Last weekend the Dakh Modern Art Center offered its production of Bernard-Marie Coltes’ criminal drama “Roberto Zukko”, a blood-curdling thriller about a serial murderer, one of the best European plays of the past decade. The author, a marginal intellectual rebel, died of AIDS in Paris nine years ago as an idol of modern Western theater.
The appearance of Coltes on Ukrainian billboards is an extraordinary fact. Even though belatedly, Ukrainian actors became interested in a truly outstanding drama requiring nonstandard creative approaches. True, the author became famous in Europe only after his death and did not live to see his best work on stage. “Roberto Zukko” sums up everything that worried nonconformist Coltes in his society. Having experienced Marxist, narcotic, and homosexual addictions, he knew the gutter life of the city. To him violence is not only a symptom of social madness but also a way to cleanse the world of evil and hypocrisy. Coltes stumbled onto Zukko reading newspaper police columns the way Dostoyevsky (his idol) found his Raskolnikov. Unlike the prototype, his hero murders people for no obvious reasons and, unlike Raskolnikov, never repents. He is a blind tool of supreme punishment, pouncing on the world, sparing neither children nor their elders.
Dakh’s interpretation could be described as simplified. Volodymyr Ohloblin, master of the realistic school of social criticism, Ihor Leshchenko, nihilistic production designer, and a young amateur cast combined efforts to produce an impassioned publicist drama where the main emphasis is on the action rather than a given episode’s hidden meaning.
Of course, the new production is at a student, not professional level; often lack of professionalism is not made up for by actors’ diligent work, but they put their heart in the job. Moreover, “Roberto Zukko” is a very serious play, not one of those frivolous French vaudevilles that have become so popular with the Ukrainian public.
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