Flirting with Scholarship

On May 27 the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater will premiere Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Natalka Poltavka.

Last year the company’s artistic director Bohdan Stupka suggested the idea to stage the show to stage director Oleksandr Anurov. “I was skeptical about it at first,” says Oleksandr Anurov, “but then it looked rather interesting. I immediately thought that Oleh Skrypka, leader of the rock group VV, could create a romance-style adaptation of the music from Mykola Lysenko’s same-titled opera. The rock musician knows a lot about folklore and has a keen feeling for Ukrainian culture. He is also a member of the cast; he plays the role of Vyborny... He got the role later. He is too young for Vozny and too old for Petro. In the script Vozny performs the most colorful music numbers.” Oleh’s partner is actor Volodymyr Nikolayenko. The other cast members are Petro Panchuk (Vozny); Bohdan Stupka was also supposed to play this part, but he is on sick leave; Natalia Yaroshenko and Tetiana Mukhina (Natalka); Larysa Rusnak and Oksana Batko (Terpelykha); Oleksandr Furmanchuk and Taras Zharko (Mykola); Dmytro Chernov and Pavlo Piskun (Petro).

Since there are only a few days left before the premiere; the daily rehearsals are 8 hours long. Oleh Skrypka invited The Day to attend a rehearsal, when the cast was working on Act 1.

The stage setting recreates the atmosphere of a village in the Poltava region in the first half of the 19th century: a pretty house with a thatched roof and wicker fence, a drinking well by the road (production designer: Andriy Aleksandrovych). Petro, Natalka, and Terpelykha wear costumes typical of the region. The stage director said that the costumes were only for rehearsals, but they looked very much like those the cast will be wearing during the premiere. Almost all actors will be dressed in authentic 19th-century garments and only several costumes will be custom-made, using old samples. As soon as we arrived, Oleksandr Anurov pointed to the revamped image of the Terpelykha character. Traditionally, this character is portrayed as a middle-aged, full-bodied village woman trying to talk her daughter into marrying a man she doesn’t love. What we saw was a refined middle-aged lady who had once lived in Poltava, but had to move to the countryside after becoming impoverished. Her advice to her daughter is sensible: what mother wants her daughter to be poor?

Vozny looks natural, although Oleh Skrypka admitted that he felt very nervous before the premiere. However, performing and cracking jokes is his forte. He performed two songs for which he arranged the accompaniment: Did rudy, baba ruda (Red-haired Granddad and Granny), which sounded even livelier than the traditional version, and Kozhnomu horodu nrav i prava (Each City Has Its Ways and Rights).

“I wanted to keep as close as possible to Ivan Kotliarevsky’s original text,” says Oleksandr Anurov, “because this play has been staged countless times and a certain tradition had developed. All these clichйs conceal the original work’s wisdom and easy understanding. I deliberately removed all the social and class layers. I was interested in the characters. Vozny and Vyborny are smart alecks and birds of a feather. Natalka and Vozny are in love, but not with each other. Terpelykha, Vozny, Natalka, and Petro experience joys and sorrows, they flirt with each other...There is a very delicate boundary between sentiments laid bare and vulgarity. Oleh brought some ethnographer friends and they told us about how Ukrainians flirted, how village maidens and young ladies behaved. For example, a girl would never cross her legs in public. Well, we want our production to reflect this kind of refined approach.”