Against the persistent rumble of distant conflict and the ever-present threat of Russian air strikes, Kyiv is preparing to stage a radical, deeply personal reimagining of Homer’s ancient *Odyssey* that weaves Ukraine’s ongoing wartime struggle into the 3,000-year-old epic. Titled *Odysseus, Maeotis*, the new production hits the stage of Kyiv’s Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater at a moment when Homer’s classic is already enjoying a global cultural spotlight, buoyed by Christopher Nolan’s big-budget IMAX blockbuster *The Odyssey* starring Matt Damon, a box office hit that has introduced the ancient tale to new international audiences.
Unlike Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation, however, this Ukrainian production draws its raw material directly from the front lines of the ongoing war. Its cast blends professional performers with active-duty Ukrainian soldiers, with the lead role of Odysseus, the warrior king desperate to return home after a decade of conflict, played by Daniil Mireshkin, a serving member of Ukraine’s 1st Corps Azov. For Mireshkin, the fusion of ancient myth and modern Ukrainian reality creates unflinching, vital parallels to the issues defining his country today.
“This combination of myth and modernity allows us to draw parallels and understand just how critical the question of return is: the return of military personnel to civilian life, the return of our territories and the return of ourselves to our true identity as Ukrainians,” Mireshkin explained in an interview with the Associated Press following a final rehearsal Tuesday. The play’s premiere has already been pushed back multiple times, delayed by successive waves of Russian attacks on Kyiv – a disruption that itself mirrors the endless, uncertain waiting the story explores.
“This story helps us talk about these topics, which, as it turns out, haven’t lost any of their relevance,” Mireshkin added.
The production strips Homer’s original text to its core narrative bones, retaining only the central arc of Odysseus’s long, punishing journey home and his wife Penelope’s equally grueling wait in Ithaca. Director Ivan Uryvskyi said the play was written entirely from scratch, reworking the epic’s timeless themes of return, exile and captivity to fit Ukraine’s current reality.
“Of course, very little of Homer’s original text remains here, because the play was written from scratch. We simply took the core narrative arc — Odysseus’ return home,” Uryvskyi said.
Even the play’s title carries layered modern meaning: Maeotis is the ancient Greek name for the Sea of Azov, the body of water off Ukraine’s southern coast that was once considered the edge of the known ancient world. The Sea of Azov is home to Mariupol, the devastated port city that fell to Russian forces after a devastating 2022 siege, and the production draws heavily on firsthand accounts from Azov brigade defenders who held the city. Today, around 600 Azov brigade servicemen remain held as prisoners of war in Russian captivity, out of thousands of Ukrainian captives.
Playwright Oleksii Dorychevskyi, also a member of 1st Corps Azov, spent a year conducting interviews with former Ukrainian prisoners of war to build the play’s narrative. For Daryna Leheida, the professional actress who plays Penelope, Odysseus’s faithful wife, the ancient queen’s decades-long wait for her husband mirrors the lived experience of millions of Ukrainian women today.
“It’s about the fate of Ukrainian women who wait, believe and hope, but who can also feel powerless, hopeless and stripped of faith,” Leheida said. Beyond the fates of individual soldiers and their families, the story extends to the land itself: “It’s about the temporarily occupied land waiting to come back home. It’s about the children and people who are waiting, what we face during this waiting and the toll that war takes on us.”
The staging reflects the bleak uncertainty of wartime Ukraine, with a deliberately austere, unsettling design. Against a darkened set accented by glowing neon light bars, projections are cast directly onto the performers’ bodies. Homer’s iconic mythical monsters – the one-eyed Cyclops, the deadly enchanting sirens – have been replaced by modern symbols of war: buzzing drones that glide across the stage and scale models of robotic killing machines, turning ancient dangers into the threats that Ukrainians face every day.