Dhe protest was politically programmed and, as far as the Ukrainian side is concerned, completely understandable emotionally, but perhaps not really serving their cause. Before the premiere of the play “Der Vij” (The Wiy) based on Nikolai Gogol, which deals with the events of the war in Ukraine and was brought out by exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov with an international team of Ukrainian artists on the studio stage of Hamburg’s Thalia Theater on Gaussstrasse, a loud troop of about twenty Ukrainian women with banners and chants against the “propagandist of Russian culture”, whom they accused of hypocrisy and sexism, and for the subjectivity of Ukrainian culture. Serebrennikov, who has been condemning his country’s war against Ukraine since 2014 and left Moscow after the invasion began at the beginning of the year, in this production in particular dims down Russian subjectivity to the maximum, yes, he dissects it.
In Slavic mythology, the Wij is a powerful spirit from the underworld whose gaze kills. His eyes are mostly covered by huge lids, which he can only open with the help of others. The Ukrainian-born Russian author Gogol has this demon fight against reason and morality in his black romantic story of the same name from 1835. Given the extreme, irrational cruelty displayed by Russian military forces in Ukraine, commentators often speak of their “chthonic” quality, evoking this monster inextricably glued to the earth. Serebrennikov, who comes from Rostov in southern Russia near the Ukrainian border and works a lot with Ukrainians, turns him into the demon of war that robs people of their humanity. The dramatic text, which he wrote together with his Ukrainian co-author Bohdan Pokrukhin, therefore uses primarily current documentary material and assigns the Russian soldier, who is accused of his and his compatriots’ atrocities in Ukrainian captivity, a silent role for the greater part of the play to.
The soldier as non-human orc
Germans, Russians and Ukrainians play who speak German, but also English, Russian and Ukrainian. The set designed by Serebrennikow (with Elena Bulotschnikova) transports you into a dingy concrete room, the underworld of a bomb shelter or torture cellar. In complete darkness, four men with cell phone lights dance a beating choreography at the beginning, which is accompanied by the sound of breathing, human and siren wailing and hate-filled curses – fighters in a region apparently liberated by the Russians have captured an occupier, for them a monster that only arouses desires for destruction. The fact that the character embodied by Filipp Avdejew hides his face for the longest part of the two-hour evening and is put in a mud-staring dirty uniform by the costume outfit (Serebrennikov with Shalva Nikaschvili) characterizes him as an ork being who has sunk into inhumanity, as which Ukrainian military Russians often do speak to.