Theatrical Donbas-2008

Most drama companies, even those that have made their reputation and have excellent premises, are destined to move in space, change stages, and adjust to the public’s tastes. Destined from their inception to go on tour – a function that someone somewhere once called into question – Ukraine’s long underfunded theater companies are still touring the country. The expectation that their creations will be seen and duly appreciated compels theater directors to be constantly on the move. Once every couple of years the mechanisms of the drama companies based in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are oiled, a process that marks the start of the Theatrical Donbas project.

This interregional festival is a creative competition. This year it featured six drama companies: the Luhansk Regional Russian Drama Theater, Makiivka Regional Russian Drama Youth Theater, Mariupil Regional Russian Drama Theater, Severodonetsk City Drama Theater, the Virymo! Dnipropetrovsk Youth Theatrical Studio, and Donetsk Regional Ukrainian Musical Drama Theater. The people who staff these theaters all know each other well and jealously follow each other’s progress. Theaters that are convinced of their own self-sufficiency do not take part in the Theatrical Donbas, although there are always grounds for self-doubt.

The first thing that sparks such doubts after the week-long performances is the reigning bad taste of members of the elite, who are capable of investing mind-boggling sums in minor theatrical entertainments but refuse to pay the average actor of a provincial theater even a subsistence-level salary. The Luhansk Russian Drama’s Dodo (based on Clive B. Paton’s The Dodo Plays and directed by Oleksandr Dzekun), which won awards for top direction, set design, music, and several acting roles (Valerii and Hanna Prykhodkin, Polina Shkuratova, Bohdan Muzyka) proved to be one of the most successful premieres of the past season in Ukraine.

The cast’s dramatic identification is perfect, without a single formalistic approach. Every line is understandable, despite the fact that the plot concerns weird half-human and half-bird creatures that live on an uninhabited island or in someone’s dream.

Dzekun, a past winner of the Taras Shevchenko Prize, does not need more acclaim than he already has, but the Luhansk Russian Drama Company, which staged this very sad, penetrating, and philosophical play is like an adopted child. Its new director will be Oleh Aleksandrov, the former artistic director of the Severodonetsk City Theater, which a few years ago was winning all kinds of awards at theatrical festivals in Kharkiv, Ternopil, and Donetsk. Today, owing to the outright dislike for the Severodonetsk Theater of the city council of Donetsk, an industrial city with a population of 100,000, it is hardly likely to survive.

The most shameful thing of all is that the bureaucrats who are deliberately ignoring theater problems do not suffer any pangs of remorse. They want to compute the proceeds of performances here and now, not in a few years, when there will be a new generation of people capable of positive emotions.

Hopes for a better future are perhaps the biggest source of support in the life of the Makiivka Youth Theater, which has acquired the status of theatrical outsider. Unfortunately, Gunilla Boethius’s absurdist farce Woman Who Married a Turkey can hardly be described as a success.

This weird performance, meant for a teenaged audience, offers real prospects for a theater that doesn’t want to make do with artificial zoos. Teenagers in the audience mean a triumph for the members of this drama company, who will have to work hard to become truly creatively successful.

Natalia Yurhens’s performance in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Oscar and the Lady in Pink was a real success for the Mariupil-based theater. Yurhens performed all the roles in this hit play, and her Oscar and the Lady in Pink were absolutely irrational, crazy, and incomprehensible to those with common sense. Almost spontaneously the actress portrays the luxury of short-lived joy and despair, recreating the sweetness of a long and full life and the indifference of death.

She plays everything that can be encapsulated in human consciousness and human souls that do not wish to vegetate and then disappear without a trace. It is impossible to explain the shaman-like way Yurhens does this when she rises on tiptoe, rifling through papers with trembling hands and smiling helplessly through her tears.

There are few actors of Yurhens’s caliber in Ukraine. They seem to be from a different theatrical age, the one in which the Virymo! Theatrical Studio’s happy-go-lucky version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull would have seemed like an aesthetic challenge. Here the main performer (Yurii Lysniak) in this slide-show of silhouettes is not from Chekhov’s play but one that was invented by director Volodymyr Petrenko. He sets the tone, pace, and rhythm of the game and life. He listens to the most intimate confessions of Arkadina, Trigorin, and Treplev, and when he disappears, everything goes topsy-turvy, and human existence turns into the gloomy chaos of predestination.

This year’s Theatrical Donbas featured a production that was aesthetically revolutionary: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro staged by the Donetsk Musical Drama Theater and directed by Olena Negrescu. A number of provocative questions that accompanied the announcement that this opera production would be staged in a theater are easily explained: no other theater in Ukraine has tried to offer a contemporary interpretation of this opera.

The dusty costumes and the huge, ostentatious stage props that resemble cemetery gravestones, a sad choir that barely moves, and the soloists’ strained performances are the specters that are wandering around the stages of our musical theaters. The Donetsk production, which features a huge screen projecting ancient castles, sports broadcasts, and fairy-tale landscapes, bridges Mozart’s era with ours. The production is captivating, thanks to the young cast and sparkling improvisations that embarrass some audience members because of their direct, unbridled approach.

It would be naive to expect every cultural project to produce an impact on our society today. The hundreds of similar projects whose goal is to “strengthen, improve, and deepen” are an exact repetition of a number of opportunistic measures that were adopted 20 years ago, with about the same effect: their profane euphoria, unsupported by genuine spiritual intentions, is striking for its formalism and artificial ideology. Real interest in something can be frankly demonstrated only by the participants of a given project: drama companies and the public, those who truly need this and those who continue to doubt themselves, which means that they really want to be seen and heard.