Throughout a distinguished career spanning more than four decades, Makaryk has returned repeatedly to a central question: what purpose do the performing arts serve in times of upheaval such as war, revolution, censorship, exile or other extreme circumstances? “I want to see what the arts do for people in such challenging situations,” she says. Her work explores how theatre endures, how it creates community, sustains morale and offers something spiritual and transformative when life’s meaning seems tenuous.
Inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2025, Makaryk has a fascination with theatre under pressure that’s deeply personal. Born into a Ukrainian family that fled both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in 1943, she grew up with stories of displacement and survival.
In postwar Munich, the streets filled with rubble, a landlady lent her mother, then a pharmacology student, clothes and shoes so she could attend the theatre. For Makaryk, this story crystallizes the magic of performance: stepping out of a harsh reality into a world of beauty and imagination.
That belief has shaped a lifetime of scholarship on Shakespeare as a cultural mediator—an artist whose plays become tools of resistance, unity and reflection. “Theatre,” Makaryk says, “is inherently political because it is created by, for and with people.” It is therefore also one of the most censored art forms in history.
Yet, precisely for this reason, Shakespeare is repeatedly invoked in wartime. His plays grapple with leadership, betrayal, love, gender and moral ambiguity, complexities that mirror the chaos of conflict. It’s no accident, Makaryk notes, that Hamlet was staged in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1943, or that Shakespeare continues to be cited today. “It’s all there, it’s in Shakespeare,” as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
“I want to see what the arts do for people in such challenging situations”
Professor Irene (Irena) Makaryk
Makaryk’s research covers Shakespeare in Ukraine, the Soviet Union, Canada, Afghanistan and the Arctic. She was the first scholar to demonstrate the centrality of Shakespeare to Ukraine and her groundbreaking Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn was the first English-language book to bring to the world’s attention the achievements of Les Kurbas, who directed some of the most remarkable experimental productions of the Soviet period. Executed on Stalin’s orders, Kurbas developed prohibited zones of inquiry. His legacy was unknown to anglophone scholars and even to most Ukrainians until Makaryk’s book was published.
Makaryk’s work on Shakespeare in Kabul examines a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost staged just after the Taliban were briefly pushed out in 2005. Women performed publicly for the first time in decades, often at enormous personal cost—threats, violence, death. Through interviews and archival research, Makaryk documents how theatre spurred courage, community and reclamation in a society where performance had long been banned.
Makaryk’ most recent book turns to the Arctic, focusing on 19th-century exploration ships, including those searching for Sir John Franklin. Crews organized glees, bands, masquerades, farces, comedies and Shakespeare plays—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus—sewing costumes, painting backdrops, printing playbills and performing to survive months of darkness and isolation. These acts of creativity built morale, forged bonds and left behind remarkable archives of posters, diaries and scripts. For Makaryk, these performances were not distractions from survival—they were survival.
Whether analyzing the influence of Shakespeare in Afghanistan, Ukraine or the Arctic, Makaryk reminds us that in the bleakest conditions, the arts endure—because people need them to imagine, resist and remain human.
“What do I love best?” Makaryk asks. “Researching.” Drawn to gaps and omissions, she disappears into archives to uncover what others have overlooked.
Will she continue? “Absolutely—it’s my life.”