Staged at Kharkov's Taras Shevchenko Theatre, Andrei Zholdak's two productions demonstrate his basic principle-a rapid cinematic montage of visions. He presented Turgenev's refined psychological comedy as a film bearing a sequence of photographs-random shots of bizarre life on a country estate. The action is laid in a never-ending rain, and every scene comes as a raindrop.
The traditional theatre bases on a coherent plot. Zholdak turns it upside down to make it a motley arrangement of instants stopped short. His personages are mere puppets. Their mechanistic movement has a sophisticated pattern, which the cast follows with the utmost precision and brilliance. Exclamatory utterances are never pronounced-they are inscribed in large lettering on boards carried to and fro across the stage. Fragmentary words are all the actors utter, loudly and always with the same intonation. Forming kaleidoscopic phrasal combinations, those words lose meaning.
Zholdak's other Baltic House item, "4.5", is even more abstract. Subtitled, "Goldoni. Venice", it rests on the principles of poetic theatre, pioneered by Les Kurbas, trailblazing Ukrainian stage director of the 20th century's first half.
Water is protagonist and setting here. It trickles or pours down from the grid-iron, soaks the actors to the bone, and fills aquariums arranged on the stage. The babble of those man-made torrents comes as incidental music. Water is here a perpetuum mobile of inanimate elements. In stylish 18th century settings, dressed-up Venetians do absurd things with a pompous air, and pronounce numbers instead of words. The vocabulary of the play comprises 75 entries. The list is circulated in the audience in a tongue-in-cheek call to come at something meaningful in a provocative, all-penetrating absurdity. Zholdak's toy Venice is a Babel of madness.
Zholdak's theatre is not unlike Brueghel's paintings-an aloof, detailed and colourful portrayal of the chaos of human existence, with a montage of the many parallel plots. Profoundly original, and a law unto himself, Andrei Zholdak does not create a multimedia milieu in which the synthetic image would finally oust the drama. In fact, he proceeds from Gogol's phantasmagoric naturalism, the old Ukrainian vaudeville, and Chekhovian emotion-laden vagueness. Zholdak's theatre rests on fantastic humans, and his cast performs spontaneously to offer full-blooded figures, however impromptu the scenic finds might be. Underlying those pioneer productions is humour made by amazement not mirth.
Foreign stage reviewers relished what they regarded as the director's "Slav originality".
