Theater in Kyiv during war - 100 000
The russian-Ukrainian war is still going on, but Kyiv as the capital has millions of people living in the city now, despite the dangers of bombings, and despite such dangers, the cultural life is going on.
The "Theater on Podil" had a performance "100 000", Hundred Thousand (that's the name) by Karpenko-Kary, that's an old performance and a very famous one.
At 18:00 the lights turned down. I thought they got turned down because it was time to start the performance, but it appeared that the electricity was turned off. That's the reality we live in - the whole city has a schedule of the time when electricity is turned off for energy-saving reasons.
Bohdan Beniuk, the main actor came on the stage to speak with people. I know him personally, and in past, I spoke with him several times, he used to be a Member of Parliament in past and he is really great actor.
While he was speaking, it was still not clear will there be performance or if it will be moved to another day. But the power generators turned on and after some time sound checks were done, and they decided to make the performance although that's the first time it happened in such conditions. Bohdan explained that this performance used to be very popular in Spain in the past, as the topic of it is about business and money, themes which were interesting for the audience 100 years ago and remain interesting now.
"100 000" was written in 1889, so more than 100 years ago. It shows the atmosphere of the Ukrainian village of the XIX century. The main hero Kalytka (Bohdan Beniuk played this role very well) dreams of getting rich and buying more land.
My crypto-blog readers would be able to recognize in him crypto-investors, who want to get reach and has both FOMO and FUD. Kalytka gets the proposition to buy fake money (which is not recognizable from the real one) 1000 for 50, so after testing that this fake money is acceptable, he decides to buy 100 000.
This performance is a comedy, and there are other storylines, (I.e. love story of Kalytka's son), but there is no happy end for Kalytka's business. After buying fake money, he discovered that only a few banknotes are valid, and the rest of the package is just paper. Maybe you can see some similarities with crypto-investors who wanted to become rich fast and bought tokens, which remained only "on paper" or just digits without market value.
The performance continues for 3 hours. In ordinary conditions, there should be a half an hour break but because of nowadays war conditions there was no break. The curfew starts at 23, so people should have time to get back home. There play of actors' is amazing and all the characters were great. It's not possible to transfer the impression by written words.
But I hope that at least minimally I was able to show the atmosphere. The Theatre on Podil" is one of the most famous theaters and they often go abroad with their performance. For example, Bohdan Beniuk told a story about how their performance was greater very well in Edinburgh, UK. So who knows, maybe someday in the future, you will be able to attend it in your country. And definitely, you should visit Kyiv some day.
