Shakespeare in war: bard’s ‘existential’ theatre takes hold in Ukraine | Ukraine

THE Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival Ivano-Frankivsk was not opened with a game in the city. In the steps of the theater, another performance was shown with the emergence of the tragedy of the tragedy, but in real life, which was not interested in the sad stories of the death of the kings.

This was the theater in a different sense: a rally containing hundreds of people shown in the name of Ukrainian war prisoners, Thousands of It is estimated that it remains in Russian captivity.

A few women in the crowd wiped tears, holding a flag showing the face of their lovers. A little girl in a blue cotton dress hired a sign: “Be your voice.” The other: “I am nothing without you.”

A few hours later, the audience came together for the production of Romeo and Juliet, staged in an abandoned factory and in the crypt -like basement of the theater, and they smashed their young lives with malignant fate.

In his speech at the opening reception of Festival Program Director Iryna Chuzhynova, the festival was not slightly done. The organizers asked if it was the right thing to keep a festival while fighting against Russian invaders. Finally, he said, “We admit that art isn’t actually fun today,” he said.

“It is not a true, but peaceful life in which we create a peaceful life illusion in the theater, Chuz said Chuzhynova, Chuzhynova said. “We must be together. You need the support of others while grieving. So we have these ceremonies and these theater rituals.”

He said that Ukraine has experienced a “intense synonymity in the moment of synonyms in which normal life and the disaster of the war and the disaster of war. One of the players of Romeo and Juliet was not in the game that day, he added: he recently signed a military contract and was already on the front.

This year’s Shakespeare Festival is the second of the city after the organizers decided to progress with the opening pressure of 2024. And not as possible, Shakespeare explodes In front of Ukraine. A King Lear and two Othellos are a reperttheard in Major Kyiv theaters; There is also a dream of a summer night in the capital, a hamlet, a macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet.

“You can always find a intersection in Shakespeare’s world, Yur Yuri Andrukhovych, the famous poet and translator who made the Ukrainian translations of the festival, including Romeo and Juliet. “There is a great need for the theater to work with existential problems: fear, hatred, passion, betrayal, human spirit.”

At the Ivano-Frankivsk Festival, there were Shakespeare comedies-the comedy of the Hatas and there were too many ado about nothing-but the program program leaned towards the tragedy, as well as Romeo and Juliet, as well as King Lear’s two Plus Bir Richard III and Macbeth. “It is important that there is a place for tears, Chuz Chuzhynova said.

Ivano-Frankivsk is the southwest of Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the front at the foot of the Carpat Mountains. However, in the third year of Russia’s occupation of the country, the war is hanging everywhere in the air. The pleasant pedestrian streets of the small city are covered with more than 500 drops of the town and flutter on their portraits and flowers furnished under them.

Chuzhynova said that Shakespeare is the most popular Shakespeare in Ukrainian theaters since the full -scale invasion. The story of the rise and fall of a shap speaks so far – it clearly calls Vladimir Putin to mind, but other authoritarian leaders around the world. Andrukhovych is about to start working on a new translation for a new production.

Chuzhynova said Shakespeare is a way to talk with Ukraine’s political uprisings. Following the 2004 orange revolution, in which the political discourse affected by Russian, forced the “two Ukrainian” narrative in the east and west, Romeo and Juliet became popular with their fighter families.

In 2013, Hamlet, who was angry with the students of the then president Viktor Yanukovic’s pro -Russian return, was Hamlet, who attracted the directors: in the background, the story of a young man who worked with a strong neighboring arms for war.

Romeo and Juliet Production director Rostyslav Derzhypilskiy said Macbeth was also important in Ukraine a century ago. In 1920, the visionary director Les Kurbas, who was later killed in the liquidation of Stalin in the village of Bila Tserkva in the center of Ukraine, staged the first production of the game (and any Shakespeare play) in the Ukrainian language. This was during the war that was torn from Ukraine after the October Revolution of 1917.

What is one of the performances that provide adjustment for a new game at the festival When Hurlyburly is overHe performed by American playwright Richard Nelson and his translation of Ukraine.

All the female actors from the theater in Podil in Kiev take the roles of the women of the victim company that cook, talk and eat together. The characters include Bronislawa Nijinka, which will later become Radikal Stravinsky Ballet Les Noces choreography.

Nelson said that there was a group of young actress about a group of young actresses entering a game in the middle of the war. Uncertainty, violence and fear disturb the characters that find solace in each other’s company.

Bütün Almost everything in the game is very similar to the events that happen, ”a player said. Another actor, Maria Demeno, “War is a part of our lives and cannot be separated from it. It is difficult to live with it. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow like our characters. We don’t know which decisions we need to make.”

At the end of each festival performance, the actors asked the audience to keep their silence for one minute. The destructive news that a member of Yuriy Felipenko, a popular young actor, was killed by a member of the previous day.

“When people are on the verge of tears, the tragedy goes to a different level when people are still on tears, Prof The authority added that the contrast between seeing things that return home and returning home is “almost embarrassing”. “Working in Ukraine really means something for actors and spectators. This is not a routine exercise.”

Dobson said Shakespeare was an important figure in England during World War II. John Gielgud toured the famous hamlet. Laurence Olivier, released in 1944, was a national morale strengthening. In the prisoner of war in Silesia, the young Denholm Elliott took part in the second night as Viola. Powell and Pressburger’s Issue of Life and Death (1946) intensifies the fact that the dream of a night of summer is rehearsed as the film’s events emerge.

Dobson remembered how his father saw Donald Wolfit as Lear while London was bombed. His father never saw him again, “He believes that the game will be a kind of blasphemy at best to experience the deserted vision of humanity in peace time.

Dobson said that the Nazis also enjoyed Shakespeare. Famous actor Werner Krauss denazification court Because in addition to other depictions of attack, it Shylock’s anti -Semitic depiction In 1943 of the Venice merchant in Vienna. Cleaned.