The performance of the Franko Theater in Saint Petersburg was a great success. After a long break (last time this Kyiv theater performed here in 1982) the most well-known plays of the Franko Theater were presented to the Russian audience: Kaidash’s Family, Schweik, Marriage, and Tevye-Tevel were performed in the famous Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater, and Legend of Faustus in the Vyborg House.
During the round table discussion named “Development of Cultural Relations in the Sphere of Theater Art between Russia and Ukraine and Prospects for Further Relations,” the theater’s art director Bohdan Stupka said: “I want to revive old and good traditions of our leading figures who came to perform in Petersburg in the early 20th century. They easily communicated with us in Ukrainian: Vasyl Harello, soloist of the Mariinsky Theater; Mykola Marton, actor of the Aleksandreevsky Theater; Semen Spivak, stage and art director of the Youth Theater on Fontanka, and many other Ukrainians from Petersburg.” The round table became not a debate, but a meeting of friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and not one word was uttered about politics and politicians!
The leading Russian theater experts and critics emphasized that “the cultures of Russia and Ukraine are similar in many aspects, but they are also different in many things, so it is necessary to widen cultural ties which enrich not only the audience, but actors as well.” For example, the popular actor Mikhail Boyarsky recollected with warmth that he was in Kyiv on his first tour, and his debut in the cinema was at the Dovzhenko Studio. Petersburg critics pointed out “the high mastery of the National Ivan Franko Theater that demonstrated filigree performances on stage in different director systems.” They lamented that their “male actors now working on theater stage are losing their talent” and noted the Franko Theater’s “meticulous ensemble of a brilliant company that showed a modern living theater.”
Valerii Ivchenko, a former Kyivan, and now a leading Bolshoi Drama Theater actor, said that he had completed his “theater university course in Kyiv and had been taught professional mastery and life wisdom by the leading figures of the Kyiv stage.”
“We had no language barrier,” stressed the organizer of the tour Natalia Kolesnyk, director of the Theater House agency. “Many spectators put on headphones, but after a few minutes they removed them.”
“The actors’ performance was so captivating that everything was clear,” confessed spectators after the play. This tour showed that the Franko Theater is on the rise and there are things to be learned from Ukrainian actors.
All tickets were sold for all days beforehand, and 15-20-minute long ovations after each performance are a vivid demonstration of the fact that Russians miss Art with the capital letter and the Ukrainian theater in particular. In order to get autographs of the actors, theater buffs stood in long lines, while the organizers, seeing the audience’s excitement, invited the Franko Theater not to postpone the new meeting and come with the next tour as soon as in November.
