The strains for the present snake down the block, with folks ready for as much as seven hours to purchase tickets on the theater in downtown Kyiv. Movies of the efficiency have drawn tens of millions of views on-line.
The smash hit isn’t a well-liked Broadway musical or a sequence of concert events by a pop star — it’s a play primarily based on a traditional Nineteenth-century Ukrainian novel, “The Witch of Konotop,” and the temper is something however upbeat. Contemplate the opening line: “It’s unhappy and gloomy.”
Mykhailo Matiukhin, an actor within the manufacturing, mentioned that’s what has struck a chord with Ukrainians as a result of it reveals “what we live by means of now.”
“Tragedy comes and takes all the things from you, your love and your property,” he mentioned.
The play dramatizes the story of a Cossack chief in a Ukrainian group virtually 400 years in the past as he tries to root out witches that native townspeople consider are answerable for a drought. The motion takes place towards the backdrop of a navy menace from czarist Russia — one thing that has resonated with Ukrainians right now as they soak up each day, and infrequently discouraging, information concerning the battlefield and brace for missile strikes from fashionable Russia on their cities at night time.
Ivan Uryvsky, the director, mentioned audiences had been notably captivated by the sense of impending tragedy within the play, which is carried out on the Ivan Franko theater in Kyiv.
Moderately than in search of escapism from the struggle, many Ukrainians have been flocking to the play to assist make sense of their lives, he mentioned.
“It is vitally laborious to overplay the cruel actuality Ukrainians reside in now, however theater ought to really feel the temper of the time and the folks,” mentioned Mr. Uryvsky. “When it manages to do this, then the play will contact folks’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 struggle began, the brand new wave of curiosity in our historical past and tradition appeared,” mentioned Susanna Karpenko, who composed the music for the play. Ms. Karpenko mentioned she was influenced by Ukrainian people music and wished to enchantment to an viewers keen to grasp its personal tradition. “That’s in demand in Ukraine now,” she mentioned.
Underneath the Soviet Union, Russia dominated the territory that’s now Ukraine each politically and culturally, and books in Ukrainian had 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 e book 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 Japanese Ukraine in 2014, and the assault on the 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 tens of millions of individuals fled the nation.
However Ukrainian theater has bounced again. In 2023, 350 new performs had been staged throughout Ukraine, in accordance with the theater critic Serhiy Vynnychenko, the founding father of a web based platform that analyzes theater-related knowledge. That’s double the quantity within the first yr of the full-scale invasion, even whether it is nonetheless nicely under 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 yr. The present is now a part of the theater’s repertoire and there aren’t 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 an attractive lady who refuses to marry him. Zabroha’s misery at being jilted is intensified by a horrible drought that has gripped his city, and, indignant at ladies usually and beneath the affect of his sly, self-serving clerk, he decides it’s all of the fault of witches.
The play is about throughout a interval of the 1600s when czarist Russia was in search of to increase its management over the lands which are right now Ukraine. As Zabroha searches for witches, his superiors order him to ship troopers to battle the Russians.
The prospect of going to struggle solely strengthens the Cossacks’ perception that they’re being undermined by witches, and that they should drown them — a process that Zabroha pursues with ruthless vitality as an alternative of getting ready for struggle.
The play ends with the villagers discovering a witch after drowning quite a few harmless ladies. However the witch will get the final giggle by casting a spell that causes Zabroha to marry an unappealing lady within the village.
Lastly, he’s eliminated by his superiors for neglecting his duties to organize for a protection towards the Russians.
The present struggle towards Russia has spurred many younger Ukrainians to find the theater for themselves, mentioned Evhen Nyshchuk, the supervisor of the Ivan Franko theater, which levels classics that usually enchantment to older audiences.
Past the sold-out reveals, posts with the hashtag “The Witch of Konotop” have been considered 35 million instances on TikTok, which is principally utilized by younger folks in Ukraine.
Along with younger folks’s curiosity of their historical past, mentioned Mr. Vynnychenko, the theater critic, many cultural occasions and concert events they’re usually drawn to had been canceled due to the struggle, leaving them few leisure choices.
Anastasia Shpytalenko, 15, attended the play on a current night with a bunch of buddies after ready in line 5 hours to purchase tickets. “We heard that it was extremely popular and wished to test it out,” she mentioned.
The play “reveals us what our tradition actually is,” mentioned Daria Filonenko, 15, as one other, Anastasia Yakushko, 16, chimed in: “This play is simply wow! Typically, apparently, outdated could be extra fascinating than new.”
Witches resonate strongly in Ukrainian tradition and are a mainstay of its folkways. Early within the struggle, a video from the precise city of Konotop, in northeastern Ukraine, went viral on-line. It captured a lady approaching a tank as Russian forces superior into Ukraine. She invokes witches to defy the troopers.
“Do you even know the place you’re? It’s Konotop,” the lady mentioned. “Each second lady here’s a witch,” she added earlier than telling a Russian soldier he could be cursed with impotence.
A Ukrainian pop tune a few witch cursing the enemy, written by the poet Liudmyla Horova, can usually be heard at cafes. “Enemy, you’re going to get what the witch provides you,” the lyrics go.
Witch-themed souvenirs and T-shirts have additionally proliferated throughout Ukraine after two years of struggle. 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 mentioned.
“Ukrainians,” mentioned Mr. Uryvsky, the theater director, “are attracted by the picture of the witch.”
