{"id":228463,"date":"2025-07-01T05:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T05:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/228463\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T05:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T05:20:10","slug":"shakespeare-in-war-ukraine-festival-explores-intersection-to-bards-world-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/228463\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare in war: Ukraine festival explores intersection to bard\u2019s world | Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival<\/a> in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life.<\/p>\n

This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom<\/a> are estimated to remain in Russian captivity.<\/p>\n

A couple of women in the crowd, holding a flag showing the face of their beloved, wiped away tears. A small girl in a blue cotton dress held up a sign: \u201cBe their voice.\u201d Another: \u201cWithout you I am nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The festival opened with a demonstration to support Ukrainian prisoners of war held in Russian captivity. Photograph: supplied<\/p>\n

A few hours later, audiences gathered for a spectacular promenade production of Romeo and Juliet<\/a>, staged in an abandoned factory and the theatre\u2019s crypt-like basement, watching young lives torn apart by a malign fate.<\/p>\n

The festival had not been undertaken lightly, said the festival programme director, Iryna Chuzhynova, in a speech at its opening reception. The organisers had asked themselves whether holding a festival was the right thing to do while Ukraine<\/a> was struggling against the Russian invaders. In the end, she said, \u201cwe agreed that art is not in fact entertainment today\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s true that in the theatre we create an illusion of peaceful life, but it\u2019s not peaceful life,\u201d Chuzhynova said later. \u201cWe need to be together. When you\u2019re in grief you need others\u2019 support. That\u2019s why we have these ceremonies, these rituals of theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said Ukraine was living in \u201ca moment of concentrated simultaneity\u201d in which normal life and the catastrophe of war were experienced in disturbing proximity. One of the cast of Romeo and Juliet was not in the play that day, she added: he had recently signed a military contract and was already at the front.<\/p>\n

A performer at the festival\u2019s opening party. Photograph: Supplied<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Shakespeare festival is the city\u2019s second, after the organisers decided to forge ahead with 2024\u2019s inaugural edition. And, unlikely as it may seem, Shakespeare is booming<\/a> across Ukraine. A King Lear and two Othellos are in repertoire in major Kyiv theatres; there is also an A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream in the capital, a Hamlet, a Macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can always find an intersection to Shakespeare\u2019s world in such situations as we have,\u201d said the celebrated poet and translator Yuri Andrukhovych, who has made Ukrainian translations of four Shakespeare plays, including the festival\u2019s Romeo and Juliet. \u201cThere is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems: fear, hate, passion, betrayal, the human soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were Shakespeare comedies at the Ivano-Frankivsk festival \u2013 The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing \u2013 but the programme skewed towards tragedy, with, aside from Romeo and Juliet, two productions of King Lear plus a Richard III and a Macbeth. \u201cIt\u2019s important to have a place for tears,\u201d Chuzhynova said.<\/p>\n

Ivano-Frankivsk is in Ukraine\u2019s south-west, hundreds of miles from the frontline in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. But in the third year of Russia\u2019s invasion of the country, war hangs everywhere in the air. The pleasant pedestrianised streets of the small city are lined with more than 500 official memorials to the town\u2019s fallen, with flags fluttering above their portraits and flowers laid beneath them.<\/p>\n

A performer at the festival\u2019s opening party. Photograph: supplied<\/p>\n

The most popular Shakespeare play in Ukrainian theatres since the full-scale invasion has been Macbeth, Chuzhynova said. Its tale of the rise and fall of a tyrant speaks to the moment \u2013 most obviously calling to mind Vladimir Putin, but plenty of other authoritarian leaders around the globe. Andrukhovych is about to start work on a new translation with a view to a fresh production.<\/p>\n

Chuzhynova said Shakespeare had a way of speaking to Ukraine\u2019s political upheavals. In the wake of the Orange Revolution of 2004, when Russian-influenced political rhetoric pushed the narrative of \u201ctwo Ukraines\u201d, east and west, it was Romeo and Juliet, with its warring families, that became popular.<\/p>\n

After the Maidan protests, instigated in 2013 by students angry with the pro-Russian turn of their then president, Viktor Yanukovych, it was Hamlet that attracted directors: the story of a young man working out his identity while, in the background, a powerful neighbour arms for war.<\/p>\n

Macbeth had also been important in Ukraine a century ago, said Rostyslav Derzhypilskiy, the director of the Romeo and Juliet production. It was in 1920 in the central Ukrainian village of Bila Tserkva that the visionary director Les Kurbas \u2013 later killed in Stalin\u2019s purges \u2013 staged the first production of the play (and of any Shakespeare play) in the Ukrainian language. This was during the war that ripped through Ukraine after the October revolution of 1917.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to This is Europe<\/p>\n

The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans \u2013 from identity to economics to the environment<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

A new play, When the Hurlyburly\u2019s Done \u2013 a line from Macbeth referring to the end of a conflict \u2013 is being performed in Ukrainian translation. Photograph: supplied<\/p>\n

It is the imagined aftermath of one of those performances that provides the setting for a new play at the festival, When the Hurlyburly\u2019s Done<\/a>, by the American playwright Richard Nelson and performed in Ukrainian translation.<\/p>\n

The all-female cast, from the Theatre<\/a> on Podil in Kyiv, take on the roles of the women of Kurbas\u2019s company who cook, talk and eat together one evening. The characters include Bronislawa Nijinksa, who would later choreograph the radical Stravinsky ballet Les Noces.<\/p>\n

Nelson said the play was \u201cabout a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of the war to be performed by a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war\u201d. Uncertainty, violence and fear haunt the characters \u2013 who nevertheless find solace in each other\u2019s company.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost everything in the play is very similar to events happening now,\u201d said one cast member, Yulia Brusentseva. Maria Demenko, another actor, said: \u201cWar is part of our lives and can\u2019t be separated from it. It\u2019s hard to live with that. Like our characters, we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen tomorrow. We don\u2019t know what decisions we will need to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of each festival performance, the actors asked the audience to keep a minute\u2019s silence. The devastating news that a member of their company, a popular young actor called Yuriy Felipenko, had been killed at the front had arrived the previous day.<\/p>\n

\u2018Almost everything\u2019 in When the Hurlyburly\u2019s Done is \u2018very similar to events happening now\u2019, said one cast member. Photograph: supplied<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people are on the verge of tears anyway, tragedy goes to a different level,\u201d said Prof Michael Dobson, the head of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, who was attending the festival. The contrast between seeing stuff here and back home was \u201calmost embarrassing\u201d, he added. \u201cIn Ukraine the work really means something to the actors and the audience. It\u2019s not some routine exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dobson said Shakespeare was an important figure in Britain during the second world war. John Gielgud toured his famous Hamlet. The film of Henry V starring Laurence Olivier, released in 1944, was a national morale booster. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, the young Denholm Elliott starred as Viola in Twelfth Night. The magical atmosphere of Powell and Pressburger\u2019s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is intensified by the fact that A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream is being rehearsed while the events of the film play out.<\/p>\n

Dobson recalled how his own father saw Donald Wolfit as Lear while London was being bombed. His father never saw it again, believing that \u201cto experience that play\u2019s desolating vision of humanity during peacetime would be at best an anticlimax, at worst a sort of profanation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Nazis also enjoyed Shakespeare, Dobson pointed out. The celebrated actor Werner Krauss faced a denazification tribunal<\/a> for, among other offensive depictions, his antisemitic portrayal of Shylock<\/a> in a 1943 production of the Merchant of Venice in Vienna. He was cleared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-228463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114776298308359154","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}