For the past 10 years Andrii Zholdak has been presenting the achievements of the modern Ukrainian stage at the New European Theater (NET) festival in Moscow. A few years ago he brought his Kharkiv productions to the Russian capital (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Hamlet), and last year the NET billboard featured Phaedra, which he staged at the Theater of Nations. Although the production had nothing to do with Ukrainian theater, the word “Ukraine” was still indicated next to the producer’s name.
The latest brainchild of our theatrical rebel, based on Carmen and also staged at the Theater of Nations, was not included in the current festival program lineup perhaps for purely commercial reasons, although the play was shown on the eve of the festival (read about it in an upcoming issue of The Day). This time, the name of “our downtrodden native land,” so dear to the ear of any Ukrainian patriot, was not heard at all during this year’s gathering of theatrical experimenters. This is very telling and understandable if one regards theater festivals of this kind and caliber as a barometer of the state of national cultures. The crop of brilliant stage directors who grew up in the Ukrainian theater in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been criminally mowed down by our national culture bureaucrats. Thanks to the longtime state service of sleek and corpulent bosses of all levels, soon there will be nobody to stage professional productions, let alone engage in experiments.
Things are different in Europe, where by all accounts there is no place for us. There they cultivate creative shoots, they don’t uproot them. This is also the concern of NET’s management, which, despite the shortage of funds caused by the nature of this festival (new ideas and forms have never appealed to the broader public), can still find an opportunity to bring new-generation producers to their beloved capital. Many of them are considered the best in their own countries, for example, Christian Smeds. This year’s NET opened, quietly and without undue fuss, with his production Sad Songs from a European Heart, which was first staged in Lithuania, not in his native Finland.
In Sad Songs the actress Adona Bendariute, who had the privilege of working with Nyakroshus, gives a solo performance of some selected scenes and types from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Barely able to utter the first phrase, “I...I...I am a prostitute,” she immediately comes clean about another terrible factor in her profligate life. The girl, dressed not even in second-hand items but in something antediluvian, confesses that she loves a murderer. As you might have guessed, it is none other than Rodion Raskolnikov. After playing the scenes connected with Sonia, humiliated by her profession, the drunkard Marmeladov, Raskolnikov, who tries to justify himself in his own eyes, and the old usurer woman who raises a ketchup- smeared ax over her own head, the actress completes her solo performance with the phrase “I am guilty.” All the characters have feelings of guilt. The leitmotif of their presence in the narrow confines of the small stage is an attempt to establish contact with us, to confide in us, and to beg our forgiveness for the very fact of their existence in this world. Through this obsequious search for the spectator’s attention, the actress and the director masterfully convey the world outlook of a little man who drinks, murders, and commits other stupidities and crimes in order to become magnified, if only for a moment, in his own eyes.
Unlike the low-key Finnish-Lithuanian solo show, the Russian-French Mo’lodets (Le Gars) attacks the audience with sound and tense emotion. Together with the Frenchwoman Lucie Berelovitz, the actor, musician, and producer Vladimir Pankov, who recently staged a musical in Moscow based on Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, staged the homonymous poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, who did her own translation into French. There are four French and four Russian actors, plus four musicians, in this sound drama (the latest buzzword for modern musical productions) staged at the Theater of Nations. It may be pure coincidence that the number of people on the stage is the mystical 12.
But it is by no means coincidental that the director chose the form of a sound drama for Tsvetaeva’s poem, which is done in the style of a Russian fairy tale because what is important in this form is not only the music, not only the word that sounds like a gunshot, but every sound. The tense atmosphere of this story about a country girl named Marusia, whose encounter with a werewolf (a handsome fellow in a red shirt) destroys her and her entire family, is achieved thanks to a masterly manipulation of sound, rhythm, and gesture. The intertwining and discontinuous Russian and French speech generates feelings of conflict and inner struggle, which occurs in the heroine’s heart and, at the same time, makes one reflect on the indivisibility and reciprocal penetration of cultures that you can observe every time you visit NET.
This year’s festival also offered us the unforgettable experience of seeing a production by the French director Joel Pommerat. His Les Marchands is a wonderful illustration of the fact that you can extract a lot of sense and feeling from any subject, even the dullest and most banal one, that you are left with the feeling that the theater is not just the most important of the arts but an irreplaceable interlocutor and comforter. Using as few theatrical devices as possible, Pommerat tells the story of an unemployed woman who kills her ten-year-old son so that others can find a job. The director envelops the tragedy of human loneliness and emptiness, the mindlessness of life, in the wrappings of a social drama. He achieves the effect of the lack of not only meaning but also air in the existence of contemporary people by means of an unexpected and sophisticated technique — the actors move their lips without saying a word and thus resemble fish in an aquarium or ghosts — that certain attempts of new-wave directors to convey the absurdity of our almost catastrophic life seem utterly pretentious and disgustingly crude. For example, Les Marchands does not feature any everyday filth and foul language without which the Russian “new drama” and the new of generation directors unhampered by censorship find it increasingly difficult to find the means to say that we have all been living in hell for a long time. DAKH, the Kyiv-based theater, also issues a warning to audiences about imminent four-letter words: if Moscow can do it, why can’t we?
We seem to be able to imitate only bad things. This robs me of the last hope that in the foreseeable future we will create (or revive) at least one decent theater festival or be invited to show some productions in another country’s feast of life, which is nothing but a theatrical performance.
