Eleven nights

For two weeks, the British will have an opportunity to get acquainted with the Ukrainian art. The lobby of the St. James Theater, located next door to Buckingham Palace, will host a photo exhibition portraying those who embody our culture today, from representatives of the high opera and ballet art to participants of ethnic festivals.

The project’s organizers will hold public screenings of Ukrainian films, which rank with the best in the world cinema. These are Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth and Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The screening will be followed by a creative evening of Larysa Kadochnykova, who was the protagonist in Parajanov’s film and is a leading actress of the Lesia Ukrainka National Theater which represents the performing arts of our nation in the London project.

“We are going to perform four plays during this tour,” artistic director of the Lesia Ukrainka Theater Mykhailo Reznikovych told us. “The centerpiece of our London program, though, is Ukrainka’s Don Juan. Of course, the British know the legend of the great sinner, retold by Tirso de Molina, Moliere, Pierre Corneille, Carlo Goldoni, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, George Gordon Byron, and a great many other classical authors. However, few people know that there is our, Ukrainian version of this story as well, which is not only equal of widely known interpretations in its artistic quality, but unique in its approaches as well.”

Whether the London audience will appreciate the Ukrainian Don Juan will become clear closer to the tour’s completion; meanwhile, British theater-goers and critics are sharing their impressions of Ward of the Manor show, based on Ivan Turgenev’s play. “You know, today I realized that I had become quite unused to the Slavic way of performing plays. It is very different from the British one, first of all in its scale and robustness. The show’s director Reznikovych said that their home stage in Kyiv was three times that of the St.    James, and it shows!” theater reviewer Daria Kanurbaeva shared her impressions. “British theaters generally have fairly small auditoriums, and artists are very restrained in the manifestation of emotions on stage, doing it all in the minimalist manner... Here, on the other hand, emotions overflow, the artists act with great excitement. In the case of today’s performance, it did not seem excessive or exaggerated; on the contrary, it looked very harmonious in the context of this drama school. We had many Anglophone viewers today, who watched the show while listening to simultaneous translation, and their reactions made clear that they liked what they saw. Classical performances are very popular with the London audience, because there is a shortage of them in the city. Against the background of modern interpretations and experiments which have swept British theaters, a theater like this feels like a breath of fresh air.”

“What did we expect from our encounter with the British audience? First of all, we looked for a mutual understanding, wanted to see the audience getting our subject matter and starting to empathize with the play’s characters. This is a prerequisite of success if we are talking about the psychological theater. Judging by the reaction of the audience, it seems that we have achieved it to some extent. It may be the greatest reward for all the participants of this show,” Reznikovych said during a press conference dealing with the project’s opening. In addition to Ward of the Manor and Don Juan, the next two weeks will see the Kyivites presenting plays My Mocking Happiness, based on letters of Anton Chekhov, and Life’s Little Nothings, based on his short stories. The entire program will take 11 theatrical nights to run its course.