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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Kyiv’s Young Theater Premiers ReKHUviLIYzor

16 November, 1999 - 00:00

The worst news possible in dramatic art is no news. Theatrical events have to be created. A new stage production at Kyiv’s Young Theater was obviously aimed at creating this kind of event: at least its elements indicated as much. To start with the title, both tongue-twisting and balancing on the brink of indecency for the Ukrainian ear: Rekhuviliyzor . Etymologically, the title is a hybrid of the titles Revizor (The Inspector General) by Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol to Ukrainians —Ed.) and Khuliy Khuryna by Mykola Kulish. Kulish’s Khuryna clearly follows the plot lines of Gogol’s famous masterpiece. But in this case, an early Soviet backwater is being troubled by a visiting crook whom local bureaucrats mistake for a Party boss. However, Kulish’s pseudo-correspondent Sosnovsky puts on the airs of a VIP quite deliberately, and, unlike the free- wheeling Khlestakov, he finally gets his comeuppance. One way or another, the stage producer Stanislav Moiseyev applied the technique he had already tested in the Ivan Franko Theater production of Let’s Drink and Go: the mixing of two closely-related plays in one show.

The importance of this production was also noticeable by the cast: virtually the whole troupe was involved in the premiere. All found their roles, especially in the Kulish component, so rich in crowd scenes. Incidentally, the Khuliy Khuryna fragments eventually prevailed over those of The Inspector-General, the latter having been radically changed in the Young Theater’s interpretation: the scene of Khlestakov’s boasting was completely excluded, while the visits of town officials to the phony inspector were emphasized as a key episode. The way the actors played clearly suggested the instruction for a farcical, comic, and taut action. The stage was from time to time crammed with crowd scenes. The commotion in a small town, caused by a search for the grave of fictitious revolutionary hero Khuliy Khuryna, was most likely to contrast, in the producer’s mind, with the misanthropic world of The Inspector General. However, the staged extravaganza smoothed out to some extent the differences: when all are full of a mad comic fervor, it is not easy to single out a certain individual.

Stanislav Boklan, as Kulish’s Yamka, was exactly good for his restraint and his character’s faintly abashed airs, which stood out, in the positive sense, against the general tumultuous background. Unexpected was the decision to cast Oleksiy Vertynsky, an older-generation actor, as Khlestakov, usually interpreted as a young worldly scamp. This resulted in a very strange elderly Khlestakov who, to crown it all, turns into a graveyard watchman in Khuryna and at the end into a three-headed monster which announces the arrival of a real inspector general. One regrets that the scene of Khlestakov’s ridiculous lying was removed from the play, for this actor would have done it brilliantly, and the scene would have been remembered better than, for example, the flirtation with Anna Andriyivna (Tamara Yatsenko) and Mariya Antonivna (Olena Uzliuk). Rekhuviliyzor does not end with the proverbial mute scene; rather, its carnival atmosphere assumes sinister apocalyptic features, as if everybody would die of shame.

No doubt, there was a major risk in mixing these two not-so-easy texts. To maintain balance, two distinguished outsiders were invited in: scenery manager Serhiy Masloboishchykov (his previous work at the Young Theater, Don Juan, got a prize at Kyiv’s Pectoral festival) and Olena Bohatyriova, in charge of costumes. By force of various circumstances, Masloboishchykov failed to fulfill his concept such that construction would allow the play to make a 90-degree turn and could have enabled the producer to apply the method of separation, so necessary for combining two different pieces. Alas, what remained of the idea was just a moveable lighting frame on the frontage, around which most of the set pivoted.

As to the work of Bohatyriova, we saw a happy coincidence of intention and fulfillment. It is the costume designer who managed to fully illustrate the play’s quaint plot. The bleak and absurd clothes worn by the characters of Gogol’s episodes are in total contrast to the flamboyant and fantastic attires of the Khuryna participants. The latter resembles the dream of a Red Army soldier gone mad, an attack of surrealists on a provincial Communist Party committee, or puerile hooligan antics. At a certain moment you begin to understand that Bohatyriova’s costumes have even set pace of the play’s action, and you expect a new hero to appear, wearing some new almost psychedelic costume. This may sound harsh, but the costumes save the show, imparting it an absurd integrity indispensable in such an odd fusion of two still odder plays.

A phrase comes to my mind from Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of a City: “a feast called pandemonium.” The pandemonium raised by humankind for so many years on all echelons of the former empire is a show far grander and all-dooming than any attempts to stage it. So is it too bad that the very attempts to do so also obey the insane laws of the same pandemonium?

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