“Stolen Happiness” by Ivan Franko, which is one of the most popular plays in Ukrainian literature and the most significant one for Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, is staged again at the end of the anniversary 100th theatrical season. The new version suggested by the director Dmytro Bohomazov is fundamentally different from many well-known interpretations. The director presents the play, which is modern in terms of its stage language, and thus deviates from social...
“Stolen Happiness” by Ivan Franko, which is one of the most popular plays in Ukrainian literature and the most significant one for Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, is staged again at the end of the anniversary 100th theatrical season. The new version suggested by the director Dmytro Bohomazov is fundamentally different from many well-known interpretations. The director presents the play, which is modern in terms of its stage language, and thus deviates from social and domestic, ethnographic details. The story of the triangle Mykola-Anna-Mykhailo is transformed into a multi-layered psychological parable not only about the impossibility of building happiness on someone else's grief and not only about the “stolen” happiness and longing for a kind of revenge that guides the characters. The conflict of confrontation is exposed to the deep, essential categories of human existence, including promise, betrayal, passion, honor, conscience, forgiveness. The director combines mutually exclusive concepts and destroys our hardwired perception of them, thus turning the story of relationships of characters and events into a paradoxical existence, transferring them to another dimension of consciousness, which exists by its own rules and needs a corresponding retribution. However, the director avoids a specific answer: what or who controls the actions of the characters: God? Fate? Or the vortex of this incomprehensible dimension, which sucks in, tempts, plays with destinies, promises, allures, drives people mad, when they lose themselves and transcend the limits of human laws and God's commandments. Eventually, not people, but creatures, enjoying what they've done and failing to control themselves, fasten the noose of despair around their own necks.
