They will present to the audience their best production Shantrapa [i.e., hooligans. – Ed.] on August 19. The play of the same name by Panas Saksahansky was staged by Iryna Klishchevska back in 1993, and since then it was quite difficult to get tickets for it, as each performance was a full house. Spectators find themselves as if at the backstage of the theater, full of swirling passions. The main characters are a provincial troupe, and in order to survive, they have to solve not only the global problems (how to find a sponsor), but also to fight for their place on stage – when servile flattery, jealousy, laughter and tears go shoulder to shoulder... The actors are ready absolutely for everything: to stage Natalka-Poltavka without Natalka or to make a comedy from a tragedy. These “masters” are real “shantrapa”, bringing the audience to Homeric laughter: “I used to sing in a church choir, and now I decide to become an actor...” The author called the play “a joke in one act,” and the actors of Koleso [i.e., wheel. – Ed.] gave new breath to the Ukrainian classics. One watches it and it seems that Saksahansky wrote this play not in 1914, but today – so topical it is. Let us remind that at that time, legendary Maria Zankovetska [1854-1934. – Ed.] played in Shantrapa together with the Saksahansky troupe. Afterwards, the Soviet censors crossed the play out of the theaters’ repertoire. And thanks to Koleso’s artistic director Iryna Klishchevska, artist Svitlana Zaikina and the actors’ team, Shantrapa returned to the audience. Nearly the entire troupe of the Koleso Theater is involved in the play.
By the way, Shantrapa was successfully performed at many international theater forums: it won the Slavic Gatherings Grand Prix (Ukraine), received diplomas at Theater without Borders (Russia), Classics Today (Ukraine) and Black Sea (Turkey). This staging also took part in the US-Ukraine joint international theater project.
The nearest premiere in Koleso will again be Ukrainian classics. The play Huska Perished This Way is being rehearsed by Klishchevska. This play by Mykola Kulish was considered lost for many years. The text was first published in 1960, and the stage life was given to the comedy by Marian Krushelnytsky theater-studio in 1962. In 1963, it was played in Lviv in the Zankovetska Theater, but after several performances the play was forbid . In 1970, the play was staged in the Odesa Theater of October Revolution, and then only in June 2008 the stu ts of Kyiv Karpenko-Kary National University of Theater, Film and Television have presented Huska Perished This Way as their degree work. In March 2009, it was shown at Les Kurbas Center. And now Koleso will show its own interpretation of the grotesque satiric comedy: a story, the events of which take place in Ukraine in 1918-19, when hostile forces storm into the Huska family, turning their lives upside down...
In November, Koleso’s team has been invited to Israel, where the theater will show the play Prima Donnas.
