Kherson hosts ninth annual theater festival

The international festival Melpomene of Tavria was initiated by Oleksandr Knyha, the managing and artistic director of the Kherson Kulish Music and Drama Theater. All the undertakings and plans as well as their implementation at the festival are his brainchild.

This year the festival hosted 20 theaters from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Moldova, as well as three amateur companies from Kherson and Kakhivka. The festival is a competitive one and features a reputable jury headed by Rostyslav Kolomiiets, a corresponding member of Ukraine’s Academy of Arts. Even though the competitive element is a serious driving force in this creative endeavor, it is not the main concern. The goal of the festival is to hold an artistic holiday in the city.

The theatrical holiday not only filled the stages of Kherson’s two theaters — the Kulish Theater and the Puppet Theater — it also spilled onto the main streets, where it took the form of a boisterous artistic carnival procession accompanied by an orchestra. It cleverly took over the open-air stage outside the theater, where various artistic companies staged performances for eight days. Finally, it enriched the festival with exhibitions, excursions, and unofficial meetings with visiting actors and directors.

The leading play of the festival was Vovky ta vivtsi (Wolves and Sheep), a theatrical fantasy based on Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s plays and staged by the Kulish Theater. Several plots taken from Ostrovsky’s most brilliant plays were woven together into a monumental theatrical fabric by the director Oleh Mishukov and painter Viktor Balash. From the very beginning the director unraveled several plots concurrently, uniting them with the common theme of “money” and masterfully tying them back together into a single knot at the end. Stage decorations accentuated the theme: several curtains separating the room on stage took the form of huge banknotes from 1898.

The cynicism of Ostrovsky’s times is equally relevant in our day. This is what the play is about-society’s unchanging nature. One part of humankind-wolves-eats its fellow creatures, whereas the other part-sheep-allows itself to be devoured. Many a contemporary can repeat without hesitation the reference that one of Ostrovsky’s characters makes to money: “To me, you come second after God.”

The play was a collection of the actor’s successful performances. All of them offered vibrant, emotion-filled, and spirited interpretations. The deeply psychological play, naturally intertwined with a light vaudeville manner, yielded multifaceted and meaningful characters. The charming and powerful Olena Hall-Savalsky played the role of the merchant Murzavetsky’s wife. Vasyl Chernoshkir enriched his artistic palette by imbuing the character of the eternal bachelor Lyniaev with the naivete and vulnerability of Chekhov’s characters.

Equally sympathetic was the gullible heroine Kupavina, played by Valentyna Dronova, who readily makes herself a victim of the hypocritical “wolf” Berkutov (Oleh Natiazhny). Amidst a whirl of metamorphoses Glafira Alekseevna (played by Svitlana Dobrovolska) deftly attains her goals. Grotesque motifs come to the fore in the characters of Anfisa Tykhonovna and Appolon Murzavetsky. With their vivid and resourceful acting within the bounds of their invented characters, Henrietta Ptashnyk and Oleksandr Miroshnyk turned their every appearance on stage into a separate mini-play.

Enchantress, which was based on the original play Beztalanna (The Fortuneless Maiden) and staged by the Mykolaiv Ukrainian Drama and Musical Comedy Theater, won three awards: for directorial work (Andrii Bilous, Kyiv), set design (Borys Orlov, Kyiv), and musical arrangement (Oleksandr Kurii, Kyiv). The director develops the plot about the eternal love triangle as a parable on the passions of nearly age-old proportions. The stage is stripped of the petty details of everyday life; its space is delimited by a mere quadrangle made of logs with a stylized well in the middle. The well is a source of clear water taken both in its literal and figurative sense. At first, this outline of the quadrangle lies on the floor as the foundation wall of a house under construction-or, figuratively, someone’s life in the early stages. When it is raised higher, it becomes the ceiling of this house. In the second act it goes up so high as to appear very small, representing “the sky as big as a poppy seed.” The well becomes polluted and its bottom is no longer visible. These visual images maintain the psychological suspense created by the love mixed with hatred that flows between Hnat (Andrii Mostrenko), Varka (Olena Konovalova), who destroyed his life, and Sofia (Maryna Diachenko), whom he ruined by his passion. The function of the village folk in the play is reminiscent of a chorus in ancient Greek drama: they comment and evaluate events with pagan, primordial passions rising and the mass of people bustling. All this is executed with a great deal of plasticity (choreography by Oleksandr Leonenko).

Charivnytsia, staged by a young director, was successful in conveying the sense of contemporary stage language. A deliberate departure from traditionalism and run-of-the-mill stereotypes in interpreting classical Ukrainian drama, as well as their replacement by a fresh motif in the depiction of complex human relationships made the play especially interesting for young viewers.

The Best Female Actress award went to the well-known Kyiv actor Larysa Kadyrova for the play Sara Bernar. Usuperech usiomu (Sarah Bernhardt, Despite Everything). In this hour-long play designed as a monologue the actor managed to reveal the life of the great Sarah Bernhardt using only the force of emotions and convincing intonations, as she had to curb her movements (she sat motionless in a chair, like Sarah). Sharing memories of her eventful life, Sarah expressed an undertone of content-despite everything, she had done and played so much! The confined space of her current dwelling place expanded to the bounds of the universe. Her life became convincing proof of the statement that “an actor is a concise chronicle of time.”

The Best Actor award went to Volodymyr Orel, a Ukrainian actor now playing in the Tiumen Drama Theater, for his role as Davis in Harold Pinter’s tragicomedy The Caretaker. The actor succeeded in divining the essence of the absurdity in Pinter’s complicated plot. That is why the generalizations that describe how people’s relationships are constructed were so convincingly and masterfully played by the three actors.

The Wyspianski Theater from Katowice (Poland) brought a play that is very popular today — Oscar and the Lady in Pink by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. This is a heart- wrenching story of a 10-year-old boy who is dying of cancer and a nurse who is helping him live out his last days-and it does not leave a single viewer indifferent. The apparent narrowness of the topic was conveyed by the actors with maximum sincerity, which made it grow to the dimensions of philosophical generalizations, harmonizing the eternal dilemma of life and death. This play received a diploma for Best Pairing and the Best Play award from an independent journalists’ jury.

Brilliant national color permeated the mystery play Hutsulskyi rik (Hutsul Year) written by Hnat Khotkevych and staged by the Kolomyia Ukrainian Drama Theater. The play is constructed as a parable about the changing seasons, which are projected onto stages in a person’s life. The emphasis is placed on man as a part of nature, who has to relate to nature and strive for harmony with it. The actors recreate pagan, primordial religious rites conveying genuine authenticity supported by national symbols and real elements of people’s culture. Ordinary events in people’s lives — marriage ceremonies, deaths, and expressions of love, hatred, and jealousy coexist with true ethnography in a space created by stage decorations, and are viewed as distinct rituals and definite codes of the nation’s existence.

It has become a fine tradition in Kherson to see the Academy of Movement Theater of Musical and Plastic Arts from Kryvyi Rih. This company always brings new productions to the festival. This time the theater presented its trademark style-the emotional and imagery-filled plastic fabric of Kamianyi Khrest (Stone Cross) based on the short stories of Vasyl Stefanyk.

The performance by the Lehenda Choir Theater of the Luhansk Philharmonic Society was a little outside the mainstream of the festival. Its musical play, My tvoi, Ukraino, kozaky (We are Your Cossacks, Ukraine) consisted of well-known folk songs that were performed and choreographically supported so as to recount the brief history of Ukraine. However, for the sheer force of vocal execution and fiery choreography this performance was on par with a good drama. Vibrant and skillful musical compositions are capable of evoking feelings of pride both for a nation that has this level of art and culture and for actors, who are able to convey their essence to the audience and demonstrate artistic prowess of the highest caliber.