines and leaves us squarely in someone else’s lived experience. And in that place between survival and storytelling, something like the promise of justice starts to emerge. As one line in the play reminds us, freedom is not shouted, but something done quietly, step by step.

For those interested in bringing a small taste of Ukraine home, the recipe used in the performance can be found below, for those interested in art archive documenting the injustices of this war, visit the Wartime Art Archive, and for those looking for court of justice, let’s train our eyes on the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (not the first and sadly not the last of its kind).

About the Authors:

Juliette Groothaert is a law student at the University of Bristol, graduating in 2025. She is interested in the evolving relationship between intellectual property law and artistic expression, which she hopes to explore further through an LLM next year. As a summer legal intern, she looks forward to contributing to research in this field while broadening her perspective through work on the Center’s Nazi-Looted Art Database.

Jagna Schmude is a third-year law student at the London School of Economics. She is passionate about the intersection of art and law, with particular interests in Nazi-looted art restitution, AI and copyright, and legal issues around fakes and forgeries in the art market. One of her favourite artists is Hilma af Klint, whose spiritual and abstract works continue to inspire her.

Additional Sources:

1. Mark Lawson, The Reckoning Review – Shattering Stories of Invasion in Ukraine, The Guardian (June 6, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/jun/06/the-reckoning-review-arcola-theatre-anastasiia-kosidii-josephine-burton. ↑
2. Dave Fargnoli, The Reckoning Review, The Stage (June 6, 2025), https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/the-reckoning-review-arcola-theatre. ↑
3. Emmie Newitt, The Reckoning at the Arcola Theatre Review, Theatre & Tonic (June 6, 2025), https://theatreandtonic.co.uk/blog/the-reckoning-at-the-arcola-theatre-review ↑
4. Ke Meng, Review: The Reckoning at Arcola Theatre, A Young(ish) Perspective (June 7, 2025), https://ayoungishperspective.co.uk/2025/06/07/review-the-reckoning-at-arcola-theatre/. ↑