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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

When Odysseus Was Returing Home

8 December, 1998 - 00:00

Larysa Paris staged Bald Chanteuse, and Oleksandr Ihnatusha Amphitryon
in the Kyiv Experimental Theater.

I recall a story, obviously far from anecdotal, about a Chukchi pupil
who wrote his composition on Homer. The beginning was as follows: "When
Odysseus was returning home, there was a great blizzard..."

I will try to explain why exactly this story comes to mind. Bald
Chanteuse is a play about the most comfortable place a man can have:
his family, home, and visitors are coming. But, as we know, Ionesco copied
the dialogues for the play from some idiotic English for Foreigners textbook.
The comfort was ruined, and everything became simultaneously awful and
funny.

Thus, the theme that emerges here is the one of Home as a place which
has become senseless. This is a spotless and glossy home, sort of a McDonald's.
It is so clean that you needn't wash the gold-shining lemons scattered
on the floor. This is an uncomfortable medium where all attempts to save
or retrieve something will be useless. The actors (Avdeyenko, Shuran, Petrov,
Lehin, Rudenko, and Yatsenko) work in academic harmony, as a single organism,
which understands perfectly what it is doing. Actually, there is a tragic
element, for it seems to be impossible to act out so accurately what has
not yet happened. Thus, all this has happened or almost happened, and we
have lost our Home. It becomes obvious when the maid (Vika Avdeyenko) reads
her old verses. She still remembers that those were beautiful verses, but
the words no longer indicate that being the case. This calls to mind Malkovych's
lines: "The time may come when even the youngest nightingale will not remember
the candle of the letter "i". And here it is: near the end of the performance
Tetiana Shuran recites with inspiration the alphabet, all we have left.

There is no comfort in this actually quite funny show except for sober
dignity and boldness, with which the theater faces the real world.

If Bald Chanteuse is sterile, with no speck of dust, Hacks' Amphitryon
is something totally different: with water flowing, sand coming down, and
everybody in plaster up to their ears (the set is by Volodymyr Karashevsky).
This one is also about home coming through perestroika and the Renaissance,
chaos and blizzard. The motif is probably not purely coincidental: Ihnatusha
has returned to Kyiv only recently, after several years in the US. For
Vika Avdeyenko it was also a homecoming - from the well-off Russian Drama
to the poor Experimental Theater. And this also goes for Valery Lehin.
Even the script's translator Serhiy Borshchevsky joined the company after
working for a long time in Cuba.

The motif of conscious homecoming in the play is quite tangible. In
the harbor (that is in an iron trough filled with water) Amphitryon's paper
ships burn eloquently.

The actors roam in the water and wet sand. This is a meeting with a
Home that has been washed away. After this show a phrase like "while Odysseus
returned home, there was a great winter flood in Transcarpathia" would
not be at all surprising. But nonetheless it still creates a warm image:
Amphitryon (Anatoly Petrov) returns to restore the Home and remain himself.
Yaroslav Chornenky joins in this theme in his own peculiar way. He plays
philosopher Sozius whom the gods turned into a dog. Having become a dog,
the first thing he does is to touch his bald head and rejoice that his
bald spot still there, so I am not quite a dog yet! If I am right, Hacks
does not have this episode.

...Having started with the story about a Chukchi pupil, I would also
like to finish with it. It was no accident that it came to mind. For when
the theater fascinates, you involuntarily begin to look for something special
in the things which seemed to be secondary. For instance, you notice that
the faces of some of the actors - Petrov, Avdeyenko, Rudenko, and even
Chornenky - have slightly Asian features. And it already seems to you that
they are not mere actors, but some small mysterious folk from the depths
of the continent, a people which was able to create a rawhide-tent state
for itself. And this is already something, because you do not have even
that, and all around blizzard is raging.

 

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