Tinsel for Saints
The play, Lion and Lioness, premiered a couple of weekends ago at the Kyiv Youth Theater and turned out to be quite unusual in many respects. Based on Irena Koval’s script, a rare thing, it is a serious attempt to storm the onetime stomping grounds of Les Kurbas by the Ivan Franko National Theater, starring Bohdan Stupka and Polina Lazova. Naturally, this kind of cast will suffice to risk any kind of experimentation. For the producer Stanislav Moiseyev the risk was the script. Irena Koval’s work relies on biographical material, focusing on Tolstoi’s complicated relationships with his wife.
Some of the great Russian author’s contemporaries let it slip once that Leo Tolstoi was not clever enough for his own talent. This is precisely the character we see onstage: quarrelsome, niggardly, lecherous, even despotic. His acquaintances are dubious and ideas evil; he fails in his life and philosophy, practicing an extremely trivial approach to all things and the challenges of the reality; he often acts on others’ instructions. The impression is that all the confrontations between Count Leo and Sofya are caused only by money and sex. In any case, a considerable part of the time onstage is spent on fierce verbal battles centered on the above omnipotent subjects. Polina Lazova’s dramatic identification is remarkable; she is a furious lioness and literally screams most of her lines. She is especially good when the sensual degree rises high but never turns into overacting. Bohdan Stupka, as Leo Tolstoi, is versatile, still the overall emotional atmosphere of the family duels is tiresome. The play is presented as a tragic farce. True enough and it lasts from the first through second act, but this is just a single tone, a single color, yet the play is about love and there is very little of it. At a certain point the Lion and Lioness get to be too much like a trivial domestic quarrel. Perhaps this is precisely what happened in the Tolstoi family, but dramas in real life and onstage are fundamentally different, for people go to the theater to get away from their kitchen and office quarrels, family problems, etc.
Interestingly, the Lion and Lioness become attractive precisely where theatricality gets the better of the monotonous rhythm of verbal battle. In this sense Valery Lehin is good in his supporting part as Tolstoi’s alter ego. And, of course, Bohdan Stupka’s character is masterful. He is querulous, angry at the whole world, and loving. The music is good and expressive, courtesy of composer Yury Shevchenko; as is the production design (Volodymyr Karashevsky) with the emphasis on black combined with gray and sparkling amalgam. A huge mirror ball threateningly swinging to the right answers a sparkling snowdrift in the background. The ball barges in on the most intimate scenes as a beautiful symbol of fate. Silvery confetti fly from above. A half-length cheval glass, symbolizing the family routine, produces an especially interesting effect toward the end of Act One, with Leo and Sofya writing letters to each other on both mirror panes turned opaque and then join them. A touching culmination that makes up for many shortcomings of the production. In the end the tinsel absorbs the heroes when two devil-may-care garbagemen or perhaps angels (Valery Chyhliayev and Kostiantyn Bin) dress the Tolstois in rustling cold robes and put masks on their faces (wardrobe by Olena Bohatyriova) and the pair finally merges in the sparkling in the background, finally at peace with all the tinsel.
The play was originally called Heathen Saints, perhaps more to the point, considering what happens onstage. After all, such a combination of farce, tragedy, tears, and tinsel appears to befit a heathen ritual more. The powerful gods were finally propitiated, but next time considerably more sacrifices will be required.
