Good Vintners
Franko National Theater, based on Figueiredo’s play The Fox and the Grapes, is defined as a heroic comedy. A conveniently dual formula, promising drama kettledrums and the joy of an evening well spent. Both were abundantly present, it should be noticed.
The Fox and the Grapes, a play by popular Brazilian author Guillermo Figueiredo, is what was previously referred to as an existentialist drama. Aesop, a sharp-tongued slave and author of popular fables, must choose between a serene life as a slave and death as a freeman. He chooses the latter, even though he is loved and expected in the home of his former master Xanthus by his wife Cleia and even Xanthus who recognizes the sage’s supremacy.
This fact, the problem of choice sharpened to the extreme, is without doubt characteristic of the sixties way of thinking. One is tempted to visualize the play staged then at a makeshift studio down a basement and away from the official eye, with the cast all wearing black and scarce stage props... Figueiredo was, in fact, staged by the Ivan Franko company before perestroika. Small wonder, as the themes of his plays, even with the censor’s deletions, allowed broaching subjects from daily life that remained topical under any tyranny. Yet the theater is not conservative by definition; in its own way it is dedicated to all those social dashes and jumps. Now that a host of problems traditionally nagging mankind during the past century have been solved by life itself, the messages conveyed by Figueiredo’s plays have to be viewed at a somewhat different angle, a different production vocabulary if you will.
This new perspective is what the stage director, Myroslav Hrynyshyn, tried to work into The Fox and the Grapes, and the material is truly and heroic lines are equally present in the original score, allowing the producer precisely that kind of freedom which the heroes lack.
The heroic theme is embodied by Bohdan Beniuk’s Aesop. The actor is a born comedian, and like all gifted ones he dreams of serious, even tragic roles. His Aesop is outwardly unattractive, his face and speech are rough, but he is strong with his inner and precisely spoken wisdom. An ambivalent role is fraught with lapsing into an overstated seriousness, irrelevant introspection, and more customary satire. Beniuk is thus doomed to his choice. Balancing between two very different states of mind is rather complicated acrobatic. His Aesop is more often serious, he discusses freedom, utters banalities (the more I learn about my fellow man, the more I like the animals). Beniuk seems most frightened by the prospect of the audience laughing at his hero, yet the hero only suffers because of this, as the extra hard task of keeping serious contradicts the actor’s very nature. Things get much better when Beniuk finds for Aesop the required tragicomic, satirical colors. The clever slave then remains a mouthpiece of truth but attacks his enemies using the most effective and powerful weapon, equally lethal at all times: laughter.
Oleksiy Bohdanovych, as the slave’s master and ne’er-do-well philosopher Xanthus, can also be funny and wrathful, yet his performance palette is dominated by light colors. This is probably why Bohdanovych’s Xanthus looks as though he were a hero of one of Aesop’s fables, a narcissistic peacock of a philosopher, spreading his tail of borrowed wisdom on every occasion, however inappropriate.
In fact, it the Beniuk-Bohdanovych duet that keeps the play afloat, the heroic and comic notions. The love line – Cleia (Liudmyla Smorodyna) and Melissa (Tetiana Aleksenko) – is graceful rather than impassioned. Getting back to the producer’s interpretation, Hrynyshyn’s version has long been tested, it is a rich and entertaining performance akin to private theatrical concern. In principle, such renditions are important primarily as examples of a good delivery of a ready stage product. They are box-office productions and even the quality of the premiere is not as important as the audience’s expectations. In the case of Aesop the strategy worked well, as practically no one left the audience before ringing down the curtain the final time. Actually, the end of the play was met with a standing ovation and numerous encores. The fox had reached up and got hold of the grapes, albeit not quite ripe. The hunger for a spectacular theater is still acute and Hrynyshyn tries to sate it as best he can. Plush mock Ancient Greek setting (courtesy of production designer Valery Bortiakov), star cast, waves of glycerin smoke, and the grandiose albeit crudely constructed scene of Aesop’s execution all work to that end. The quality of detail does not count. Only the overall effect does. Even if the thundering soundtrack obliterates Aesop’s last lines as a doomed freeman moves atop a dais toward the sham volcano. Even if the comedy remains obscure and the heroic drama rather vague. The main thing is that the entertaining format is kept. People leave the audience with about the kind of experience they expected.
Indeed, they could have had more, but that rates a separate article and perhaps a different theater.
