Odesa Ukrainian Theater performed Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" in Ivano-Frankivsk

The Vasyl Vasylko Ukrainian Theater in Odesa successfully presented its play "The Comedy of Errors" directed by Roman Fedoseev at the second Shakespeare Festival held last week in Ivano-Frankivsk.

According to Svitlana Bondar, head of the theater's literary and dramatic department, the performance was accompanied by a live orchestra led by Vadym Bessarab, who performed compositions specially written for the performance.

"The festival, which brought together leading Ukrainian theaters, artists and Shakespeare scholars, has an important mission: in times of war, Ukrainian theater is not only art, but also an instrument of public diplomacy, a space for a deep dialogue with the democratic world. This year's program included exclusively Ukrainian productions that reflect on global themes: the role of theater during the war, a new reading of the classics, cultural memory and the responsibility of the artist," she said.

In addition to the performances, the festival featured lectures, presentations, and public discussions with theater, literary, and Shakespearean scholars from Ukraine, Poland, and the UK.

"The Comedy of Errors" is one of the earliest plays by English writer William Shakespeare, the first of his comedies and one of the shortest. The play tells the story of a man who, accompanied by a servant, went in search of his twin brother, who had been lost 18 years earlier, and eventually came to the city where he lived. In Ephesus, where the brother lives and the main action of the play begins, the men are constantly confused, and their servants are also confused, because their servants are also twins.

This happened because when the babies were born, their parents bought two twin brothers from poor people to raise them as servants for their children. Then, when they were all traveling by sea, the ship got into a storm and the mother took one son and his servant, and the father of the other son was scattered in the storm and rescued by ships from two different cities. So the father raised one son and the mother raised the other far away from each other.

The plot of the comedy is based on the play by the Roman playwright Plautus, The Two Menichmae, but Shakespeare also added elements from other comedies by this playwright, for example, from Amphitryon he took the second pair of twins, the servants.

Кирило Бойко