The traces for the present snake down the block, with individuals ready for as much as seven hours to purchase tickets on the theater in downtown Kyiv. Movies of the efficiency have drawn hundreds of thousands of views on-line.
The smash hit isn’t a well-liked Broadway musical or a collection of concert events by a pop star — it’s a play primarily based on a basic Nineteenth-century Ukrainian novel, “The Witch of Konotop,” and the temper is something however upbeat. Think about the opening line: “It’s unhappy and gloomy.”
Mykhailo Matiukhin, an actor within the manufacturing, stated that’s what has struck a chord with Ukrainians as a result of it exhibits “what we live by now.”
“Tragedy comes and takes every little thing from you, your love and your house,” he stated.
The play dramatizes the story of a Cossack chief in a Ukrainian neighborhood virtually 400 years in the past as he tries to root out witches that native townspeople consider are accountable for a drought. The motion takes place towards the backdrop of a navy risk from Czarist Russia — one thing that has resonated with Ukrainians at present as they take in each day, and infrequently discouraging, information concerning the battlefield and brace for missile strikes from fashionable Russia on their cities at evening.
Ivan Uryvsky, the director, stated audiences have been notably captivated by the sense of impending tragedy within the play, which is carried out on the Ivan Franko theater in Kyiv.
Relatively than in search of escapism from the conflict, many Ukrainians have been flocking to the play to assist make sense of their lives, he stated.
“It is vitally onerous to overplay the tough actuality Ukrainians live in now, however theater ought to really feel the temper of the time and the individuals,” stated Mr. Uryvsky. “When it manages to do this, then the play will contact individuals’s hearts.”
The play’s success additionally underlines a renewed curiosity in Ukraine’s cultural heritage because the full-scale invasion of the nation by Russia in February 2022 that has manifested itself in theater, literature and artwork. This contains the tradition of the Cossacks, the seminomadic individuals who populated the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia.
“When the conflict began, the brand new wave of curiosity in our historical past and tradition appeared,” stated Susanna Karpenko, who composed the music for the play. Ms. Karpenko stated she was influenced by Ukrainian folks music and wished to attraction to an viewers keen to know its personal tradition. “That’s in demand in Ukraine now,” she stated.
Underneath the Soviet Union, Russia dominated the territory that’s now Ukraine each politically and culturally, and books in Ukrainian have been largely banned. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia continued to push its cultural influences in Ukraine, shopping for radio and tv stations, newspapers and guide publishers.
Ukrainians started pushing again and asserting a stronger sense of their very own identification, a development that snowballed with the 2 Russian invasions of their nation — in Crimea and Jap Ukraine in 2014, and the assault on your complete nation in 2022.
After the invasion, Kyiv’s vibrant theater scene, like many sources of leisure, all however collapsed, as combating and missile assaults disrupted regular life and hundreds of thousands of individuals fled the nation.
However Ukrainian theater has bounced again. In 2023, 350 new performs have been staged throughout Ukraine, in accordance with the theater critic Serhiy Vynnychenko, the founding father of an internet platform that analyzes theater-related knowledge. That’s double the quantity within the first 12 months of the full-scale invasion, even whether it is nonetheless nicely beneath the variety of performances placed on earlier than the Covid pandemic and the invasion.
The “Witch of Konotop” debuted final spring, and the thrill round it stored rising, as did demand for tickets this 12 months. The present is now a part of the theater’s repertoire and there are not any plans as of the second to finish it.
The novel and the play, by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, inform the story of Mykyta Zaboha, an administrator of a Cossack city who falls in love with a good looking girl who refuses to marry him. Zabroha’s misery at being jilted is intensified by a horrible drought that has gripped his city, and, offended at girls normally and underneath the affect of his sly, self-serving clerk, he decides it’s all of the fault of witches.
The play is ready throughout a interval of the 1600s when Czarist Russia was in search of to increase its management over the lands which can be at present Ukraine. As Zabroha searches for witches, his superiors order him to ship troopers to struggle the Russians.
The prospect of going to conflict solely strengthens the Cossacks’ perception that they’re being undermined by witches, and that they should drown them — a job that Zabroha pursues with ruthless power as an alternative of getting ready for conflict.
The play ends with the villagers discovering a witch after drowning a variety of harmless girls. However the witch will get the final chortle by casting a spell that causes Zabroha to marry an unappealing girl within the village.
Lastly, he’s eliminated by his superiors for neglecting his duties to organize for a protection towards the Russians.
The present conflict towards Russia has spurred many younger Ukrainians to find the theater for themselves, stated Evhen Nyshchuk, the supervisor of the Ivan Franko theater, which phases classics that sometimes attraction to older audiences.
Past the sold-out exhibits, posts with the hashtag “The Witch of Konotop” have been seen 35 million occasions on TikTok, which is principally utilized by younger individuals in Ukraine.
Along with younger individuals’s curiosity of their historical past, stated Mr. Vynnychenko, the theater critic, many cultural occasions and concert events they’re sometimes drawn to have been canceled due to the conflict, leaving them few leisure choices.
Anastasia Shpytalenko, 15, attended the play on a latest night with a gaggle of buddies after ready in line 5 hours to purchase tickets. “We heard that it was very fashionable and wished to test it out,” she stated.
The play “exhibits us what our tradition actually is,” stated Daria Filonenko, 15, as one other, Anastasia Yakushko, 16, chimed in: “This play is simply wow! Generally, apparently, previous may be extra fascinating than new.”
Witches resonate strongly in Ukrainian tradition and are a mainstay of its folkways. Early within the conflict, a video from the precise city of Konotop, in northeastern Ukraine, went viral on-line. It captured a girl approaching a tank as Russian forces superior into Ukraine. She invokes witches to defy the troopers.
“Do you even know the place you might be? It’s Konotop,” the lady stated. “Each second girl here’s a witch,” she added earlier than telling a Russian soldier he can be cursed with impotence.
A Ukrainian pop track a couple of witch cursing the enemy, written by the poet Liudmyla Horova, can typically be heard at cafes. “Enemy, you’ll get what the witch offers you,” the lyrics go.
Witch-themed souvenirs and T-shirts have additionally proliferated throughout Ukraine after two years of conflict. One clothes model made a T-shirt picturing a witch wearing khaki-colored camouflage flying on a shoulder-fired antitank missile as an alternative of a brush. All this feeds the play’s recognition, the organizers stated.
“Ukrainians,” stated Mr. Uryvsky, the theater director, “are attracted by the picture of the witch.”
