Deported children Real, raw stories of Ukraine's agony told in new play

In a small, underground theatre in central Kyiv, an audience is watching - at times with perfectly still attention, at times with roars of laughter - a story that is so raw and painful that it is hard to believe it has already found its way on to the stage.

- Charlotte Higgins Kyiv

I Will Return, by the playwright Oksana Grytsenko, is a drama about three children from Ukraine who find themselves stranded, unable to return home, in a summer camp in illegally occupied Crimea.

The story is a snapshot of an ongoing national trauma. Official statistics suggest that nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly taken from occupied parts of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion and deported to Russia itself or to areas such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Only a trickle of a few hundred have come home, when parents or guardians, often helped by the charity Save Ukraine, have located them and made the perilous journey to collect them. Some have had their names changed and been put up for adoption.

The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the alleged unlawful deportation of children.

Grytsenko based her play on detailed interviews with six teenagers who were taken illegally to Crimea ostensibly to protect them from the dangers of war, and then stranded there as parents and guardians struggled to reach them and produce the correct documents to bring them home.

She merged characters to protect her interviewees' privacy, taking care to stay as true to the real situation as possible.