“The seed of unlove, sown by parents, sprouts with fratricide”: Zankovetska Theater has been updated with “Land”

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The long-awaited premiere took place in Lviv – the Zankovetska National Theater presented the first performance under the leadership of the new director Maxim Golenko. The famous theater director, who “moved” to Lviv from the Odesa Vasylka Theater this June, has already managed to attract colleagues from the Kyiv theater environment to the team.

The performance “Zemlya” based on the novel by Olga Kobylyanska became this premiere. He put it Davyd Petrosyandirector-producer of the capital’s Franka Theater, together with Danyila Kolot (scenography, costumes) and Olga Goldys (plastic). He created the poster for the performance Serhii Masloboyshchikov.

In total, Golenko and the team announced at least 16 new productions, which should gradually transform the theater. In his opinion, “in the theater named after Maria Zankovetska, a certain aesthetic was formed, it contains traditional elements, a large layer of comedic, post-colonial content. I believe that it should be changed. We need to bring a new audience who has never been to this theater… We understand that this process should be promoted very carefully“.

In Lviv, they showed “Land” based on the novel by Kobylyanska. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

Maksym Golenko plans to do this by communicating with the audience: “..we have to conduct a dialogue with the audience. We live in a time of sudden catastrophe, there is a war. Therefore, the theater has responsibilities: it cannot and has no right only to entertain. It should be understood where the theater should relieve stress from the audience, and where he has to talk to him about the space where we all exist together now.”

Among the planned premieres of the 106th season is “Dotsia” Tamara Gorikha Zernya from Igor Bilitsa“Life is Beautiful” by Frederic Stroppel in the production Vyacheslav Zhukova“I, “Victory” and Berlin” based on the work of Kuzma Scriabin (Andrii Kuzmenko) from Veronika Litkevych, Vlada Belozorenko will stage “1984” by George Orwell.

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Golenko himself will work on at least two plays. These are “Enemies. A Love Story” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which can be seen already this year, and “Red Ruth” based on the play Natalki Vorozhbytwhich is being prepared for Volodymyr Ivasyuk’s birthday in March.

Maksym Golenko says about “Enemies. The History of Love” that the action will take place in the space of an ancient tragedy. Reveals other details: “the play will be an existential melodrama laced with Jewish black humor. It’s easier to talk about such a difficult time like this (with humor). Remember the first months of the war – how much strange black humor appeared, and how it saved us.”

The play “Earth” was staged in Lviv by Davyd Petrosyan. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

In this performance, the audience will be able to see Yuri Khvostenko, for whom this will be the first major role after returning to the Lviv stage. Maksym Golenko invited him to work in the production Rimma Zyubin, Mark Drobot, Anastasia Yevtushenko. The director hopes that the play will have a touring future both in Ukraine and abroad.

After all, the premiers decided to open the season with “Land”. According to Golenko, it was important for him “to start working in the field of the national theater from Ukrainian classics, and Davyd Petrosyan is a person who knows how to and loves to work with classics, and can adequately modernize them.”

Director Davyd Petrosyan himself explains the selection of the work succinctly: “Zemlya” is my favorite work of Ukrainian classics. After the first attempt to realize the story (Davyd Petrosyan staged “Earth” in 2018 on the chamber stage of the Kyiv Ivan Franko Theater – ed.), I really wanted to go back to her and put it differently. Therefore, when Maksym Golenko invited me to the theater, I immediately thought of “The Earth”…

For the first time, David Petrosyan staged “Earth” in Kyiv in 2018, now a new version of the play was presented in Lviv. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

For me, Kobylyanska, like Lesya Ukrainka, is truly world literature, in which biblical stories are transformed through the prism of Ukrainian identity… The combination of subtle psychology and the epic scale of the tragedy cannot help but prompt one to turn to Kobylyanska’s work.”

For David Petrosyan, this is the first experience of working with the people of Zankiv: Andriy Kozak (Father), Lyubov Borovskaya (Have), Volodymyr Panteleev (Mykhailo), Yaroslav Derpak (Owl), Oksana Kozakevych (Anna), Diana Kalandarishvili (Rahira). A performance for Oksana Kozakevych and Diana Kalandarishvili – twice premiered, because the actresses joined the troupe of the theater only this season.

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The director notes that “after how we and the actors have gone through this path together, I can only say that they are a wonderful team that I can confidently trust. Very disciplined and dedicated. You can simply envy their patience.” The audience also had to be patient, because with “Land” the theater named after Maria Zankovetska began the long-awaited changes.

Olga Kobylyanska opens the novel with a quote from the Norwegian playwright Yunas Lje: “around us there is an abyss dug by fate, but here, in our hearts, it is the deepest“, dedicating the work to his father, Yulian Kobylyanskyi.

For two actresses of the theater, the play “Earth” is the premiere. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

Davyd Petrosyan and his team transfer this epigraph, as well as the topic of parent-child relations, into the play. Interpreting the work in their own way, they depart from the original in some places, but they faithfully maintain the author’s idea, where the land is not so much a material value as, above all, a metaphor for life itself.

The life of the Fedorchuk family (father, mother, two sons) revolves around the earth. In the landless Bukovyna at the end of the twentieth century, it is not only a symbol of wealth and respect, but above all, of immeasurable hard work.

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The parents devoted their whole lives to bequeathing land to their sons (Mykhailo and Sava) that they would be able to multiply, but both the elder Mykhailo and the younger Sava have their own ideas about the future – and neither of them coincides with their parents’. On the uncertain ground of illusions, misunderstandings grow between parents and children, which reach the foundations of the family with tectonic cracks and destroy it.

In the play, the world of the Bukovyna family has its own, clearly limited space – whether it is a patch of field covered with stubble, or a farm house after threshing grain, or the roof of a house cut by the weather. Actors take the stage – sometimes almost weightlessly making their way through the field with sprouts, sometimes lifting heavily under the weight not so much of work as of feelings that lie on top of them like stones.

“Land” was staged at the Zankovetska Theater in Lviv. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

Father and Mother worry about Mykhailo, who is being drafted into the army. Mykhailo for his beloved Anna, who, like his choice to start a new life in the city, will not be accepted by her parents. Savu is suffocated by envy of his brother and the understanding of his own inferiority in the eyes of his Father and Mother. Rahira harbors a desire for domination and revenge for the humiliation her family has endured over the years. Anna is a “difficult” child and a premonition of her difficult fate as an orphan.

Everyone has their own burden, which turns out to be overwhelming. Davyd Petrosyan prepares the audience for this from the very beginning: the Fedorchuk family is constantly patching the roof, which is gaping with holes, but they continue to look into the future with their blackness throughout the entire performance, as if foretelling the futility of work.

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This Sisyphean labor stands in stark contrast to the life credo of the Father and Mother, who, without laying down their hands, earned both fortune and respect from people. The established life of the family suddenly flies down the slope. The moment when Maty shakes the apples to take them to Mykhailo is perhaps the key moment in the play. Life rolls down like ripe apples from the roof. The earth, “desiring a victim”, will suck its juice, only to forget the fruits again after a while.

The symbolism of space in the performance is impressive. Through the roof of his native house, the director visualizes almost the deepest chasm between parents and children: dislike. Sava appears in front of the audience, stealthily, he overhears the plans, prayers of the parents, beatings for Mykhailo, watching the life of the family from the outside.

In Lviv, they showed an updated play “Earth” directed by Davyd Petrosyan. Photo: Ruslan Lytvyn

There is a wall (or is it a roof?) of dislike between him and his parents. He feels this barrier, maybe that’s why he remains an infantile overachiever who, rebelling, seeks refuge in Rahira’s love. It is no coincidence that for the first time Sava takes up the sickle, the instrument of murder in the play, precisely after the carelessly dropped words of the Mother sink into his heart. The seed of dislike, sown by parents, sprouts with fratricide.

In the play, Sava, rebelling against his parents, sets fire to the house, and thus breaks with the traditional way of life that oppressed him. It is surprising, but here the production resonates with the real story, under the impression of which Olga Kobylyanska wrote the novel.

The prototype of Sava’s hero emigrated to Canada. In the performance, the spark of the new can be seen on the ruins of the old world. The earth, sprinkled with blood, gives birth to a new life – a child is born to Anna from Mykhailo. As Petrosyan himself says: “after a lot of suffering, pain, death, there will always be a place in the black earth where a tender and light tree will grow. Everything on earth is cyclical“.

David Petrosyan’s play is a deep, symbolic, modern vision of Olga Kobylyanska’s work, “a document of the thinking of our people”, as Ivan Franko wrote about it. In response to the challenges of war, she turns to our roots, prophetically reminding us that “we are people who only know the earth”, and therefore we know that we will endure and make our way through the blackness of the soil with life.

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