Den recently reported (The Day’s Ukrainian edition; no. 80-81) that the Lviv Zankovetska National Theater was welcomed to the 12th International Theater Festival Melikhovo Spring for the 11th time. This year the event brought together actors from 11 theaters, representing Poland, Slovenia, the Russian cities of St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Lipetsk, and Moscow, Moscow oblast, as well as two Ukrainian troupes, from Lviv and Odesa.
“To play at the Museum Estate of Anton Chekhov is a huge honor and responsibility; a false note in this atmosphere would be completely unacceptable,” Alla Babenko stressed. “I am happy that our performance of The Confession caused a positive response. The plot is basically derived from Chekhov’s stories Ninochka, The Confession and some others.”
Babenko always finds an unusual but interesting approach to the classics, creating unique and elegant plays. Her latest piece tells the story of a love triangle, embodied by the skillful actors Yurii Chekov, Oleksandra Liuta and Yurii Volynsky. According to the festival’s custom, a discussion among critics follows every performance. This time they emphasized they always look forward to Babenko’s plays, and marveled at the finesse and subtlety that the theater director brought to the design of her performance and at the faithfulness with which the actors conveyed the inner feelings of their characters. The Zankovetska Theater has shown its class indeed!
“I have come to the Melikhovo festival for the fourth time,” Chekov told The Day. “When playing in this museum-reserve, one is filled with tremendous energy. It seems that the spirit of the writer still dwells inside these walls and above the entire Melikhovo estate, as if Chekhov invisibly supports us. At the discussion, we heard a lot of kind words about Babenko’s play, and we are proud that she gave us an opportunity to work with the beautiful texts of the classic. We play in Ukrainian but there is no language barrier! After just a few minutes, the audience forgets that Chekhov never wrote in Ukrainian, as it watches the action and empathizes with our characters. By the way, we are invited to show our performance on several theater forums, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, while the Kazan Drama Theater is now interested in performing Babenko’s Chekhov-inspired play (the director always makes the plot herself, using the authentic text but finding interesting stage moves of her own) on its stage. We were able to watch only few plays at the festival. We were glad to see our colleagues from Odesa (the Russian Drama Theater performed Recipe for Love, based on Chekhov’s short stories), who did a very decent job. It was interesting to see how the Lipetsk Tolstoy Drama Theater would play My Life. The thing is, at last year’s festival we performed a chamber version of this story, which was very warmly received by Chekhov scholars. Although the Russians engaged almost an entire troupe (60 people) in this performance, playing in the natural scenery of the museum-reserve, ‘quantity does not always have a quality all of its own,’ as they say. In the subsequent discussion, critics compared it to our performance, noting that ‘the Lviv version was more convincing.’ You know, for quite a few years now the organizers of Melikhovo Spring have asked Babenko to stage The Seagull. Chekhov wrote the play in Melikhovo, and so it is a part of the mandatory program at the festival. But Babenko, so far, refuses... We watched with interest Why Do You Insult Me? by the Central Theater of the Russian Army, a tragifarce based on Gogol’s The Overcoat and Chekhov’s The Wedding. An interesting performance, Little Stories by A. P. Chekhov, was staged by the Mytishchi FEST Drama and Comedy Theater, while the honorable duty to close the forum was entrusted to the Slovenian National Drama Theater, but their widely publicized Platonov met with a pretty cool reception. Summing up the Melikhovo Spring of 2011, the theater critics confessed that ‘the liveliest event of the forum was The Confession by the troupe from Lviv!’”
By the way, the Zankovetska Theater will soon go on tour to Kyiv. On June 17, they will show their large-scale play Fables About Ivan (director Vadym Sikorsky based it on a script written by the legendary Ivan Mykolaichuk, and the Lviv team dedicated this performance to the late actor’s anniversary), while on June 18 The Confession will be shown on the stage of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Kyiv at the request of the center’s management (they sponsor the theater, including their trip to the Melikhovo festival).
