The Theatre of Silence
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Rebuilding Mariupol’s Drama Theatre as an Act of Erasure
by Frazer Macdonald Hay, Uniform November
In March 2022, Russia bombed the Mariupol Drama Theatre, a building clearly labelled with the word “CHILDREN” (“ДЕТИ”) in enormous white letters visible from the sky. Hundreds of civilians were sheltering inside. According to investigations by the Associated Press, at least 600 people were killed. It was one of the deadliest single attacks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now, less than three years later, the Kremlin has announced that “restoration work” on the theatre is complete. The stage will reopen early next year, featuring productions of Russian and Soviet classics. Russian state media celebrates the project as part of Mariupol’s “revival.” Ukraine, however, sees it for what it is: an attempt to remake the ruins of a Ukrainian city into a Russian one.
Across Mariupol, this rewriting of place continues. City signs have been repainted red, white, and blue (the colours of the Russian flag). Streets and squares are being renamed, often reverting to Soviet-era titles. The Avenue of Peace has become Lenin Avenue once again. In 2024, the Russian-appointed city administrator, Oleg Morgun, declared it essential to “bring back historical names” and honour “heroes who gave their lives for the right to be Russian.”
In occupied Mariupol, Russian passports are now essential to access basic services, including compensation for destroyed homes. The Kremlin’s so-called “master plan” envisions a reborn, Russian Mariupol: the Azovstal steel plant, once a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, will become a technology and eco park; an airport is promised; and the population is to double by 2035, fuelled by new housing developments designed to attract Russian buyers.
But beneath the scaffolding and slogans lies a profound act of silencing.
As Amos Rapoport and Henk Driessen remind us, “The built environment provides cues for behaviour, meaning that architecture too is a means of nonverbal communication. Hence, because of its visibility and durability, architecture has often acquired a symbolism reflecting political, social and ideological aspects of society and, of course, takes prime position in all debates on inference or rank and status” (Rapoport, 1976; Driessen, 1995).
Russia’s “restoration” of Mariupol’s theatre, its architecture, its symbolism, its very name, is therefore not neutral. It is an act of communicative control: a visual language of occupation and ideological dominance. The theatre, once a civic refuge, is being re-scripted as a monument to Russian benevolence, an architectural performance of denial.
This reconstruction is also a reminder that war operates far beyond the battlefield. As Hirst observed, “War is not just technique, a clash of forces, the outcome of which is given by the capacity of the weapons on respective sides and decided by the resulting casualty lists. War is also symbolic, and symbols affect the capacity of soldiers and civilians to fight and to suffer. They also help them to understand war, both as conduct — to see models of bravery, competence and endurance — and in terms of placing themselves, knowing where they are and why” (Hirst, 2005: 191–192).
In Mariupol, this symbolic dimension of war is being extended into the peace that follows, a continuation of conquest through the manipulation of meaning and place.
The extreme nature of such violence, as Ignacio Martín-Baró and others have shown, fundamentally alters social meaning systems, relationships, and ways of life. “The habitual (normative) order of a society is overturned,” writes Humphrey (2002), “and social relations and meaning systems are profoundly altered.” In these contexts, “trust and a sense of connection between groups (normally a key part of well-being) are destroyed, and the concept of the negative ‘other’ emerges or hardens” (Beneduce et al., 2006; Williamson & Robinson, 2006; Staub, 2006).
In Mariupol, this is playing out spatially. Reconstruction has become a weapon in the struggle for meaning, belonging, and legitimacy. By rebuilding on top of silence, without recognition or mourning, the occupier imposes a new social order, one founded on fear and fragmentation rather than reconciliation.
When the theatre reopens, the audience will sit beneath a roof rebuilt over the memory of mass death. Performances will attempt to fill the void with culture, distraction, and nostalgia. Yet the silence beneath that stage will remain. The ghosts of the hundreds who died there — children, families, neighbours- will not have been mourned publicly, their trauma unacknowledged. When memories of violence are not recognised, they do not disappear; they linger, fester, and seep into the everyday fabric of life. Suppressed trauma always returns, often in violent or corrosive forms.
Mariupol’s reconstruction is not reconciliation. It is a theatre of denial, a stage set designed to obscure the truth of what happened. The Kremlin’s swift rewriting of place may serve its narrative in the short term, but in the long term, it creates deeper fractures. Architecture cannot simply erase violence. It absorbs it. And if that violence is not named, it will echo endlessly within the walls meant to contain it.
The Mariupol Drama Theatre stands now as both ruin and reconstruction, a building reanimated to perform someone else’s script. Its walls, once shelter, now stage a choreography of silence. In the language of architecture, reconstruction is often framed as renewal, but here it becomes a form of erasure: a deliberate reprogramming of space to overwrite memory and belonging. This is why place matters. Buildings remember. Their scars, layers, and absences hold truths that cannot be rebuilt out of existence. When those truths are denied, the architecture of recovery becomes an architecture of forgetting, a fragile façade masking the unresolved. Beneath its repainted surfaces, Mariupol’s theatre remains what it has become: a witness to unspoken violence, standing uneasily between memory and manipulation.
#ArchitectureOfMemory #TheatreOfSilence #CulturalErasure #PoliticsOfPlace #MemoryAndViolence #ReconstructionAndErasure #ArchitectureAsWitness #SpatialPolitics #OccupationAndIdentity
#Mariupol #UkraineWar #RussiaUkraine #WarCrimes #MemoryOfViolence #OccupiedCities #PostConflictReconstruction #CulturalOccupation
