Lesia Ukrainka Drama Theater’s “Amarcord”

On Dec. 1-3, the Lesia Ukrainka Russian Drama Theater (Kyiv) held a soiree commemorating the 80 th anniversary of this celebrated company. The festive evening, entitled Skvoz gody (Rus. “Throughout the Years”), featured actors of various generations, who are still members of the cast. The following interview with the theater’s director general and artistic director, Mykhailo Reznykovych, is about the company’s future celebrations, and past and present realities.

JUBILEE

“The Lesia Ukrainka Theater is my first love,” Reznykovych confessed. “I started working for the Russian drama company 43 years ago. I was overwhelmed by its strikingly humane, friendly, and creative attitude to the younger generation. At the time the company was joined by a group of actors, who were warmly welcomed by such celebrated actors as Yuri Lavrov, Yevhenia Opalova, and Viktor Khalatov. Their friendly attitude to their younger colleagues was a lesson that has served me all my life. You know, I wish today’s stars treated young actors this way.

“This jubilee of our company is an Amarcord for me: bitter-sweet memories. They are sweet because it was a wonderful period, and bitter because all my teachers are no longer alive. This jubilee is both sad and happy. In ‘Throughout the Years’ we tried to remember those who are no longer with us. We want the whole troupe to come out on stage, to create humor, make jokes. This will be a play consisting of short stories, one merging into the next. You know, within its walls the Lesia Ukrainka Theater has always helped people with talent, those who want to perform on this famous stage, and this jubilee is an occasion to bring back good memories and to figure out the company’s prospects.”

EXPERIMENTING

This year the Russian drama company started the season with a number of small-stage experimental productions. For example, the Romeo and Juliet cast spoke in German and Russian. Vasyl Stus’s Idu za krai was in Ukrainian. The company’s latest production, Don Quixote, 1938, which incorporates characters from Cervantes and Bulgakov, was a notable success.

M.R.: All our premieres were planned a year and a half ago. That was a difficult period for our company; we were having an all-out confrontation with the Ministry of Culture. Despite numerous inspections, strident declarations, court hearings, and other nerve- wracking methods, we kept the rehearsals going. I’m glad that the plays were staged. For example, we performed Romeo and Juliet to packed houses eight times in Kyiv and Munich. We are happy that we have been invited to stage this play in Basel (Switzerland) in February 2007, and then in September in Edmonton, Canada, which has a large Ukrainian community. So we have decided to stage the play in Ukrainian.

Our Romeo and Juliet represents an emotional merger of domestic and German actors, different languages, and drama cultures. This is the most interesting thing about the play. The German part of the cast is made up of drama critics, future playwrights, heads of drama companies’ script departments, rather than professional actors. In Germany, artistic directors of drama companies know only too well that students have to master acting techniques, so that after graduating from higher schools they will be able to write about the theater without blunders and poor taste — something we find in certain articles written by some of our graduating theater specialists, who very often do not understand the very nature of acting.

The idea of staging Idu za krai, a story about Vasyl Stus, his life and destiny, belongs to Roman Semysal, one of our actors. We decided to support it and the idea that the play should be in Ukrainian. While working on this production, I faced a major problem. Pasternak addressed it when he wrote: “All my life I have fought against baseness; various kinds of baseness.” I think Stus would have said something like this. The play raises the problem of combating a yes-man attitude. This problem remains topical. You can be Orange today and Blue-White tomorrow, then another color the day after. This kind of attitude must not be tolerated. The play broaches the important theme of conscience. This is the first Ukrainian-language production on our stage in the company’s 80 years. The effect on the audience is as though they are hearing Stus’s voice, although the play features documents voiced in the language of the original: Ukrainian and Russian.

I would like to stress that our Romeo and Juliet and Idu za krai are generally aimed at proving simple truths. It doesn’t matter what language one speaks; what really matters is the kind of statements one makes. Do I want to understand you or not? You can talk a lot about joining the European home and not do anything. But Romeo and Juliet and Idu za krai are steps actually being taken in this direction, an attempt to return to that Tower of Babel that people could not build because they began quarreling, and the Lord punished them and said that from now on they would speak different languages. Our plays signify the return to one language, the language of the theater.

GOVERNMENT

The idea for Don Quixote, 1938 was conceived a year and a half ago, but the premiere was held only now. Bulgakov’s play was never a success. We decided to stage it in response to the Spanish Embassy’s request. If not for David Borovsky, the production designer, we would have never staged it. We created the plot and settings together; we did our best to make the production interesting. I kept flying back and forth from Kyiv to Borovsky’s place all of last October (at the time I was denied exit and entry visas; I was outlawed, and I was paying for all the flights out of my own pocket). You know, the problem of the individual versus the government has existed in all times. We combined Bulgakov’s play and Cervantes’s novel in our plot. Dzhivelegov, an excellent specialist on Italian and Spanish dramaturgy, wrote that Don Quixote’s two concluding acts are Bulgakov’s spiritual testament. This is what determined our starting point in working on the play. Our production unites three epochs. Don Quixote, 1938 is a multilayered and multiphase play. While working on it, we discovered something very interesting. Cervantes and Bulgakov had much in common: both of them had had a similar life and experienced problems as well as tragedies. Our production is permeated with what we believe is a very simple idea. Once you part with your dream, or when you are forced to part with it, even to destroy it within yourself, this dream ceases to exist. Man cannot live without a spiritual and pure dream. When the dream goes, so does life.

PREMIERES

Sometime in late December we will invite theatergoers to attend our premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Hasn’t this play already been part of your company’s repertoire?

M.R.: I staged it in 1975. It has been performed 300 times, and it has always enjoyed great success, even though before the premiere the theater management, after watching the dress rehearsal, decided that it would be a total fiasco. Those bureaucrats were wrong. The play was a great success with audiences and critics. The cast included stars like Rohovtseva, Kadochnikova, Shvidler, Baturina, and Smoliarova. This time we decided to create a new production using the old sets and wardrobe, but a different director (Iryna Barkovska) will stage it with different actors. This play by Oscar Wilde is very difficult to stage. Practically no one could do it during the last 50 years of the former Soviet Union. We did it at the Lesia Ukrainka Theater. We unraveled one mystery, the nature of feelings, which is very difficult to convey on stage. Now the problem is whether the younger cast, people of a different generation, will be able to convey these feelings.

I believe that what makes our drama company unique is that it has preserved the spirit, the living idea of the psychological theater, throughout the years of its existence. Something like Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel could be written about any great drama company. The Lesia Ukrainka Russian Drama Theater is waiting its turn.