“...but the most remarkable event of that time was the arrival in the capital of the African tragedian Ira Aldridge. Shevchenko could not fail to become close to him: the two had far too much in common. Both were pure, honest souls, both were true artists, both had suffered cruel oppression from childhood. One, in order to get into the theatre he passionately loved, which was closed ‘to dogs and Negroes’, hired himself out as an actor’s servant; the other was flogged for a candle end he burnt while drawing... They could not speak to each other except through an interpreter, but they sang each other the songs of their homelands and understood one another,” we read in the memoirs of Yekaterina Tolstaya-Junge, daughter of Fyodor Tolstoy, the Russian artist, medallist and count who took part in the effort to buy Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom.
The New York-based Yara Arts Group and its director Virlana Tkacz, whose idea it was, set out to recreate this meeting on stage: “I was less interested in presenting an accurate biography of Aldridge than in modelling that meeting, in looking at what they might have talked about between themselves. I always start from the situation I have — the texts, the people, the possibilities. Since the kobzar, the wandering bard, is a topos of Shevchenko’s work, I really wanted to use that figure. Julian Kytasty and I have been working together for a very long time — in fact, we started the project with him — and then Jeremy Tardy joined us, and I realised he could play Aldridge.”
The whole production, Dark Night, Bright Stars, is built on parallels between Ukrainian and African American culture, between Ukrainian and African music, between the Ukrainian and English languages. Audiences have a unique chance to witness the atmosphere that reigned in the house of Count Fyodor Tolstoy and, as it were, to eavesdrop on the conversation between Aldridge and Shevchenko. The key moment of the play is the portrait of Aldridge that Shevchenko wanted to draw. From the memoirs we also learn that the work dragged on because the actor could not sit still. Shevchenko often grew angry when Aldridge fidgeted: “The tragedian would solemnly take the seat prepared for him and sit for a while, grave and quiet, but his lively nature could not bear it: he would start pulling faces, joking with us, putting on a comically frightened look whenever Shevchenko glanced at him. We laughed the whole time.” Aldridge sang English songs nobody there had ever heard, and Shevchenko became so absorbed in them that he would forget to draw. In Yekaterina Tolstaya-Junge’s memoirs we read: “Every portrait session ended with the two new friends singing folk songs — one in English, the other in Ukrainian, then both in Russian — until Aldridge began dancing a jig and acting out comic scenes. All this was met with stormy applause.”
The actors managed to convey this sonic atmosphere organically, conceptually weaving together gospel and the traditional Ukrainian kobzar style of singing to the bandura, performed by Julian Kytasty. The play’s musical line deserves special attention. The actors chose the songs themselves, guided by the atmosphere and drawing on the concept: “The two hymns we use in the play come from the 1820s prayer book of the church where Aldridge’s father was a minister,” says Virlana Tkacz. “We found the original hymnals of those Protestant hymns, and in them were two written in England in the 18th century that were sung in African American churches. They suited our theme. We found the music and the words. The hymns are by Isaac Watts: ‘When I Can Read My Title Clear’ and ‘My Happy Home’.”
The final song, “Jerusalem, My Happy Home”, which closes the play — first in English, sung by Shona Tucker, and then joined by a Ukrainian version in a duet with Mykola Shkaraban — is like an ellipsis left hanging in the air of the theatre like an echo, in a space filled with an unmistakable longing for home and with Shevchenko’s yearning for Ukraine. The play ends with a retrospective passage telling how Shevchenko never managed to get to Ukraine. Nor did Shevchenko ever meet Ira Aldridge again: the actor came back to St Petersburg only after his death. In Yekaterina Tolstaya-Junge’s memoirs we read with what rapture Shevchenko described Ukraine: “There was one cloud on the Kobzar’s horizon: he longed for his dear Ukraine! How often he spoke to me of his beloved homeland, how much he said, and how beautifully! He painted pictures of the steppes with their lonely burial mounds, the little farmsteads drowning in cherry orchards, the old willows bending over the quiet Dnipro, the light dugout boats gliding across its surface, the bluffs of Kyiv and the golden-domed monasteries: ‘That is where we ought to live, you and I, that is where we ought to die!’ And as I listened to his rapturous, poetic speech, I came to love a land I had never known.”
The sound textures are “stitched together” with textual material the actors selected during rehearsals: “First and foremost we use the poems Shevchenko wrote at the time he met Aldridge,” explains Virlana Tkacz. “But he wrote little then, only two poems, so we use poems he wrote in exile. Moving from one set of poems to the other allowed us to convey a certain contrast of moods. We chose the texts that suited us and ‘fell into place’ during rehearsals.” The Shakespeare quotations recited by Jeremy Tardy were also chosen according to a particular concept, Virlana says: “These are excerpts from Aldridge’s roles. He played Othello, he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, he played Macbeth and King Lear, but since Macbeth was banned in Russia we don’t use those texts — only King Lear, and another of Aldridge’s well-known roles, from the play The Padlock, in which he played Mungo. Our choice of Shakespeare texts is based on reading through the material in four huge books about Aldridge.”
Asked how the actors themselves reacted to the parallels between Shevchenko and Aldridge, Virlana Tkacz replied: “I don’t sit down and invent anything. I bring material, but we don’t use much of what I bring; usually we use whatever somehow ‘sticks’ together. A very interesting moment came when Jeremy and Shona came here, saw the portrait of Aldridge and learned more about Shevchenko himself. Because in New York they performed the play entirely in English, as if without really understanding what it was about. But here it turned out that there are many parallels between Ukrainian and African American history. Those parallels interest them greatly. They want to know who their Shevchenko is. Is it King, or Washington, or Du Bois — which of them could become their ‘Shevchenko’?”
Yekaterina Tolstaya-Junge’s memoirs can also refute a great many recent theories about Shevchenko: “Our trips in the white northern nights to the fishing grounds on the shore will remain unforgettable for me. There was drinking and singing, but had Shevchenko allowed himself any excess or impropriety, it would undoubtedly have outraged both me and my mother, for views on a girl’s upbringing were different then. In the course of two years, during which I saw Shevchenko almost every day, with rare exceptions, I never once saw him drunk, never heard a single indecent word from him and never noticed him behaving in any way differently from other well-bred people...” The play does, however, include a scene in which Mariia Pleshkevych, playing the young Yekaterina Tolstaya-Junge, teases Shevchenko as he pours rum into his tea: “Taras Hryhorovych, this is supposed to be tea with rum, not rum with tea...” I don’t know whether the scene was taken from the memoirs or invented for “comic relief”.
Still, the likeness between Shevchenko and Aldridge, the emphatically aristocratic bearing of both, and the fact that the two communicated successfully without knowing each other’s language are beyond dispute. After talking for a while they begin to understand each other and seem to pick up the language, as if by Heinrich Schliemann’s famous method, and towards the end of the play Shevchenko uses the word “beautiful” more and more often, which lends every situation a certain comedy. Aldridge, too, is presented ambiguously: here he dances mockingly, the way white people mock Black people, aping a monkey. The joyful frenzy Aldridge has worked himself into, once again unable to sit still in front of the artist, breaks off, and this at once becomes a point where Aldridge and Shevchenko meet: the latter imitates a hopak and says, “And this is how they mock us...” At the same time the play features the song “Who Is the Man We Call King”, which hints at Aldridge’s supposed royal roots. Virlana Tkacz explains: “Shona knows more about that, because she has been to Africa and researched all this, but we wanted to tell the story of Aldridge’s childhood. There are legends that he was an African prince. We know that’s not true, but where such ideas came from... perhaps from songs like this. We wanted to bring in this song to convey some of the legends around his name. Aldridge’s passion for the stage and for those ‘royal’ roles, and his passion for Shakespeare — it’s all connected with his mother. Like Shevchenko, he lost his mother at an early age, and he idealised her constantly.”
Finally, a word on the visual devices used in the production. Waldemart Klyuzko, who created the visuals, shared his concept with us: “The projections are the result of collaboration between the actors, the director and the set designer within the theatre space and its existing lighting. Each space dictated its own adjustments. The basis of the visuals was the desire to illustrate the text in space.”
So what are we left with after the play? Once again the principle of “looking from the outside” proves effective. The Americans’ detached view of Ukrainian history through the prism of literary history may be somewhat simplified, but it reveals yet another facet of the unknown Shevchenko — a facet that we in Ukraine, who knows, might never have managed to “dig up” and scrub clean of its crust of stereotypes. The consonance of “slavery” and “serfdom” in this production is so obvious that the bolder viewer will inevitably find themselves comparing Ukrainians with African Americans. Whether such a comparison is appropriate may depend on whether African Americans find their Shevchenko — or, more likely, on whether we find our own Shevchenko, and whether we finally learn to follow that simple precept: “Do not shun your own, and learn from others… ” Only by forbidding ourselves to be slaves will we become free, for freedom lies not in permissiveness but in the limits a person sets for themselves.
Dr. Myroslav Trofymuk
Born in Lviv. Designer, director, musician, researcher, founder of ZEMLA STUDIO. Master of classical philology and digital marketing, PhD in the history of Ukrainian literature. Member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Since 2022 he has authored the CENTRUM MUNDI audio show for Polish Radio for Ukraine, continuing the same research into the contemporary music scene in Ukraine and Poland.
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