Talking About Life
The season has just begun, but the Ivan Franko drama company appears already with a second premiere, Hryhory Skovoroda’s ABC of the World, with five travelers pondering true happiness. It is a friendly conversation about peace of mind.
Director Oleksandr Anurov tried to produce something that cannot be adapted to the stage in principle. No plot to hold the audience in suspense, no action in its traditional meaning — just talk, the lines interspersed by parables and philosophic treatises about the sense of existence. What is power, piety, the tree of life, happiness, things beautiful and horrible, friendship and enmity? Where is one to find the truth? Answers to these vexing questions are sought by the philosopher Hryhory (Petro Panchuk), the carpenter brothers Afanasy (Vasyl Basha) and Yakiv (Volodymyr Mykolayenko), resourceful Lohvyn (Ostap Stupka), and stonemason Yermolai (Vasyl Mazur). While they try to figure themselves out, they are tempted by demons, two beauties (Oksana Batko and Tetiana Shliakhova). Their discussions are meant to use collective will to build the Temple...
Aleksandr Anurov (also author of the adaptation) has “enhanced” Skovoroda’s text by passages from dialog by Plato and Erasmus, so lines from the Ukrainian thinker smoothly merge with treatises by the Greek and Christian philosophers. He says he made the additions not because he thought that Skovoroda’s text was not enough, but because the Ukrainian philosopher considered Plato and Erasmus his spiritual fathers.
The ABC is a play meant for intellectuals, aesthetes, and theatrical gourmets who will appreciate a production quite hard to conceive and who go to the theater not only to be entertained. The music includes Skovoroda’s own compositions along with Ukrainian, French, and Italian baroque songs. The play could also be described as a dated one, as December 3 will mark Skovoroda’s 280th anniversary.
Hryhory Skovoroda wrote a great deal of music and works on philosophy, collections of verse, cantatas, songs, parables, and treatises, but the Ukrainian theater refers to the original source only now. Veteran theatergoers will recall Suziria’s excellent production of his Garden of Divine Songs, starring Bohdan Stupka, but it was a potpourri staged in the 1980s. We are now in the twenty-first century.
“The turn of the century demands that one search for one’s own creative path,” says production designer Viktor Kharytonenko. “I proceeded from the text: two natures. For this reason I made the setting look metaphysical. Every character has his planet and the revolving stage props are the clot of their emotions.”
Actresses Batko and Shliakhova say their roles are anything but easy; they have to dance on a moving stage bent at ten degrees. Ostap Stupka performs tumbles. Kharytonenko has translated into life drawings by the great Michelangelo and the age-old dream of a flying man comes true on the Ivan Franko stage. The trick is done by the treadle. Stupka works his legs like riding a bicycle and actually flies with wings flapping.
“Total atheism destroys the personality,” Anurov is convinced. “There is one’s faith. Man is placed between these two categories, offered to choose between belief and unbelief. Atheism begets revolution, chaos, darkness. Our life is torn by demons and we must get rid of them. Ukraine begot the genius [of Skovoroda], and we are yet to fully comprehend his creative legacy. I know that most people, reading the poster and seeing Skovoroda’s name, will figure it’s some dull philosophic stuff. It’s a risk, but we can’t always do just what the public wants. Young people live not only by beer and cola these days. There is more to life than having fun and nightclubs. Let me quote from Skovoroda. Our life is like an ocean, and only a handful of lucky men can swim it. I’m sure that those carefully listening to his words will learn something. Man is born for beauty and happiness, not for darkness.”
Anurov could be described as a Kyiv Muscovite. He was born into a family of actors. Aleksandr Anurov and Vera Predayevich worked for the Lesia Ukrainka Russian Drama Theater. He is a graduate of the Karpenko-Kary Drama Institute. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an actor with the Russian Drama and he says it was not the best period of his life. No prospects, grim times. But then he joined the Suziria company and he still enjoys reliving the experience. He has lived in Moscow since 1990. His teacher was the reputed Anatoly Vasiliev. He is an actor and stage director with the Drama School Theater. He has staged plays in Hungary and Croatia. Five years ago, he staged Dostoyevsky’s Crocodile at Kyiv’s Russian Drama. The critics described it as “elite and intellectual” and it quickly vanished from the repertory, not being a box office favorite. What will happen to his ABC? It does not take a prophet to predict that its life on stage will not be easy, but the stage director fears no hardships. The Franko cast members make no secret of their ambitions and hope that their new play will interest primarily the thinking audience.
