Oleksiy Lisovets’ Creative Milestones
FESTIVAL GAMES
“Our theater made itself known at the White Tower five years ago when Vitaly Linetsky received the prize for the best male part in Dmytro Bohomazov’s A Little Wine or Seventy Turns. This time we came with one of our latest productions, Women’s Games. I thought that my work was a little out of sync with the festival,” says stage director Oleksiy Lisovets. “The performances submitted were a motley crowd, indeed, so much so that I couldn’t figure out the organizing committee’s selection criteria. They ranged from top professionalism, as in Roman Viktiuk’s Edith Piaf, My Legionnaire, staged by Riga’s Russian drama company (Veronica Plotnikova received an award for the best female part) and the lowest possible level of amateurism— I mean the Trabzon State Turkish Company’s Midsummer Dream. The festival program included very good productions with interesting stage direction and impersonation discoveries, among them Lermontov’s Masked Ball by Chisinau’s drama company Lucaferul, winning the grand prix, and Gogol’s Inspector General by Brest’s drama and music company (Serhiy Petkevich received the prize for the best male part). But there were also plays best described as an archaic Turkish bazaar dating from the 1950s in terms of style, wardrobe, and makeup.
“We performed on the stage of Brest’s Drama and Music Theater. Most festival performances were on the big stage, ours was on the small one, for ours was a chamber production with a cast of two actresses. Everything was done on short notice; we put up the stage props and at three in the afternoon started performing for the jury. At ten p.m., we performed again for the public.
“I’m glad that they said our Games was a ‘professional, refined, intellectual rendition, with an excellent stage setting.’ Indeed, the stage looked good — a black study with a pyramid of wineglasses, water dripping. We had a special mobile stage setting design. We brought everything ourselves, without using any additional transport. The technical personnel were made up of just five persons. The play is very peaceful; it’s a story of the mysterious murder of Maestro Mozart. Two women simply discuss it and there is only one episode of shouting, in the finale, because the tragedy has occurred and nothing can be done about it.
“We gave birth to our production the hard way, first of all because Rodion Fedenyov’s play is very much on the literary side and adjusting it for the stage was rather difficult. We cooperated closely with the author and I had to make some changes in the plot to add dynamism. We worked on the text and on the performance simultaneously. The author would add or rewrite something and this creative dialog lasted half a year, whereas the rehearsals as such took only a couple of months. The stage design was done by Ihor Nesmeyanov while Illona Kuts did the wardrobe.
“We have two casts for this play in Kyiv and every duet is interesting in their own way. The Games is a sophisticated production, a story about conscience. There are only two characters that undergo countless transformations while communicating with each other. It’s a duel between two women. The actresses are excellent: Svitlana Zolotko vs. Oksana Arkhanhelska and Kseniya Mykolayeva vs. Iryna Melnyk. I think that both duets are equally good. Zolotko and Arkhanhelska played at the White Tower.
“In general, I was satisfied with the audience’s response. In Brest we were congratulated by colleagues, actors, and stage directors. I think that was more than just a polite gesture. So we received only a diploma, so what? It is generally known that every festival is a cobweb of political, financial, and corporate interests, often very far from the creative realm. I am positive that festival results are predictable in most cases. The fact that they liked our performance and would remember us was demonstrated by the invitation to appear at the next White Tower. Most importantly, the Belarusian public is interested in Ukrainian theater. Two years ago, my rendition of The Eternal Husband based on Dostoyevsky’s story was warmly received in Gomel. Dario Fo’s Free Couple was a success in Vitebsk. I hope that Women’s Games will tour festivals. We have been invited to Noah’s Ark in Sevastopol. It’s a festival of duet performances.”
In fact, Women’s Game had varying followings. The audience had its own opinion and the critics their own, a very different one. The stage director says he is not worried by such polarized opinions.
“I treat the critics with a great deal of humor,” says Oleksiy Lisovets. “I’m not trying to say that they are all bad, but most of them leave much to be desired. A real critic must have an education matching that of any stage director and see more plays than any given stage director, meaning that this critic keeps a sensitive finger on the pulse of the current theatrical situation. Regrettably, there are practically no such critics in Ukraine. There are journalists to whose writings you pay a varying degree of attention. Some of the reviews are personal impressions written in good Ukrainian or Russian, but this is more on the columnist side. It’s not an analysis of a performance in the current theatrical context.
THEATER AND AUDIENCES
“I’m very perplexed to realize that people expect from every play, every movie only one thing: entertainment. Even the most intellectual audiences do. Too bad a whole generation is growing up with a Disneyland mentality; they know no empathy, watching a film or a play; they never ask themselves how they would act in a certain situation. For them, the main thing is not to be overburdened by any problems on stage and screen. Very soon such children will find themselves in an adult world that has nothing to do with what they have learned from comic strips. Rather, they will be faced with situations very much like those described by Dostoyevsky and Freud, a far cry from what happens to Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry.
“Real art is demanding on one’s soul. A modern individual must be raised on serious literature, pictorial art, theater, and cinema, otherwise we’ll soon have a lot of serious problems.
“I think that the Left Bank Drama and Comedy Theater is in the artistic domain, even though remote from the center of Kyiv. Their productions match the best capital’s drama companies. Also, our theater is the liveliest in town — judging by the names of stage directors and actors on the cast, as well as by the repertoire policy. And this despite the fact that the prestige of the actor’s and stage director’s profession is somewhat lower than previously. Most of the younger generation are rational individuals. They know that one cannot live by art alone. A young man getting enrolled in the stage or film director’s faculty is well aware of what he can actually count on in the end. I won’t cite any statistics, they’re too degrading. Meaning that practically every stage director and actor has to do some moonlighting. With luck he can get into a TV series or commercials, for this spells better money. Although this is an alarming syndrome; there are too many slapdash productions, too much running around after a quick buck. All this takes a lot of time and keeps one from actual creativity. This situation is in Ukraine and in all the post-Soviet countries, although our colleagues in Russia are a little better off. They have revived their filmmaking industry, they make a lot of TV series and private theatrical concerns are flourishing. Lenkom, Tabakerka, and Satyrykon always play to packed houses. Remember how the Kyiv theatergoers were eager to watch the Lenkom plays when they toured the capital? This drama company is a most prestigious creative trademark, promoted the best way, yet even they have problems — although we could only dream of the theatrical process organized their way. You could blame my pessimism, but I can see no changes for the better in Ukraine, not in the near future anyway. This is demonstrated by the manner in which they shape and conduct the national policy in the cultural domain, among other things.”
THREE NAPOLEONS
“We have no systematic practice of theater being supported by ‘new Ukrainians.’ They help now and then. Ukraine lacks patrons of the arts as a social institution; we do not have people like Tereshchenko, Mamontov, or Morozov. The government machine cannot afford to sustain drama companies and other performing groups. We need subsidies from outside. Staggering sums are in circulation, but only in the shadow sector. A lot of people keep their money stashed away, never trusting our banks, because we all have been done over on more than one occasion by ranking bureaucrats with their reforms, and by fraudulent businessmen with their ‘pyramids.’ There are rich people in Ukraine, but they conceal their incomes. In fact, we have all lived by the double standard for a number of years. Previously they told us lies about a happy socialist future, now they are feeding us other stories. We put away cash for a rainy day, because we know that no one will help us except ourselves. Drama companies cope with their problems as best they can.
“There is, however, an advantage about my profession; I can choose a play I want to stage. I’m working on Irzy Hubac’s Corsican Woman. It’s a fantasia about Napoleon and Josephine. It so happened that two other companies — the Lesia Ukrainka Russian Drama and the Bravo Theater — selected the play. Meaning that we’ll have three Corsican Woman. God willing, all three will premiere this season. Such popularity is explained not by the plot being so good, but by our poor dramaturgic and financial resources. There have always been few good plays, besides we don’t have a single dramaturgic almanac in Ukraine to help drama companies shape their repertories.
“Kyiv drama companies live isolated from the world drama process. So we are the first to announce plans for a new production, so what? The main thing is whether this production will be a success. One ought to remember that there aren’t too many theatergoers in Kyiv who will want to compare three stage renditions of the same play. People are mostly attracted by the story and stars on the cast. Probably a real connoisseur will want to watch three versions of the same story. Still, none of the companies intends to discard its Corsican Woman. In other words, there will be three different performances in Kyiv. The critics will have a field day, coming up with what they will consider funny review titles, like ‘A Choir of Napoleons’ or “Josephine Trio’... I don’t know about my colleagues, but I’ve already done the casting. Napoleon will be played by the Merited Artist of Ukraine Oleksandr Hetmansky and Josephine by Olesia Zhurakivska, an actress from a good Moscow school. She spent several years with the Yermolova Company and has been with us for two seasons.
For decades under the Soviets Moscow remained the theatrical trendsetter, with the Ukrainian drama companies keeping half a step behind, as a rule. Now the Russian capital is raided by musicals: Metro, Nord Ost, Notre Dame de Paris, soon to be joined by Chicago. Safe to assume that the local public is fed up with that kind of show. Here in Ukraine this genre is still terra incognita — none of the performing groups has done as much as give one a try! Lagging behind as usual? There is a joke: ‘Say, guys, you got a different kind of money?’ — ‘No, the money is the same, the exchange rate is different.’ In Moscow, every theatrical project is financed on a spectacular scale. I don’t know which Ukrainian business person would be prepared, say, to buy the Notre Dame de Paris rights, for this production is really expensive and on a huge scale. In Moscow, such projects pay their way, for a lot of stars are involved, there is a steady influx of audiences from different parts of the federation and from other countries. In Ukraine, the situation is different; such investments take time to pay back. We don’t have our own scriptwriters and composers for our own musicals — or maybe we have, but the maestros and writers don’t want to waste time on such projects. Why should they, knowing they can’t count on quick earnings? Are our audiences interested in musicals? I am not, but that’s my personal choice; the younger generation is. The entertainment industry has the priority these days. If you can think of something new, different from what’s already on the market, fine. You’ll ride the wave- crest for a while. But then someone else will appear and get ahead of you: such is the showbiz law. It’s different with the theater, thank God.”
“THEATRICAL NOVEL”
“The great Nemirovich-Danchenko said that a drama company’s life span is twenty years. Yet he wasn’t a prophet, he was a classic of the theater. For him, the Moscow Art Theater was the perfect model. Today, we know a lot about the undercurrents prompting Mikhail Bulgakov to start on his Theatrical Novel [known in the West as Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, originally titled Zapiski pokoynika {Notes of a Dead Man}]. Our company is faced with various problems and we try to steer a middle course between our own problems and the interests of the company which we continue to work for, and which will mark its 25th anniversary next year. Besides, it’s very important who is at the head of the company, who works out its strategy and policy; the kind of personality, his outlooks, even temperament. I am one of Mytnytsky’s pupils, we have worked together for 15 years. I’m not one to judge how much I’ve taken after my teacher, but there is one point on which the two of us are in perfect agreement. For both Eduard Mytnytsky and yours trul, success with the audience is an important component of every stage rendition. After all, a repertory company works not for a handful of theatergoers, but for extensive audiences. Choosing a place to stage is always a painful process with me. One of the criteria is whether or not the plot will be interesting to the audience. It is important to have a dialog with the audience, steering a middle course between the box office and an attempt to have a serious discussion, without undue moralizing. This is what our company has been after, from the outset. We don’t always succeed, but the main thing is not to cross that line beyond which you will first end as creative personality and then discover you’re no good for the theater.”
“You have staged quite a few productions at various Ukrainian drama companies. Have you ever been invited to stage a play abroad? How would you feel about such an invitation now?”
“Yes, I have received such invitations, but I have said no, however attractive they looked financially. The point is that I must be interested in a job creatively, in the first place. If ever I am made such an offer, I’ll be happy to accept it. I think I could adequately represent the Ukrainian drama school in a different cultural environment. The language of the theater is understood everywhere.”
THE DAY’S REFERENCE
Oleksiy I. Lisovets, graduate of the Karpenko-Kary Drama Institute (Kyiv), Eduard Mytnytsky’s class. First stage directions at the drama studio of Kyiv Polytechnical Institute’s youth cultural center. Has staged over 20 plays on various stages across Ukraine. Stage director with the Left Bank State Academic Drama and Comedy Theater for the past 15 years. Among the most resonant productions are An Endless Travel, Caroline Ashley’s White Jazz, The Cuckold, The Eternal Spouse, Sylvia, Royal Games (Russian Drama Theater), The Queen’s Captive, Women’s Games, et al.
