Ukrainian Gambit: Decolonial Perspectives on the First Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Ukraine
Ewa Bal*
Abstract
The present article analyses the First Ukrainian International Shakespeare Theatre Festival, held in Ivano-Frankivsk from 17 to 22 June 2024. It seeks to elucidate the manner in which Ukrainian theatre artists and scholars utilise Shakespearean cultural scenarios as a platform for communication and dialogue with Western culture, within the context of an ongoing armed conflict. Furthermore, this study intends to illustrate how Ukrainian artists draw upon the avant-garde tradition of staging Shakespeare in Ukraine, in the process of decolonisation from the imposed Russian language and aesthetic models. The argument presented here is structured in three thematic sections, addressing the following points: (1) how the translations of Shakespeare into Ukrainian after 1990 have enabled the formation of a national culture, (2) how the ongoing war triggers patriarchal and feminist readings of Shakespeare and challenges its staging practice in the Ukrainian theatre and (3) to what extent the Shakespeare Festival diagnoses current theatre aesthetics in Ukraine and stimulates new languages of theatrical expression.
Keywords: Ukrainian theatre, Ukrainian Shakespeare, decolonisation, war theatre, Shakespeare festival
Although for almost three years now Ukrainian theatre has been perceived in Europe in the context of the ongoing war, interpreted as a testimony to or a method of working through trauma, it is perhaps time to approach it from a slightly different angle. This was the intention, at least, of the organisers of the first Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival, The National Academic Drama Theatre of Ivano-Frankivsk, its artistic directors, Rostyslav Derzhypilskyi and Iryna Chuzhynova, and scholars, the late Maiia Harbuziuk of the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Natalia Torkut of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, and supporting institutions such as the European Shakespeare Festivals Network and the Central European Shakespeare Research Association.
Organising the festival from 17 to 23 June 2024, during the ongoing armed conflict was a risky move, if not sheer madness. It was dangerous just to be in large congregations of people; the performances could be interrupted by bomb attacks, meaning audiences and artists would have to take to air raid shelters; the stage machinery could malfunction due to the power cuts; and many of the invited productions might have been unable to come due to short-handed ensembles (their actors are now also fighting in the army). Some of these concerns sadly turned out to be valid, though fortunately not all of them. This is why I want to call the idea of organising this festival a gambit; in chess theory, it initially exposes the player to blunders and losses but, ultimately, brings advantages and leads to victory. To my mind, the festival organisers’ intentions were clearly political: to integrate Ukrainian theatre into the European cultural circuit and to build closer networks and the subjecthood of the local art, despite the Russian onslaught.
To understand this gesture, however, we must answer two questions: (1) What was and is the particular relevance of Shakespeare’s oeuvre in constructing Ukrainian cultural subjecthood? And (2) Why is the classical repertoire of the English Bard more suitable for integrating Ukrainian theatre into the European circuit than, for example, contemporary Ukrainian drama and theatre? To answer these questions, I will consider, on the one hand, the historical context of the first productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Ukrainian and, on the other hand, I will refer to the decolonial art strategy of transforming “cultural scenarios” (Taylor) and the archive (Schneider) into the present and future oriented readings of the classic theatre repertoire and texts.
The war-torn circumstances of the first Ukrainian International Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk surprisingly recall the troubled history of the first productions of Shakespeare in Ukrainian by Les Kurbas (a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, director, playwright and actor, Fig.1) in the period immediately preceding the “National Revival of Ukraine” in the 1920s and 1930s. According to Irena Makaryk (33), in 1919, during Les Kurbas’s first of three attempts to stage Macbeth in Ukrainian, six different imperial and national armies were fighting on Ukrainian territory, the country’s governments had changed five times, and there was widespread chaos and famine. Despite these circumstances, artists from the Molodyj Teatr [Young Theatre Company] in Kyiv worked day and night to shape a new avant-garde theatre aesthetic based on the classics of European theatre in Ukrainian translation. The paradox of this situation, however, was elsewhere.
Macbeth (Kurbas’s third and most successful production), staged in Kyiv on 2 April 1924 (almost exactly 100 years before today’s festival), was an aesthetic and political scandal: trying to rethink theatrical representation through the classics, Kurbas first introduced Shakespeare to the Ukrainian stage, setting Ukrainian theatre on an avant-garde course and turning his back on the realism and narrowly-conceived idea of national art he heartily despised (Makaryk 3–4). “Kurbas looked West-ward in its (re)conceptualization of cultural community, and thus represented Europeanization, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, aestheticism—in other words, an open culture uninterested in a narrowly conceived national culture” (6). The reality of war in Ukraine also often imposes the muzzle of national interest on artists today, replacing deeper intellectual debate with black-and-white issues. Therefore, as a century ago, today Shakespeare’s dramaturgy provides an important platform for building a dialogue with European art, avoiding the narrow nationalist pitfalls of domestic art.
Someone may ask: Why doesn’t contemporary Ukrainian drama serve the same function? This question is justified, but to provide a well-informed answer one must consider the local and the global viewer. Ukrainian theatre and drama tend to operate within a framework of references to the local experience of war, the local history, social reality and cultural context, which, while legible for a domestic audience, are sometimes an epistemic barrier for the global viewer. This can easily be seen in the large number of anthologies or translations of dramatic texts by contemporary Ukrainian playwrights in the last two years,[1] which have had multiple occasional readings and productions all over Europe and North America but a relatively short stage life. Their initial performative power was quite strong and had an unprecedented impact on European audiences everywhere. But with passing of time, the initial shock which enhanced European solidarity has diminished, and the sympathetic gaze of the foreign spectator, who positions Ukrainian authors and actors in the role of “victim,” has also been questioned by Ukrainian artists themselves (Bal). As Yana Meerzon, following Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia, has aptly pointed out, referring to the problems of the representation of migrant bodies: “the body of a migrant remains evasive and difficult to represent without falling into blatant stereotyping, objectification, or even the further victimization of an already vulnerable subject” (20).
By transferring the experience of war onto globally recognised Shakespearian cultural scenarios, Ukrainian artists avoid making the message literal and exposing their phenomenal bodies (Fischer-Lichte 76–77) to the investigative, curious or sympathetic gaze of the global spectator. Instead, they place their experience within the confines of the well-known dramatic cognitive structures of cultural scenarios, which Diana Taylor has called an epistemic lens in the knowledge-making process (28–29), enabling a dialogue between audiences and artists across social, political or cultural differences. However, the importance of this scenario’s function can only be understood from a decolonial perspective.
Creators from postcolonial cultures only came to the attention of Western audiences when they began creatively or critically transforming the European cultural canon, including Shakespeare (such as Aimé Césaire, who became recognised for his postcolonial rewriting of Une Tempête, 1969). By transforming the canon, they entered the field of recognition (Butler) of the Western world. Ukrainian artists today aspire to a similar audibility and visibility, tapping into the classical archive of Western culture to emerge from the shadow of Russian and Soviet influence. And, it seems to me, they are being successful, because, as Rebecca Schneider has argued, drawing on Derrida’s insights, the archive has the forward-looking power to perform remnants. The elements of the archive that reappear in the repertoire of cultural practices carry the seeds of future scenarios and transformations (Schneider 108). They also constitute a recognisable echo, a syncopated beat of the past in the present (102), which allows us to hear one another better—even when performers and creators are distant in time or space. It is precisely this echo of Shakespeare’s universe that allows Ukrainian artists to strike up a dialogue with a Western audience and the Western tradition of Shakespeare’s interpretation, and to make an intelligible political gesture of breaking away from the imposed Russian-language and realist tradition of staging Shakespeare in the Soviet Union.
We must, therefore, grasp two specific objectives in the Ukrainian reading of Shakespeare’s plays: the first one is to establish a relation with the Western Culture; the second one is to decolonise the local tradition from the Russian influence. I would like to focus on three issues raised during the festival:
- The role of Shakespeare’s translations into Ukrainian after 1990 as a way of building the subjecthood of the national culture,
- How the ongoing war triggers patriarchal and feminist readings of Shakespeare and challenges its staging practice in the Ukrainian theatre.
- And to what extent the Shakespeare Festival diagnoses current theatre aesthetics in Ukraine and stimulates new languages of theatrical expression capable of dialogue with Western Europe.
Shakespeare in Ukrainian
As mentioned in the introduction, the first staging of Shakespeare in Ukrainian by Les Kurbas in 1924 linked two important prospects for the development of theatre in Ukraine: the first was to establish strong links with Western European avant-garde aesthetics and the second to distance itself from the Socialist-Realist aesthetic of the Soviet Union’s theatres and the dominance of Russian language and culture. Today’s festival has similar aims, but to properly understand them, we need to explain, at least briefly, the extent to which Ukraine was also dependent on the Russian nationalist influence in theatre until recently.
Les Kurbas, who was murdered by the NKVD in 1937 as part of Stalin’s purges, only sparked the development of Ukrainian culture. What followed was a long process of Soviet marginalisation of the Ukrainian language in the public sphere and the arts. The policy of Russification and cultural assimilation in the U.S.S.R. from the 1930s to 1991 included the programmatic absorption of the Ukrainian language into Russian (through changes, for example, in the lexis, alphabet and spelling of Ukrainian words), the deliberate stigmatisation of the Ukrainian language as indicative of the unenlightened classes (Chruślińska and Zabuzhko 10.30, 11.19; Zabuzhko 313) and, finally, the political repression of Ukrainian writers and artists. It can be said that reversing this marginalisation of Ukrainian culture was among the most important tasks Ukraine has faced in modern times. However, this was not easy, given that Russia was maintaining its neo-colonial practices of keeping the former colony down; for example, by appropriating the Ukrainian publishing market, which, until 2014, was dominated by Russian translations of world literature. Russia used a similar tactic in television, cinema and theatre to ensure that the rapid changes would not increase the distance between the empire and its former colony (Chuzhynova). This meant the Ukrainian theatre community, even after gaining political independence, still depended aesthetically and pedagogically on Moscow’s centres of cultural transmission and excellence (Harbuziuk, “Opposite Direction” 73). It was also isolated from direct cultural transmission from the West, especially after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, which shifted the “Iron Curtain” to Poland’s eastern border (73).
This situation only radically changed after 2014; that is, after the Revolution of Dignity in Maidan Square, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the hybrid war in the eastern territories of Ukraine. Only then did a sobering process start in Ukraine, followed by a series of political decisions: the ban on Russian television and publications on Ukrainian territory, the obligation to teach in Ukrainian at universities. This process has intensified since 24 February 2022, when the use of Ukrainian in the public sphere has become a show of patriotism in the face of the state of emergency.
This is why one of the most pressing issues discussed at academic panels in Ivano-Frankivsk was the translations of Shakespeare into Ukrainian as a way of creating and developing a national artistic and literary language to counterbalance Russian dominance. It would be difficult to recap this discussion in detail. I will only briefly mention the findings of the most notable scholar present in Ivano-Frankivsk, Lada Kolomiyets (“Український Шекспір як досвід переісточення рідної мови”; see also “Ukrainian Shakespeare as an Experience of Transubstantiation of the Mother Tongue”). She joined Makaryk in stating that the 1920s and 1930s were crucial for the national revival of Ukrainian theatre and art, and a large number of translations of Shakespeare into Ukrainian of that time overcame the rustic quality of the Ukrainian language, still evident in the nineteenth-century Romantic poetry of Panteleimon Kulish, the first Ukrainian translator of Shakespeare (Kolomiyets par. 15–16). At that time, such translators as Yurii Klen (Osvald Burghardt) and Hryhorii Kochur were primarily concerned with raising the prestige of the Ukrainian language by offering a new classical idiom (Kolomiyets par. 15–16). However, the ensuing sixty years of Russification, followed by the rapid development of contemporary Ukrainian in recent years, have made the Neo-classical language of these century-old translations alienating today.
A major turn has occurred only in recent years when Yurii Andrukhovych responded to the Kyiv Academic Molodyj Theatre’s call for a new translation of Hamlet in 2000, followed by Romeo and Juliet in 2016 and King Lear in 2023. Adrukhovych’s translations showed the face of the contemporary Ukrainian language, which was stepping away from its Soviet legacy and incorporating numerous puns, allusions and parodies. In this sense, not unlike Caribbean authors who apply the principle of appropriation and abrogation (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 37–38), Andrukhovych is concerned with an authorial “rewriting” of Shakespeare to produce distance and difference from the expressions that have been established in public discourse as Russian origin words reminiscent of the Soviet past. Therefore, contemporary Ukrainian translations of the classics are a matter of breaking away from forcibly inculcated Russian modes of literature, to capture the idiom of Ukraine’s middle and young post-Soviet generation. For, as Jessica Zychowicz argues, the Russification era cannot simply be erased from the consciousness of a post-colonial society (Zychowicz). It must be confronted through a process of transculturation (Makaryk 13), which means incorporating elements of the original culture and some elements of the neo-metropolitan culture. However, the decolonial turn in Ukrainian theatre not only involves the use of contemporary Ukrainian language on stage, but it also shows itself in various new readings and rewritings of Shakespeare in the context of the ongoing war.
Shakespeare and War: Patriarchal and Feminist Readings
The process of reworking the post-Soviet cultural legacy is now framed by the ongoing war, which affects readings of the classic repertory. Surprisingly, sometimes it turns interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays into melodramatic conflicts, in the sense Peter Brooks has given to melodrama: “It comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern” (10).
Melodramatic readings of Shakespeare are based not upon ambiguity, ambivalence, plurality or polysemy, but upon stark oppositions between light and darkness, good and evil (Makaryk 16). And in just this way, the two productions directed by Rostyslav Derzhypilskyi at the National Academic Drama Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk (the host of the festival), Hamlet (2017) and Romeo and Juliet (2021), have been conceptualised as melodramatic versions of patriarchal challenges in wartime.
Both productions, based on Andrukhovych’s translations, are staged in the theatre’s somewhat claustrophobic basement, a former nuclear bunker. This shelter, incidentally, has now become the city’s main refuge from the constant Russian air raids. This makes the setting of Hamlet reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic world, recalling such American films of the 1980s as Blade Runner (1982). In Derzhypilskyi’s vision, Hamlet is a young Ukrainian boy who must face his ancestors’ curse: instead of the ghost of his father, three witches, or Erynes, stand in Hamlet’s way and order him to fight for his old commitments. This curse, which weighs on Hamlet like the deafening rock music that accompanies him on stage, becomes, in the new reality of independent Ukraine, the oppressive legacy of the patriarchal culture. It challenges men to act, to defend their family’s honour and duty to the country. I have the impression that in this early production by Derzhypilskyi, Hamlet (played by Oleksii Hnatkovkyi), pacing the stage in a denim jacket and jeans, sees this task is beyond him and would rather be doing something else. This makes his battle cry of “To be or not to be” a plea for a life with no obligations.
However, in Derzhypilskyi’s 2021 production of Romeo and Juliet, the masculinist world returns with redoubled force as fate’s imperative. In the opening scenes, the boys of the Montagues and Capulet families flex their muscles in a substandard gym (Fig. 2). The budding affection between Juliet and Romeo is thus an unfortunate misstep in a culture dripping with sweat and testosterone. Defending the family honour and being ready to lose one’s life in a fight are elevated to issues of prime importance. Derzhypilskyi is not quarrelling with this patriarchal model of the world; as I read his production, he identifies with it, sidelining the female perspective. These two plays, thus, stand in stark contrast to the widespread feminist critique of Shakespeare in Western culture, especially the pacifist interpretations of Romeo and Juliet. I do not, however, see it as an interpretive anachronism but, rather, as a sign of the time and place where the play is being staged.
In the country where Derzhypilskyi lives, patriarchy remains a daily challenge. Every day since 2014, women have been escorting their husbands, brothers and sons to the railway stations to be drafted into the army, while men have not been allowed to leave the country for the past three years, as they may need to report to the draft board at any time. On the main street of Ivano-Frankivsk, photographs of dozens, if not hundreds, of faces of Ukrainian soldiers who have died in the war with Russia since 2014 stare at passers-by. As such, these circumstances paradoxically force us to revisit Shakespeare’s dilemmas and decide how we might today understand the triad of God, honour and country. This makes me very cautious about simply applying Western models of interpretation to the productions in Ukraine today. If only because in the West, for over seventy years, no one has asked: Would you sacrifice your life for your country? As Jurgen Habermas said: “This post-heroic mentality was able to develop in Western Europe . . . during the second half of the twentieth century under the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States” (par. 16). He added almost at once: “Scepticism of military violence hits a prima facie limit when it comes to the price exacted by a life stifled by authoritarianism—a life in which even the awareness of the contradiction between forced normality and self-determination would vanish” (par. 16). In Ukraine, people ask themselves this question every day, and Hamlet’s dilemma of “to be or not to be” is clearly understood: Am I or am I not a patriot?
My only regret is that, alongside this clear patriarchal voice, the festival was unable to show two plays by Ukrainian female directors who look at the same problem of duty to one’s country through Shakespeare but in a slightly different way. I am referring to the independent production H-effect (2020), directed by Roza Sarkisian, and HA*L*T! (2023), directed by Tamara Trunova from the Kyiv State Drama and Comedy Theatre on the Left Bank of Dnipro River and the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The absence of these two productions from the Ivano-Frankivsk Festival is easy to explain—some of the actors, both male and female, are currently serving in the army—and their commitment to the stage is not sufficient to exempt them from their duty. However, both plays were very much present, if only in the minds of the participants of the “War and Shakespeare” panel. I would like to mention them here.
For H-effect (Fig. 3), based on Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Roza Sarkisian invited actors from different regions of Ukraine of different backgrounds and sexual orientations, speaking Russian and Ukrainian. She wanted them to reflect upon who Hamlet is in 2020 and what values he is supposed to fight for (that usually are represented by Hamlet’s killed father) in light of the war in Donbas, which had been going on since 2014. The process of working on the dramaturgy is depicted in a documentary film by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski, The Hamlet Syndrome (2022).
The play features mostly professional actors, who appear, however, under their own names, as their auto-ethnographic perspective on the war is most important here. There is Yaroslav (Slavik) Havyanets, a twenty-year-old man from western Ukraine, a defender of Donetsk airport who was captured and tortured by separatists; there is Roman Kryvdyk, a professional actor and a combat medic who is appalled by the atrocities on the front line; Kateryna Kotlyarova, a volunteer soldier who talks about sexism in the army; Oleg-Rodion Shuryhin-Herkalov, a Donieck native, Russian-speaking and openly gay, who sews uniforms for the army; and finally, Oksana Cherkashyna, a prominent actress from Kharkiv who refuses to accept the war in Ukraine, where women are rape victims, and decides to leave for Poland to stay.
They all have very individual and distinct views of the ongoing war, but they all share post-traumatic disorder. On stage, they search for a way to express their feelings through their bodies and words, starting with the phrase “I am Hamlet, because. . . .” This sentence is an admission of failure, of weakness, and yet it gives them the right to speak a shameful truth. After all, not everyone is a “cyborg” like Slavik, who reenacts a scene that was deliberately recorded by the separatists and posted on a YouTube channel, in which he is defies an order to kill a comrade-in-arms, risking his own life. Katya, for her part, wonders out loud about the meaning of the Ukrainian flag, a sacred totem for those on the front lines. This is why she cannot understand Oksana Cherkashyna, for whom the same flag becomes a gag in her mouth during a rape scene. On stage, Cherkashyna enacts the passive response of the female body to an act of collective violence, asking, as it were, whether being a rape victim is an act of patriotism in defence of the motherland, or just death and annihilation.
Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, which is highly critical of Shakespeare and the entire European humanist tradition, allows the actors to perform a tough national psychodrama, a form of self-therapy that is urgently needed by the artists but also by the entire society. And while theatre, as understood by Sarkisian, can fill this therapeutic gap, another female director, Kyiv-based Tamara Trunova, contends that practising the classical art of theatre today can prove quite difficult, if not impossible.
As the stage director of the Kyiv State Drama and Comedy Theatre on the Left Bank of Dnipro River, Trunova had been working with her company on the premiere of Hamlet before 24 February. However, after the Russian onslaught, she found it was no longer possible to go through the paces of the dramatic script because it had fallen to pieces. That is why her performance is called “Halt!” (“Stop!” in German) but written as “HA*L*T!” to the effect of removing two letters from Hamlet: like taking a few bricks out of a solid cognitive structure (Fig.4). This production also takes the form of a psychodrama, but it focuses on metatheatrical reflections on the impossibility of playing Hamlet. Attempting to recite monologues from Shakespeare’s text, the actors repeatedly choke and stutter. However, in a resonant and Pirandellian discussion with the audience, they try to understand why they are unable to continue with the play, as if in traumatic shock. Towards the end, everything becomes clear: the other actors in the company, who are absent from the stage and fighting at the front, send “video greetings,” projected for the audience, filling them in on the ongoing war. Trunova intends to show how difficult it is to make theatre according to the rules and cultural scenarios of times of peace, so she interrogates the agency of theatre in these new circumstances.
Thus, it can be said that Ukrainian women directors are more likely to question the epistemic foundations of the world in which they must now work and to challenge its patriarchal order, without contesting the need for a patriotic commitment to the homeland. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Ukraine today—that a critical discourse on the war can only be fodder for Russian propaganda—Ukraine’s women directors are expanding the field of public debate to show that society’s patriarchal challenges need not await an exclusively patriarchal response.
Towards an Alternative Theatre Aesthetics
Bearing in mind that the first productions of Shakespeare in Ukraine, directed by Les Kurbas, were accompanied by a desire to revolutionise the existing theatrical aesthetic and push it towards Western European avant-garde thinking of the time, we might expect that today’s productions of Shakespeare in Ukrainian theatre will also be a litmus test for artistic changes in the country. I am thinking of changes resulting from the desire to open Ukrainian theatre to Western Europe and to rethink the uncomfortable legacy of stage realism and text-centred dramatic theatre found in Soviet models of pedagogy and stage practice. Indeed, after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the new circumstances prompted changes in ways of thinking and working in the theatre, which shifted towards European dramaturgy (the “brutalists”) and post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann 23). This direction was mainly taken by artists from independent fringe theatres, such as Nafta from Kharkiv, or the aforementioned directors, Roza Sarkisian and Tamara Trunova. In mainstream institutional theatre, however, the school of psychological acting and realist staging remains very strong in Ukraine.
The action of both productions at the Festival, Coriolanus (2019) directed by Dmytro Bogomazov from the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre in Kyiv and Hamlet (2019) directed by Olha Larina and Denys Martynov from Kyiv Academic Theatre on Pechersk, is firmly set within the fictional world of the play, so typical of Stanislavskian realism. Of course, this type of dramatic theatre and psychological acting is still part of the curricula of actors’ training programmes in many European countries. However, as Maiia Harbuziuk emphasised in her unfinished essay:
“In the twentieth century in Ukraine, this naturalistic, positivist worldview became the only permissible way of constructing the stage world in the totalitarian/colonial Russian theatre. This episteme, modern in its genesis and enclosed in a theatrical frame, grafted onto Russian soil, proved to be an ideal colonial tool in the process of imperial Russian cultural expansion, which radially covered vast territories from Asia to the Baltic States and from Lviv to Vladivostok” (“Поставити себе у центр”).
I can only add that the very method of creating internally coherent and closed worlds on stage, in which actors act “there and then” and not, as in today’s post-dramatic or performative theatre, “here and now,” prevents the viewer from questioning the on-stage and off-stage reality and eliminates critical distance from it. Ukrainian directors in institutional theatres are still quite attached to constructing a dramatically linear and internally contained world on stage, of which the spectator should remain an uncritical recipient (Harbuziuk “Поставити себе у центр”), as if they still feared overtly political or critical engagement.
Therefore, instead of the realist poetics of productions by the leading Kyiv theatres and the Moldovan Macbeth directed by Mihai Țărnă from the Nameless Theatre and Teatrul Fără Nume in Chisinau, I was drawn to The Tempest (2024) directed by Oksana Dmitriieva of the National Academic Drama Theatre named after Maria Zankovetska in Lviv. Dmitriieva is the current head director of the Kharkiv Puppet Theatre, and her productions are usually based on a clear visual design that draws on the Expressionist school of the Kharkiv avant-garde of the 1930s. In her version of the Tempest, the island inhabited by Prospero is essentially a world unlike the off-stage reality. Prospero (Fig. 5) brings it to life with spotlights lit at his command, and in the same way, he uses the theatre machinery to control the titular storm, giving the signal for steam or water. The whole scenography is made up of several platforms, and a mobile, multi-functional geometric figure that resembles a giant block rhinoceros on wheels. Sometimes, Caliban hides in it; sometimes, the drunken castaways fall asleep in it; and sometimes, Miranda and Ferdinand meet nearby, in secret. For most European audiences who know the Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, the animal is the personification of an indefinable naked power that rules the stage, even though no one sees it. In Dmitriieva’s The Tempest, just as in the theatre of the absurd, this ready-made object is admittedly an alien construct, with no simple equivalent in the real world. At the same time, however, it carries a load of potentiality of multiple meanings.
It is by transferring the action of the play to an abstract world of geometric figures, the play of colours and vivid contrasts in the costume designs (which also make the actors resemble a geometric sculpture, see Fig.6) that Dmitriieva expands her performance’s field of significance, making it far more than a simple mechanism of projection and identification. The key figure here seems to be Prospero, dressed in a black sailor’s uniform with red trimmings, with an overly wide-brimmed hat, which I vaguely associate with a Soviet navy cap. The castaways accompanying him on stage wear striped white and red sailor costumes reminiscent of large children’s pyjamas, or bathing suits from the 1930s, or striped prison uniforms. Therefore, if by Prospero’s ability we mean the art of staging, then it represents for me the authoritarian power, associated with the oppressive Russian culture, which through the mediatic and discursive apparatus and its own epistemology, wants to dominate the world. However, this power apparently is not invincible, as Prospero, played by Oleh Stefan, becomes weaker and weaker, more and more withdrawn, finding it increasingly difficult to speak and to utter incantations. His weakness gives hope to Kaliban and Ariel, or in other words, opens new perspectives before the subalterns who, finally, are able to speak.
Perhaps it is in this skilful use of abstract images, animated figures and plastic tableaux vivants that Dmitriieva finds an effective antidote to the ossified realist dramatic theatre, understood not only as an obsolete aesthetic form, but above all, as H. T. Lehmann (283) would have it, a predictable dramaturgical epistemological framework of the world. If so, Dmitriieva’s The Tempest might be read as an epilogue to the tragic fate of Les Kurbas, the father of the Ukrainian avant-garde Berezil Theatre, killed for contesting the only permitted vision of the Soviet world. Almost a century later, Prospero’s authoritarian magical power is fading before our eyes, his spell for staging a convenient reality is broken, and the world he has created is crumbling in its foundations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I might say that this first International Shakespeare Festival in Ukraine did not, on its own, create a new theatrical reality, but it has set in motion the mechanism of cultural mobility described by Stephen Greenblatt (1–23). It serves as a vehicle, a gambit—a move in the game—that the Ukrainian theatre community is making to emerge from the shadow of Russian influence, and out of a zone that Western Europe has considered the “field of the Other,” undeserving of attention. As the Western world’s attention must be attracted, as post-colonial artists have taught us, Ukrainian theatre makers and scholars are using Shakespeare as a platform for communication and dialogue with Western culture and as a medium for building their own subjectivity. This does not mean exchanging one colonialism for another. I do not see Ukraine as being in danger of falling into uncritical Westernisation as an antidote to its previous Russification. Instead, I think that by organising this festival at home, on its own territory, Ukraine wants to occupy a place past the demarcation line that Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the “abyssal line” (x). In global terms, this abyss separates two incompatible worlds. On one side, conflicts are resolved through regulation and emancipation; on the other, through violence and dispossession.
To my mind, as I have tried to demonstrate, the Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival creates an opportunity for emancipation, for finding a common cultural code, precisely to make Ukraine’s voice more intelligible and audible.
Endnote
[1] See Антологія 2 (Antolohija 2; Anthology 2), Без них, 2023 (Bez nykh; Without Them), Неназвана Війна, 2022 (Nenezvana vijna; The Unnamed War).
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*Ewa Bal, Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Polish, Head of the Research Center of Local Cultures. Her early research interests focused on Italian drama and theatre, to which she has dedicated two monographs: In the Footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella. Cultural Mobility and the Localness of Theatre (Peter Lang, 2020; 2017 in Polish), Cielesność w dramacie. Teatr Piera Paola Pasoliniego i jego możliwe kontynuacje [Corporeality in Drama. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theatre and its Possible Continuities] (Ksiegarnia Akademicka, 2006). Her current research interests include critical methodologies in the field of (de/post)colonialism and performance studies, as well as issues of cultural mobility, nationalism, indigenous studies, dramaturgies of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Central-Eastern Europe, Italy and Spain. She has co-edited several monographs, most recently with Mateusz Chaberski: Situated Knowing. Epistemic Perspectives on Performance (Routledge, 2021). She is the editor-in-chief of the series Performance Studies—New Perspectives, published by Jagiellonian University Press. She is a co-author (together with Kasia Lech) of the forthcoming monograph Feminist Imagining in Polish and Ukrainian Theatres After 2014 to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Copyright © 2024 Ewa Bal
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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