On July 11 and 12, the premiere of the play UKRAINOMANIA took place in Lviv on the stage of the Zankovetska Theatre. This large-scale project, dedicated to the writer Joseph Roth, brought together a team from Germany, Austria, and Ukraine, and was an attempt to discuss war, Ukraine’s European roots, and art during wartime. We tell you how the play was created.
UKRAINOMANIA opens with a scene depicting a tour of Brody, a small town in the Lviv region. In 1894, in this town, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Joseph Roth was born – one of the most famous German-language writers in the world. The tour is led by a real guide, the director of the Brody Regional Museum, Vasyl Strilchuk. He tells the guests, played by actors Solomiya Kyrylova, Ihor Bilyts, Yelyzaveta Tsilyk, Stepan Hlova, and Oleksandra Bonkovska, about the “Bristol” hotel, which Roth described in his works; about Zolotaya Street, known for its jewelry stores that the writer liked to visit; about the gymnasium where he studied (now a monument to Roth stands here), and also about the cemetery where famous people are buried – for example, relatives of Sigmund Freud. “So Freud was also Ukrainian?” one of the tour guests aptly asks.
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This brief scene of the Brody tour is very telling: it’s about how little we know about ourselves and how little the world knows about us. It was precisely with the aim of reducing this distance three years ago that work began on the UKRAINOMANIA project, which united three countries, two theaters – the Vienna Volkstheater and the Lviv Zankovetska Theatre – and about a dozen caring individuals. The team is led by 44-year-old Jan Christoph Gockel, director of the Munich Kammerspiele, whose interest in Ukraine extends beyond reading the news. Jan first came to Ukraine in 2019 to visit friends, and in 2022, he “felt the need to speak in Germany about what is happening in Ukraine,” he admits when we meet in Lviv. This is his fifth trip to Lviv: he goes to shelters with Ukrainians, endures air raids, and, according to the play’s dramatist, Oksana Lemishka, “brilliantly navigates what is happening in Ukraine.” In 2023, Gockel staged Natalka Vorozhbyt’s play “Green Corridors” at the Munich Kammerspiele – a poignant and tragicomic story about Ukrainian refugees in Germany, created at the commission of the Munich theater. That same year, he visited Kyiv and traveled to the liberated towns of Bucha, Irpin, and Borodyanka. Afterward, deeply moved by what he saw, he wrote a long report on Ukrainian culture during the war for a German publication. “As an artist, I feel I want to be where the most important things are happening. The most important things are happening here now,” Jan says very simply.
In 2024, at the invitation of the artistic director of the Zankovetska Theatre, Maksym Holenko, and producer Alina Rashko, Jan came to Lviv. Ultimately, meetings with the theater team and Lviv residents inspired Jan to create a play specifically about Joseph Roth – an absolute star of German-language literature, author of novels such as “Hotel Savoy,” “The Rebellion,” and “Radetzky March,” repeatedly adapted for film, a veteran of World War I, and a brilliant reporter. The life of Roth, a charismatic artist and adventurer, played by German actor Bernardo Arias Porras, is worthy not just of a play, but a whole blockbuster. At 19, Roth, who didn’t know his father and whose mother died of cancer in 1922, left Brody, studied at Lviv and Vienna Universities, wrote for leading European publications, lived in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, was a “patron of hotels” because he was constantly on the move; married a woman who suffered from schizophrenia, fled the Nazi regime in 1933, which banned his books, had problems with alcohol and chaotic relationships with women, and eventually died in Paris in 1939 after a four-day binge. But there is another important reason why this play, the first version of which was shown in January 2026 on the stage of the Volkstheater in Vienna, is dedicated to Joseph Roth and is relevant today. In his novels and reports, Roth masterfully depicted the multicultural world of Galicia, and his work became a bridge between the cultural heritage of Lviv and Galicia and the intellectual environment of Vienna.
“Before coming to Roth, there was Lviv first,” the director says. “Two years ago, I came here to understand the city, the theater, Galicia. Only later did I learn that Joseph Roth lived here, was born on Ukrainian soil.” In 2024, Gockel presented a sketch at the Zankovetska Theatre titled “Who the Hell is Joseph Roth?”, which marked the beginning of the “Ukrainomania” project.
While working on the sketch, the director, along with actors and the team, traveled to Brody to explore the town. There, they met with those who could help understand Roth – for instance, literary critic and psychoanalyst Yurko Prokhasko, a translator and researcher of Roth. The meeting and the almost existential conversation between actor Bernardo Arias Porras, who plays Roth, and Prokhasko were filmed and shown in the play, and are crucial for understanding Roth’s personality: “Did I see a way out?..” the actor will ask Prokhasko. “No, exits are not inherent to you,” says the writer. “Neither from war, nor from love.”
“When I was in Brody and Lviv, what touched me most was how Ukrainians connect Roth’s biography with the current situation,” says Jan. “Roth lived during times of great change. He was a refugee. He was a soldier, a veteran, an artist persecuted by fascists. He fled from Berlin, from Vienna, found refuge in Paris. Ultimately, he was fleeing his entire life, and I think this makes him an ideal hero for today.”
Actress Solomiya Kyrylova, who plays the role of a “Shakespearean gravedigger” in the play, who, along with her partner (Ihor Bilyts), tries to bury Roth (unsuccessfully), as well as several other colorful characters, shares that during the casting in Lviv, the German director was looking not for actors, but for “characters.” “The casting began with questions about why theater is needed during wartime,” Solomiya recalls. “We talked about war, about art, about the personal.” The actress remembers meeting Jan when she was pregnant, the first sketch of the play in Lviv was staged when her son was only two months old, and she went to rehearsals in Vienna (Kyrylova is the only Ukrainian actress performing in both Vienna and Lviv) when her son was just one year old – and says that “the creative process was alive and fundamental.”
Why is the project called “Ukrainomania”? It’s the title of an essay by Roth, published in 1926 – an ironic and attentive observation by the writer on how, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Ukrainian question suddenly found itself at the center of European politics and intellectual discussions. Roth described a wave of fashion for Ukraine and Ukrainian things, particularly in Berlin, after Ukraine briefly gained its independence.
In the play, stories from Roth’s life – about his travels, parties, relationships with women, authorities (monarchists, socialists), and religion – are combined with the personal stories of the actors about contemporary Ukraine, which intertwines with Roth’s personal history. For example, while performing the play in Vienna, actress Solomiya Kyrylova tells a story about how she survived the shelling of Lviv when her house was damaged. In the Lviv version of “Ukrainomania,” Solomiya recalls her stay in Berlin on a residency in 2022. “I wanted to have a reminder of Ukraine with me, so I put a small flag sticker under my phone case. On the subway, when people saw it, they reacted ambiguously; some even moved away. Then I decided to be more forward-thinking and approach it indirectly – and put small printed photos of Olha Kobylianska and Lesia Ukrainka there,” the actress says from the stage. The reaction to the photos was completely different: Germans approached Solomiya and curiously asked who these beautiful women were, if they were her relatives? “They are relatives of all Ukrainians,” Kyrylova replied. The actress says it’s symbolic that 100 years after Roth, who lived in Berlin at the time, wrote his “Ukrainomania,” she experienced similar attention in Berlin.
“When Jan creates a play, he manages to make the audience cry, laugh, and then think,” says dramatist Oksana Lemishka, who worked on the script with German playwrights Klaus Philipp and Tobias Schuster. “In ‘Ukrainomania,’ he shows the absurdity of war, but also the possibility of overcoming it. Ultimately, it’s a play about the search for strength and light.”
In the new season, the play UKRAINOMANIA will be shown in two cities – Vienna and Lviv. And if one of the project’s main goals in the European context is to show Ukraine through Joseph Roth as a country of European values, modern, artistic, and free, then defining the place of this play in Ukraine is a much more challenging task. “I wanted to find words and images through which one can speak about difficult times,” says the director – and this is undoubtedly a search that is still ongoing.