Lviv is getting ready for the Golden Lion

The International Theater Festival which is celebrating its 25th anniversary will be held under the slogan “East and west together!” Yaroslav Fedoryshyn, the founder and director of the festival, has told The Day about this. Thirty thousand people at the least are going to watch the plays, and half of the ticket sales will go to Ukrainian army.

The festival billboards announce plays from theaters from Germany, Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, and Poland. “These theaters are bringing to Ukraine their productions with an aim to support Ukrainian theater art and to be with us in this difficult time for Ukraine,” Fedoryshyn notes and pays special attention to the fact that in spite of the war Luhansk theater ensembles, “which created plays in basements and bomb-proof shelters,” will arrive in Lviv as well.

For the first time Germany at the forum will be represented by META Theater with the play Musicophilia. The admirers of art of Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Jozef Szajna will have an opportunity to meet with the successor of their ideas, an outstanding Polish artist, set designer, and director Leszek Madzik from the theater Scena Plastyczna KUL. Free Theater from Georgia plans to show the play A Clockwork Orange. The Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater will come from Kyiv to Golden Lion-2014 with the play Thistle Flower. Lviv theaters will traditionally present their plays at the festival.

However, there will be no carnival procession this year. On September 27 street play Dreams from Kobzar’s Life, a production of the Lviv Academic Theater “Voskresinnia” dedicated to the 200th anniversary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth, will open the festival. Voskresinnia will also show the family drama Locusts based on the play by Biljana Srbljanovic.