Bohdan Stupka Will Take a Year Off
The Ivan Franko Ukrainian Drama Theater hosted Bohdan Stupka’s soiree on October 26 commemorating his forty years onstage. The celebrated actor marked his sixtieth jubilee in August, but the date coincided with the death of his friend and teacher, stage director Serhiy Danchenko, so he postponed the benefit performance to the fall, timing it to the opening of the company’s 82nd performing season. And so we started by discussing his jubilee.
B. S.: I’ll do my bit onstage: scenes from Uncle Vanya; Tobias the Dairyman [Shalom Aleichem’s Tevye der Milchiger]; King Lear, The Career of Arturo Ui [known in the West as Bertold Brecht’s Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui)]; Aeneid; Stolen Happiness; Diary of a Madman, also scenes from movies, among them Yury Illienko’s Prayer for Hetman Mazepa, which no one has seen so far. Actually, they suggested I make my soiree like Maya Plisetskaya’s. Remember, she appeared onstage, bowed, made a couple of pas, with colleagues milling around and the audience cheering and ecstatic. I said no, for I don’t consider myself a rarity, I’m still an actor and in circulation. If I walk out onstage I put my heart into the performance, rather than admire myself. Borys Tiahno, a student of Les Kurbas, taught me that truth onstage is the same as in real life, except that it is a heel higher. I think that when people come to the theater they must see and hear everything happening onstage clearly and distinctly. Well, after that we’ll have a kapustnik skit, there will be greetings from colleagues and friends. I sent an invitation to Jerzy Hoffman, Krzysztof Zanussi, Valery Fokin, and Liya Akhedzhakova. I also hope to see my former schoolmates (we’ve remained friends since 1958). I would like my mother to be present, so she can watch her “ne’er-do-well son.” Well, she will turn 79, and a trip from Lviv would be too difficult.
17 MONTHS IN POWER
The Day: As minister of culture and the arts, you were exposed to a lot of criticism; they said you did a bad job. Why did you agree to the post in the first place?
B. S.: I don’t consider the time at the ministry wasted. 17 months meant good practice. I agreed to the post because I wanted to do something useful for our culture, push it forward, I wanted Ukrainian artists known around the world. But if they offered the post again, I’d say no, thank you. They say I was a bad minister, so that’s what they think, yet the Dovzhenko Studios did start two productions, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa. I found money for two young directors and they will be able to work. Last December, the ministry of culture and the arts was finally made part of the cabinet. I wanted a national television channel called Culture. We even drafted a presidential edict. We planned it as a special channel broadcast all over Ukraine from noon to midnight, so people could watch it in every village home. But to do so we had to have the required hardware. I even found investors who agreed to share 49%.
I further planned an art school for gifted children, like the one founded by Stefan Schmidt. I wanted it somewhere in Kamyanets-Podilsky or Kyiv oblast. It would have been only two weeks of classes, but the children would have remembered it for the rest of their life. Stefan converted a farmstead into a theater and now all Warsaw theatergoers frequent it. And all the performances are free of charge. Schmidt invites leading performers to attend such summer events and collects talented children between ten and fifteen years old for master classes, boys and girls from different countries. Seven young Ukrainian gifted artists went to attend Schmidt’s classes in Poland last year, among them four from the village of Hermanivka in Obukhiv district (Village Council Chairman Shafarenko opened a children’s art studio), two from Sevastopol, and one from Kyiv.
I am proud that Ukraine appeared at the Venice Biennial for the first time in the century of its existence.
The Day: Yes, but there was a terrible scandal as the curators were replaced and in the end we looked like poor relations.
B. S.: I managed to get UAH 700,000 as a subsidy and the organizing committee promised that the Ukrainian pavilion would be in the center of Venice. In reality our works were exhibited in a tent. Much was said at the time. There were interesting ideas, like Mao Zedong swimming across the Chang Jiang. What it has to do with Ukraine? A great deal. Just think how many artists created his portraits, how many scholars defended their theses. Or picture Molotov and Ribbentrop reshaping the map of Europe. Another idea was to make rivers flow backward. When the biennial director heard about this he was very interested. Well, in the end we got what we got. We wanted to show intellectual attainments, but the curators showed sunflowers and Chornobyl. Thank God, we did appear in the biennial and as to how we did it, let’s not forget that well begun is half done.
While at the ministry, I thought that we didn’t need a world revolution but something concrete done. We badly need a law on patronage of the arts. The bill is ready, but it is still to be passed by the Verkhovna Rada. The lawmakers passed a bill on concert tours, but left nothing worthwhile in the final text. I fought for pay increases for the workers of culture and I was eager to open Ukrainian cultural centers in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Istanbul... I managed to carry out maybe 25% of my plans.
STUPKA’S HETMANS
The Day: While at the ministry, you starred in A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa . The film director was the one you started as a movie actor with.
B. S.: It was my third time with Yury Illienko. I consider him a brilliant film director and my godfather in the cinema. His White Bird with a Black Spot is part of the world cinematographic treasure. When it first appeared onscreen a lot of bureaucrats didn’t like it, but then it was praised in Moscow and abroad and received a wealth of international prizes. But this is probably our mentality. The situation with the director’s new production is the same. There is no picture yet, but it is already being criticized by media: the budget is too big, the costumes are from the wrong epoch... I believe the main thing is style and director’s vision. Illienko is not making a documentary. The setting is at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Ukrainian baroque epoch. What do we know about that period? We know about Hetman Mazepa from Pushkin’s Poltava, where Peter I was the good guy and Mazepa a bad one, anathematized for his betrayal. But there is also Ryleev’s poem Voinarovski which we never studied at school. Andrei Voinarovski was Mazepa’s right hand and nephew. In his poem Ryleev sets forth Mazepa as an exemplary Ukrainian hetman seeking freedom and opposing Russian autocracy. History is very relative.
The Day: Your latest movie roles are of historical figures: Briukhovetsky, Khmelnytsky, and Mazepa. Which was a real discovery?
B. S.: All three characters are hetmans and Chorna Rada, With Fire and Sword, and Prayer for Hetman Mazepa were each an opportunity to learn. I’d known something about the hetmans, not much, and now I had to know more. I dug in archives and discovered a lot of interesting things. For example, Ivan Mazepa built twelve churches in Ukraine, including a bell tower on St. Sophia’s grounds in Kyiv; he sent money for an altar at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (parts of it are still there). Education was kept at a high level in Ukraine under Mazepa and half of Europe was literally indebted to him. He lent money to the Russian tsar, Swedish, and even Polish king. The Ukrainian Baroque exhibit at the Lavra [Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv] two years ago displayed his portraits, about a dozen, imagine! And he looked different in each. Three hundred years later it’s hard to say what he actually looked like. One thing is clear to me; he was a patriot who loved his land in the first place.
The Day: We know that you are taking a year off, that you won’t play onstage, but we also know that you’re working on Tolstoi at the Young Theater. Are you still going to perform?
B. S.: I’m refusing new roles. I emphasize, new ones. As for Tolstoi, we started rehearsing last year, so I think we must finish work. I hope The Pagan Saints will premiere in November. It’s a modern production staged by Stanislav Moiseyev; the script is by Iryna Koval (a Ukrainian emigre). The play is about the Russian writer’s complicated relationships with his wife. Iryna Koval had access to the Tolstoi family archive and wrote the play from Sofia Andreyevna’s point of view. Tolstoi’s wife is played by Polyna Lazova and the whole project is very interesting. We are now in the rough-draft phase, so there is nothing I can add .
