Jose Faced by Love and Death
Stage director Andriy Zholdak had practically no risk, resuming his production Carmen at the Ivan Franko National Theater. The original rendition had been quite a success and there had been just a couple of performances, meaning that few had watched it and there had been little on the backstage grapevine.
Logically, the second premiere was played to practically full houses. The numerous audience was eager to watch a beautiful spectacle with the nation’s stars, and Zholdak, bent on precisely this kind of show, measured up and to spare. Jose’s turned out the most interesting performance. In the first act the infatuated soldier was played by Heorhy, son of Anatoly Khostikoiev. A striking example of talent handed down from father to son. Khostikoiev fils radiated youth and untapped dramatic potential. His Jose is a true romantic hero, young, impulsive, ready to pull off the craziest of stunts for the sake of his love. In a word, Heorhy turned out a real discovery by the producer.
Anatoly Khostikoiev appears in Act II as a mature Don Jose and thus probably more predictable. But it is in the plot, as the second part of the play unfolds quite unexpectedly; Merimee’s story suddenly merges into The Godfather and we see Don Jose as a formidable mafioso with practically no trace of the young and carefree soldier. Except for his love of Carmen, immune to the ravages of time. However, the actor’s temperament and dramatic power are such that they seem to contradict the very stage character. It all evens up in the finale when Don Jose, psychologically crippled, returns to Carmen. This transformation reveals Khostikoyev’s talent in full, for his image remains captivating even in the most unbecoming circumstances.
As for the femme fatale that hurls Jose down the abyss of suffering, she was played, of course, by Viktoriya Spesyvtseva, Zholdak’s wife starring in all his productions. She knows how to look beautiful onstage, but unlike her impetuous vis-a-vis, she practically remains the same. Her Carmen looks wonderful, and joys and sorrows seem to leave her unscathed. Beautiful and psychologically immobile, she passes through the performance like a charming shadow, leaving the action onstage well alone. The true drama, the emotional explosion are in Khostikoyev’s Jose and the play is actually about him, a lasting soldier, unrestrained in love and revenge. Once again Zholdak demonstrated his casting skill, making up for his inherently liberal treatment of the original literary source.
Thus the success of Carmen is definitely due to the cast. The picturesque Jose-Carmen duets in Act II — meeting after a long separation, conversation in the virtual car, and double death — win the audience precisely owing to the combination of the two polarized temperaments of Khostikoyev pere and Spesyvtseva. It makes the persistent French background (cabaret songs and hustling and bustling crowd scenes) and even the good stage effects (courtesy of Mariya Levytska) quite unnecessary and irrelevant.
The story of Jose and Carmen is only a story of two lonely hearts that deserve happiness but never find it. Zholdak made a play about love and death, but what turned out was a story about one man, Jose, his triumphant rise and tragic fall. Perhaps this alone is quite an attainment. The theater, like politics, is often an art of the possible, setting a threshold on which many producers are known to have stumbled and fallen.
