The organizer of this event, Natalia Vorozhbyt, invited Moscow-based director Anastasia Patlai so the actors of Kyiv theaters could read the only play by the world-known Kremlin political prisoner.
There were more spectators eager to listen to the play than the small DAKH could hold. So, the play, which has not been performed on the big stage yet, was read twice. Thanks to the initiative by Ryma Ziubina, the best-known actress among those who read the play, all visitors could write their wishes to Oleh Sentsov on postcards that were brought by the actress, and they also could donate for the upkeep of his being in prison and for his family; officials were not noticed at the event. As a result, grateful viewers and the actors themselves raised almost six thousand hryvnias, to the disappointment of the Kremlin’s political punitive machine. Bad guys will be sooner or later beaten when human solidarity appears and grows.
Perhaps, it is the solidarity of the civilized world that gives strength and inspiration to the Ukrainian director, who is now imprisoned in the infamous Lefortovo. Those who had an opportunity to talk to him, told before the reading how he behaves at trials, not only with courage and dignity, but with certain artistic air. Making a performance at every trial, forcing Putin’s slaves to listen to the prisoner’s free speeches, Sentsov gives an important lesson to the world every time: it is possible to imprison the body, but no one, except for ourselves, can imprison our spirit. The Ukrainian director seems free even behind the bars, while the majority of Russians, who are supposedly free, deprive themselves of the right to freedom. So, such a modest, comparing to global processes, event as reading of an imprisoned artist’s play will undoubtedly replenish his strength and faith in human solidarity.
It is remarkable that not only the current historical context turned out to be prophetic, not only the collision and developments in the work by the Crimean director. Numbers tell about life in an imaginary sports concentration camp, where people are deprived not only of basic rights, but of names as well. Speaking of Sentsov’s conscious and subconscious predictions, we can observe an interesting thing when we tune in to a mystical mood: not only historic processes, but the numbers themselves turned out to be prophetic. The Ukrainian director, imprisoned by the FSB, followed the fate of Number Nine, a character who is arrested for dissident sentiments, statements and ideas to free from dictatorship of an unreachable, mysterious Number Zero (the performer representing this number never appears on stage). If the last number of the year when Numbers was written is taken into consideration, an assumption can be made that it was not coincidental. Like everything else in this world, where any gesture or thought of ours have their own sense and purpose.
Read an interview with director Anastasia Patlai in one of the next issues of The Day.
