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Tragic, comic, metaphorical Crimea: The location of drama and geopathology

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

The study discusses the impact of locating of the play and its production in the existing geographical location. In our case, it is the peninsula of Crimea in the play Love in Crimea, as well as dealing with the symbolic meaning of this place in the texts of Ukrainian playwrights Maxim Kurochkin and Natalia Vorozhbyt, reflecting political and social changes after 2014.

The play Love in Crimea by Sławomir Mrożek represents the important work of the Polish drama - it characterizes the cycle of political, social and cultural history through the experience of three historical stages - 1910, 1928, the present. When watching the productions of this play in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, we can talk about a certain production tradition given by observing and confronting the author's clause, but also about a new meanings of the play's motives and updating in the productions after 2014.

In the play Rjussjaphobia, Kurochkin searches for documentary material - records of interviews with respondents of different generations and social statuses from Finland, Russia and Ukraine - common features and connections between the Russian-Finnish so-called The Winter War (1939-1940) and the Russian-Ukrainian war conflict associated with the annexation of Crimea. For Vorozhbit, in the play Sasha, take out the rubbish, Crimea becomes a memory, an idyllic place of dreams and fantasy against the background of the difficult reality of two women marked by the sudden death of their husband and stepfather.

The starting point of our reflections are the ideas of prominent theoreticians of dramatic and theatrical space - K. Braun, A.

Aronson and P. Brook.

We are also inspired by the classical study The Poetics of Space by the philosopher G. Bachelard, or innovative observations on the phenomenon of space and its superiority over the concept of time or space-time in contemporary cultural, literary and theatre studies (e.g. the concept of geopathology by the pioneer of theater ecology and environmental studies Una Chaudhuri).