The traces 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 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 based mostly on a traditional 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, mentioned that’s what has struck a chord with Ukrainians as a result of it reveals “what we live by way of now.”
“Tragedy comes and takes every thing from you, your love and your own home,” he mentioned.
The play dramatizes the story of a Cossack chief in a Ukrainian neighborhood nearly 400 years in the past as he tries to root out witches that native townspeople consider are liable for a drought. The motion takes place towards the backdrop of a navy risk from Czarist Russia — one thing that has resonated with Ukrainians right now as they take up day by day, and infrequently discouraging, information in regards to the battlefield and brace for missile strikes from trendy Russia on their cities at evening.
Ivan Uryvsky, the director, mentioned audiences had been significantly captivated by the sense of impending tragedy within the play, which is carried out on the Ivan Franko theater in Kyiv.
Somewhat than in search of escapism from the conflict, many Ukrainians have been flocking to the play to assist make sense of their lives, he mentioned.
“It is extremely exhausting to overplay the cruel actuality Ukrainians live 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 conflict 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 needed to attraction to an viewers keen to know its personal tradition. “That’s in demand in Ukraine now,” she mentioned.
Below 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 pattern that snowballed with the 2 Russian invasions of their nation — in Crimea and Jap Ukraine in 2014, and the assault on the whole 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 had been staged throughout Ukraine, in keeping 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 effectively under the variety of performances placed on earlier than the Covid pandemic and the invasion.
The “Witch of Konotop” debuted final spring, and the excitement round it saved rising, as did demand for tickets this yr. 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 an exquisite girl 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 girls 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 combat 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 a substitute of making ready for conflict.
The play ends with the villagers discovering a witch after drowning quite a few harmless girls. However the witch will get the final giggle 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, mentioned Evhen Nyshchuk, the supervisor of the Ivan Franko theater, which phases classics that usually attraction to older audiences.
Past the sold-out reveals, posts with the hashtag “The Witch of Konotop” have been seen 35 million instances on TikTok, which is especially 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 conflict, leaving them few leisure choices.
Anastasia Shpytalenko, 15, attended the play on a current night with a gaggle of mates after ready in line 5 hours to purchase tickets. “We heard that it was very talked-about and needed 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 might be extra attention-grabbing 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 girl mentioned. “Each second girl here’s a witch,” she added earlier than telling a Russian soldier he can be cursed with impotence.
A Ukrainian pop tune a couple of witch cursing the enemy, written by the poet Liudmyla Horova, can usually be heard at cafes. “Enemy, you’ll get what the witch provides 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 a substitute 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.”
