Filmed and available to wacth online as part of this year's International Online Theatre Festival, this one hour physical mime piece from The Left Bank Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine is a masterclass in non-verbal theatrical tragi-comedic conversational acting.
We are shown a relatively poor house interior, in drab browns, and throughout the hour we become the flies on the wall watching the comings and goings, the relationships, the feuds, the innocent (and sometimes not so innocent) happenings of three generations of the same family all living together, sharing the same bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen etc, and just how they manage to cope with this. It is the mid 1990s, and accompanying the on-stage action is some exceptionally well-chosen music. Except for a central section where they listen to Ukraine radio. This was the only section for me which felt a little ambiguous; not only because I was unable to understand the commentary - and the audience obviously did as they laughed several times through this section - but mostly because it was the surrealness of this. Two old ladies sitting down to make dumplings; an intruder enters and procedes to burgle the house, one of the women notices and chases after him with a knife; this does not work, so the other lady pulls out a gun and forces him to sit and start making dumplings with them. It's funny, it's very funny, but it jarred against the pseudo-realism set up by the rest of the play.
The grandmother observes religious tradition and crosses herself every time she passes the picture of The Virgin Mary. Her offspring scoff at and ingore this. Touchingly, after she dies [a very moving sequence where we see her walk off with a young man in uniform - her long-dead husband] the youngest boy puts the icon back on the wall and reinstates this tradition.
It's a very gentle 'family portrait'. It's relatable, watchable, sympathetic, and at times quite humorous. There are sections in the play which anyone and everyone can on some level relate to. It is also without language, and therefore transcends country borders or lingusitic ability too.
The 8 performers are very proficient in their miming. They had all been given varying degrees of grotesque full-face masks, the older ones, more grotesque than the younger, but all with some kind of physical facial deformity. This made us pity them all the more, but it also made the actors use their bodies much more exactingly than if they'd have been without them. Each gesture needed to be exaggerated just enough to make it 'real' and not too much, bringing out the comedy, but also the tragedy of each situation with great attention to detail and a deal of sympathy.
The set, the people, their situations and the masks together all reminded me very much of the ouevre of Jan Saudek, a renegade Czech photographer.
Directed by Matteo Spiazzi, with the eight cast being Oleh Hotsuliak, Mykhailo Dosenko, Oleh Stefan, Anton Vakhliovskyi, Oleksandr Piskunov, Anastasiia Pustovit, Tetiana Krulikovska, and Kateryna Kachan; this was a very enjoyable, quite humorous, but mostly very human and touching portrait of a family. Вітаю і дякую.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 9/5/20
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