Bohdan Beniuk in Conversation with Andriy Kurkov: "The Theater Today Is an Emergency Room"

Andriy Kurkov: You’re almost 6 years 49 now. Meaning, you’re not aging. That’s what happens with every role you take on. Do you feel different ages when you perform different roles on stage?

Bohdan Beniuk: I’ll tell you this—no matter how tasty the bread is, it eventually goes stale. Same with me. Whatever the age, if I have to play characters much younger than me, I sort of dry out inside. Take your play, for instance–Grey Bees. As I say, I’m already “seventy-minus,” and I’m playing Serhiy Serhiyovych, whose wife is still young, beautiful, and they have a child. But I don’t think about age. If I did, I’d probably tell myself, “No, I shouldn’t play this role anymore,” because the audience might start thinking I don’t have the right to play it anymore. But that’s not the point. It turns out that what really interests people is a character’s psychology, their behavior, not so much what they see visually. Whether the role fits the actor perfectly, whether he matches the woman he’s with, because my stage partner is also getting older. We’re moving forward together. And that’s what makes your play so interesting. It keeps gaining these really fascinating layers.

AK: I want to see it again myself—I’ve already seen it three times, with breaks. The play keeps changing, but I stay the same, which is why I’m curious how Serhiy Serhiyovych keeps changing.

BB: Back when we were first working on that play, when Malakhov was still directing and you two were developing the whole dramaturgical backdrop, there was a moment when the characters discussed how long the First World War lasted. I said, “I think it was four years.” And then the characters say—maybe our war will be like that too, maybe it’ll last four years. But it turns out, those four years were just the beginning. More years kept piling on, and the war kept going, and that zone expanded. That gray zone started drifting, moving this way and that. And those characters are still alive. They just have different names now, but they exist. 

I recently saw a video from the Sumy region. A woman is being taken away right from the border—she’s crying, and they say, “Come on, we’re evacuating you.” And she replies, “But who will I leave my turkeys with? The fox will eat them—six turkeys! Should I just kill them? And the chickens?” It’s like there are magnets pulling people back—something that becomes part of you, something you can’t abandon. And that’s exactly what your characters in Gray Bees are like. 

AK: Vitaliy Malakhov actually wanted to turn it into a trilogy—stage all three parts. He wanted to include the Zaporizhzhia-Vesele episode, with Halyna, the borscht, the village, and then Crimea as well. Unfortunately, Vitaliy passed away, and we’re left with just one production—one Serhiy Serhiyovych, without his full journey. Though showing a journey on stage is hard, it’s really more suited for film.

BB: There was something so unexpected in Vitaliy’s approach to creativity. He could always show a completely different side of things. I think he could’ve pulled that off with you—turned that whole journey into a dramatic event. It would’ve worked, I think. And maybe someone else will come along who’ll want to take that on.

AK: The most important thing is trust. Trust in the director. We were just talking earlier about directors who tend to rush things. Malakhov never rushed. He worked slowly, deliberately, and with a lot of thought.

BB: There was a period when the theater was being founded, and it received the status of a municipal theater. There was that youthful idealism—everyone was young back then. Many of the actors who work in the theater today were recruited by him; they built it together. And with that, the Theater on Podil gained its reputation. That’s why there was a certain rhythm and dynamic to their international travel—they went to a lot of festivals, from America to Scotland. They got to see a different spirit of the world. And just recently, I heard one of Malakhov’s actors say, “We still dream of performing in an improvisational theater.” The dream of improvisation. However, to trully deserve to improvise, you need to have an inner world, something burning inside. Then it shows up on stage. But when that flame fades with age, it’s hard to get it back—because nature starts nudging you in other directions, giving you new ways to express yourself. 

AK: But theater gives everyone—actors and directors alike—that improvisational energy. And you do improvise, at least partly. I’ve seen the play three times, and each time it was a little different. But each time, it’s a living organism. And you’re the heart of that organism. 

The idea of theatrical hypnosis—that’s something that’s been on my mind. Because maybe you don’t know, but Grey Bees was criticized as a novel because the main character isn’t a patriot. And yet, people are lining up to see the play. It`s always sold out. And Serhiy Serhiyovych becomes a real hero. So there’s this contradiction. When someone reads the book alone, they don’t fully connect with the character; they imagine him flatly. But when they see a living person on stage, trust emerges. They want to follow him, listen to him, understand him. And that understanding—maybe that’s the most important thing.

BB: You’ve touched on a really interesting topic—improvisation in theater. I remember once, Serhiy Volodymyrovych Danchenko gathered the company for a meeting on a Tuesday, and he was dissatisfied with one of the performances from the previous week. He said, “If you don’t know how to improvise, then don’t.” And I started thinking—what does it actually mean to know how to improvise, or not know how? Later, I came to the conclusion that it’s probably about taste, about your personal formation. Improvisation depends on the person doing it—and if that person has a certain worldview and a certain approach to their craft, then their improvisation will carry that sense of taste. It’s a delicate thing. You can’t just say, “Do it this way or that.” You’re right—every time a play is performed, and you come back to see it again—this doesn’t apply only to Gray Bees, but to any play—suddenly something new appears on stage. 

Why does that happen? You say we allow ourselves a step to the left, a step to the right, stepping slightly away from the initial pattern—the one the audience saw that first time. Because something happened with your partner today, and something happened with me today. But when we, as actors, are alive to the psychology and behavior of the person opposite us—when we see the eyes—then, right in that moment, if a line is delivered differently, or the look is different, the relationship shifts. Suddenly, we start building that same relationship, but through different paths. 

It’s like in faith—they say God is one, but the roads to Him are many. Same here: it’s about weaving. And when actors know how to knit the sweater of a story, that ball of yarn gets woven into the dramatic fabric—it’s always interesting. You can unravel it and then, in the next performance, knit something new from the same thread. But how far you’re allowed to go—to the left or the right within that improvisation—that depends on the actor’s taste and talent. Because you can slip too far into improvisation, and then it becomes something else. And you shouldn’t do that kind of thing in academic theater. Although sometimes we have what we call a “green performance”—when a production is coming to the end of its run, we allow ourselves to switch roles and just mess around. It’s actually a lot of fun. Like: “Alright, let’s just play, let’s enjoy it.”

AK: Like a cheerful funeral.

BB: As for what you said about my character, Serhiy Serhiyovych, and how he was accused of not being a patriot—becoming a patriot isn’t a simple thing. It’s not a switch you can just flip and suddenly the light goes on or off. It’s detailed. It’s incredibly complex. And we, as I sometimes joke, are a “patchwork nation.” And that patchwork quality creates all these nuances—so many layers you have to work through to come to some kind of common understanding. It’s a difficult process, reaching that agreement. But we have to move in that direction. We at least have to be able to find a language for communication. Because once we find it, it’ll be easier to step over the gaps in mutual understanding that still exist, even during war. We thought the war would bring a shift in consciousness, and in some ways, it did. But then the same old things started creeping back in. So now we have to renegotiate even that shift.

AK: What readers missed in the novel—something I intentionally put in but then chose not to spell out—was the transformation of a person. Because every person, in one way or another, has values: family values, material values, the value of having a home, and so on. And then comes the next stage in a person’s development—loyalty. Loyalty to the state, to one’s neighbors, to one’s family, to one’s mother. And only after loyalty comes the stage of conscious or subconscious patriotism. In the novel, Serhiy Serhiyovych clearly has values—his bees, his family (with whom he keeps a mental connection, even if they’re physically distant and things didn’t work out). But his core values are tied to his little homeland. That patch of land behind the garden, his house, the six beehives—and above all, the bees. Because to him, the bees are both a material value and a spiritual one. Without them, he has no sense of purpose. His life loses meaning.

BB: And that’s exactly why Serhiy Serhiyovych dreams of helping his bees—this symbol of his spiritual life that keeps him grounded—to find a place where they can collect good honey, not one sown with the ashes of war.

AK: And when he sets off—not in the play, but in the novel—on that journey to find a better place for the bees, somewhere without the smell of gunpowder, without explosions—that’s the shift. That’s the transition from personal values to loyalty. He meets people who help him. He encounters others along the way. And then, when he reaches Crimea, and sees what’s happening with the Crimean Tatars, and ends up helping to get the daughter of his late beekeeper friend out of Crimea—that’s when he subconsciously becomes a patriot. Through his actions, he shows what side he’s on. And what’s interesting is that no critic picked up on this arc—the evolution of a simple human nature. Not an educated person, not someone intellectual. Just a regular person. Because ordinary people do have values. They might be loyal without even realizing it. Serhiyovych rises from the soil up to loyalty. And I believe that a country that can survive, that can protect itself, must be built not out of patriots, but out of loyal citizens. 

BB: Right now, we’re working with director Davyd Petrosyan. He stages some really interesting productions, often with a philosophical depth. He once said, “A play should stay in the repertoire no longer than a year.” And that’s kind of a double-edged sword. Because, take our play—Gray Bees, based on your work— it’s doing the opposite. It’s aging like fine wine. These relationships on stage deepen and become more vivid, and that allows the audience to truly see the people who’ve lived through all of this. If we took the play to a region that hasn’t experienced war, they’d perceive it differently. But those who have lived through it… for them it’s soul-wrenching. People cry in the theater, and not just once. It’s something you have to go through to really understand. 

It reminds me of what Yakovchenko once said, when people asked how to survive difficult times. He’d say, “You just have to live through it.” And once you’ve lived through it, that understanding begins to grow: how to dive back into a different background, how to navigate the new terrain. It’s like you climb to a height where a new landscape opens up before you. And then you realize—there’s another height beyond that. There’s no limit to this kind of discovery as long as there’s the desire to seek it. If you want to understand, it’ll open up to you. And you, with this play, have placed these characters into the boundlessness of human relationships. There’s no formula for how it’s supposed to be. You can’t just say, “Do this one thing and you’re good.” It turns out that life—or whoever’s watching over us, maybe God—gives us the chance to choose. And the choices these characters make can either bring them together and make them friends, or separate them forever. That’s why this play feels so deep. 

AK: People often ask me, “What would happen to those characters now?” I usually say, “Pashka probably survived, and most likely Serhiy Serhiyovych died with his bees.” But I don’t really know. That answer is a bit blunt and maybe harsh. Because when I see you on stage, I think: Serhiy Serhiyovych is alive forever. 

BB: Let people interpret it as they will. Either way, it’ll take them somewhere unexpected. And for many, it comes at a time when they’re stuck, when they don’t know how to move forward in life. And suddenly they see this. That’s why there’s such a boom in theater in Kyiv right now. You can’t get tickets to most plays for the next two months because people come for therapy. It’s like a visit to the doctor’s office. For two and a half hours, they disconnect from their own problems, and through the filter of the story, they sift through their feelings. Some of that sadness, that grief, stays in the sieve. And after the show, they walk out and shake it off. That’s the cleansing.

AK: Did you notice too that during the war, theater plays a much more important role, and not just a theatrical one, not just an entertaining one? In fact, not an entertaining one at all. 

BB: It’s therapeutic.

AK: Therapy and salvation.

BB Exactly. That’s why people keep coming. And then, when there’s an air raid alert and our show gets interrupted, we all go down into the lobby. Sometimes we’re there for 40 minutes or more. And those moments turn into impromptu gatherings. Everyone’s standing around, and I’ve led a few of them. Sometimes, when the alert lasts too long and we can’t finish the show because of curfew, people say, “It’s fine—we’ll come back and buy tickets again” because that post-show conversation gave them something just as valuable. 

Once, an American TV crew came to film us. At that time, we didn’t have a proper generator yet. Thankfully, the sponsor who built our theater still supports us—they eventually got us an independent power system. Back then, we only had small 3kW backup batteries. One for the audience, so they wouldn’t trip while walking in. One for stage lights. One for the dressing rooms and sound system. And once, right before curtain time, the power went out. We couldn’t even open the curtain—it was all manual. So we pulled it open by hand. The audience was already seated. And I stood up and said, “Tonight, we’re doing things a little differently. I’ll explain what’s happening on stage. This here is the set. This is where the scene begins—it’s morning. Actors, come out. This is my wife, this is my son. We’ll be playing it like this...” Everything was happening in semi-darkness. I narrated the entire play. Gave transitions. It turned into a kind of master class. And the American crew filmed it. They thought that’s how we always perform! But that kind of thing you can only pull off once, in extreme conditions. Still, we finished the performance. The audience really loved it.

Before this interview started, Mr. Andriy told me that he already has another play taking shape in his mind. The plot is there, but he doesn’t yet know who’ll direct it or who’ll play the roles. But the fact that you already have the concept—that’s huge. It needs to be written down right away. 

AK: The new play has a small thread tying it to Grey Bees, because in it, too, there’s something about candy. But this time, the candy tastes different. Not sweet at all. Maybe it’s even the same candy that was frozen in a backpack out in the field—“Chervonyi Mak” (Red poppy)—the very ones a fallen volunteer had been carrying to kids in the gray zone for New Year’s. So yes, it’s connected. It’s all connected. I think I got hit with this strange boomerang of joy the first time I saw the play. And now I keep coming back, hoping for that same boomerang to strike again—to push me toward new ideas.

BB: Looking back at my acting career, I’ve never once dreamed of playing a specific character or being in a particular play. That was never my approach. Instead, these people, directors, would appear in my life and hand me these roles on a silver platter. They’d introduce me to a story, make me fall in love with it, and from that character, I’d end up reaping all kinds of rewards. It’s a strange sort of fate. And Grey Bees was the same. I remember how Malakhov arranged the scenes, how he pieced everything together like a chess game, how he agonized over the model, how it all started to come alive for him, how he worried about whether it would work. And somehow, we ended up with this version that now pulses with life. A powerful kind of life, the kind that transmits energy. Energy that reaches the audience gives them exactly what they came for: inner cleansing. So if this new play you’re imagining carries the same spirit as Gray Bees, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll once again show up with that silver platter and hand me my next role.

Just recently, the American director Richard Nelson came back to us. He staged Conversations in Tusculum in 2022. The play is fascinating—the research, the form, the way it’s presented. And then he, Richard Nelson, went back to America and sent a letter. Well, not just randomly—our literary director Oksana took him to the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine on the territory of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and there he saw a poster of Les Kurbas’s theater. That sparked his curiosity—who was this man? In America, he dug up some information, then looked into it more from Ukraine, and finally sent us a letter saying he’d written a play about Les Kurbas. And I thought—well, now we’re stepping into historical territory. Historians will weigh in: Is this accurate? Is it fictionalized? Theatrical scholars will start analyzing—did this American interpret Kurbas’s work correctly or not? 

But Nelson pulled off something brilliant. He wrote a play where six actresses gather after a performance—Les Kurbas had just staged Macbeth in Ukrainian, for the first time, near Bila Tserkva, in a village. After the show, they were paid not in money, but in food—potatoes, cabbage, beets, lard—because there was no money. The troupe went home, the women gathered in one room, kids in the next, and while cooking, they talked about how the performance went. Meanwhile, Kurbas had taken the male actors to a neighboring village to see a Yiddish theater production. So the women are left to reflect. And this idea is so compelling. The way he structured it draws you in. Now the play has found its rhythm, and the actresses are taking it to New York and also to the Shakespeare Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, where we’ll be performing too. 

AK: Do you have any unfulfilled dreams? A role you still want to play?

BB: I've never had those kinds of dreams. It always starts with someone wanting to work with me. It’s always been like that for me. There’s a kind of rhythm to it—a pulse. If I start searching on my own, it’ll mean something inside me has shifted. And I’m not there yet. Right now, I’m “almost 70.” Soon I’ll be “70-plus.” And as long as my soul still lives inside my body and moves in rhythm, I still have a right to exist.

AK: You know, we have something in common—you and I. For me, the process matters more than the result. Because if the process is good, the result will follow.

BB: When you play, when you really play your role, it lets you pour in all these invisible things that act like magnets for whoever is watching. I remember as a kid, I had one toy: a metal truck made of tin. I’d play with it in the sand all the way up through seventh grade. I’d dig tunnels, build roads, drive that truck around like I was in a trance. My mom would have to drag me out of the sandbox, dust me off, clean me up. That sense of play never left me. You get pulled away, you do other things, but eventually you find your way back to the same toy, the same joy. 

Even now, I can’t just do one thing at a time. I’m always doing something else on the side. I even eat standing up. I really do! Sure, if I’m out somewhere I’ll sit at the table. But at home, I’m doing something—folding clothes, feeding the dogs, brewing tea, and eating all the while.

AK: So wait—do you eat borscht standing up?

BB: No. For borscht, I have to sit. Borscht is sacred; it demands proper posture.

When you share meals like that with people you enjoy being around, the conversations bring out new ideas. We’re always learning something. Just yesterday, I was at the pedagogical institute. Some of our soldiers came—they watched the film My Carpathian Grandpa. I gave a little presentation about it too. We talked about how we made the film, how director Zaza Buadze worked on it, where we shot it, and how the script was written. When my wife Ulyana and I first read Zaza’s script—it was originally called The Umbrella Sky—we were surprised. The story is set in the Carpathians, and the main character, whom I play, is a circus performer. Ulyana said, “A circus performer living in the Carpathians?” And his daughter’s name is Nina? In the Carpathians? Really? 

However, there was something romantic in Zaza’s vision, a Georgian kind of romanticism. He wove it into the story of a family: a grandfather, his daughter, who had lived abroad in Italy, gave birth to a son there, and died. The grandson brings her ashes to Ukraine. The mother’s gone, the father and grandson are strangers. They can’t talk. The boy doesn’t speak a word of Ukrainian. He remembers how his mom tried to teach him and he rejected it. And then suddenly, they’re face-to-face. And through all the conflict, the difficult conversations, something starts to happen—they begin to understand one another. By the end of the film, they build a bond—the grandfather and the grandson—across generations. That’s what we always talk about: lineage. Knowing who came before us, and who’s coming after. That’s what Zaza captured in his film—he created that emotional bridge. That’s what makes it so powerful.

AK: To me, theater’s transformation started even before 1991, in the late ’80s. And for me, it really begins with Malakhov. That was the break from Soviet theater: it wasn’t social realism anymore, not like the kind you’d see at Lesya Ukrainka Theater, where actors made geometric hand gestures instead of living their roles.

BB: Back when I graduated in 1978, directors like Valentyn Kozmenko-Delinde were already experimenting. He gathered a group of actors. We’d rehearse in the mornings, then work through the night to put on shows. The Molodyy Theater (Young Theater) actually came out of that movement—a bunch of artists who found each other and eventually formed a municipal theater. Vitaliy Malakhov was one of them, too.

Malakhov’s theater, in the beginning, was just a bunch of classmates. They didn’t even have a name yet. They were doing musical performances, mixing in ballet, music, improvisation—it was totally experimental. Eventually, they formalized it. When the new building was constructed on Andriivs'kyi Descent, Malakhov realized something important: you’re now in this modern, beautiful theater. But how do you surprise the audience? With the same old material? No, he brought in ten up-and-coming directors, all with fresh perspectives. Some of their productions stuck, some didn’t. But that shift was what helped him reinvent himself and the theater.

AK: That’s a powerful thought, that academic theaters have their limits. They can`t evolve, they can’t start a revolution from within.

BB: Someone new always has to arrive. Look at what happened when Yevhen Nyshchuk came to the Franko Theater. Suddenly, there were new directors. Then came The Witch of Konotop—a huge hit. It toured abroad, showcasing our theater internationally. Now our theater is pulsing with a different rhythm. We finally have directors. That was always our bottleneck—tons of actors, barely any directors. Now, diplomats, consular staff, and foreign audiences see that success, and it raises the profile of Ukrainian culture. It’s a real breakthrough because for so long, Moscow monopolized everything. Now, Ukrainian theater is showing that it has a soul. We’re no longer stuck in the Soviet mold . 

I once took a student group to China for an international theater school festival. Fifty schools—from South Korea to Edinburgh, Scotland,—each performed a one-hour version of King Lear. The Korean school used traditional theater with wings and stylized movements. At one point, I thought: Shakespeare must be turning in his grave fifty times! But the Polish performance stunned me. There was no King Lear at all, just the three daughters and an ornate crown. They spent an hour kicking that crown around on stage, ignoring it. And we understood—the crown was Lear, and they were sorting out their own lives, completely disregarding him. That was my favorite piece. For me, it was about witnessing fifty different visions. Every culture infused Shakespeare with its own soul. 

When I play Richard III, I know the English actor can perform it more precisely. But we bring our feelings to it. That’s why King Lear can feel like a story about today, about us. Sometimes it feels like Shakespeare was writing about Ukraine. That’s what makes classics so powerful—they dissolve into every nation’s essence. Every person lives by the same emotional truths. And theater helps us explore them, sometimes by avoiding mistakes, sometimes by leaping into new territory. Like I said, your Grey Bees novel is brilliant. It’s nourishing. When I said it’s Shakespearean—I meant it in the sense that it touches something eternal. Of course, not every Shakespeare play works on stage. Some are still impossible to fully stage or decode. But what matters is that we try, and that we want to. 

Yesterday I was in Vinnytsia, attending an event related to the Order of Saint Panteleimon. It’s an award in Ukraine given to medical workers for saving lives, discovering something new, or performing heroic acts in healthcare. When the event began, the National Anthem was played. According to the script, I was supposed to say, “Please stand for the Anthem of Ukraine.” Later that evening, a thought struck me: do we still need to ask people to stand for the anthem? Haven’t we reached a point where that should come instinctively—automatically, from within? Just as we do now, at 9:00 a.m. every day, we observe a moment of silence. Sometimes we’re driving or rushing somewhere, and some stop, some don’t. Sometimes during a funeral at Independence Square, traffic halts. Someone gets out of their car and salutes, someone else stays seated. Maybe they physically can’t stand. But all these small acts are gradually shaping a deeper cultural awareness within us. The people who gave their lives for Ukraine’s independence are, in a sense, urging us to build a new way of living—one rooted in respect, in compassion for those who’ve lost someone, who are now alone, and who need support. We’re learning to see life differently. The sooner we internalize this—how we should treat each other, how we view one another—the more people will begin to take responsibility for the country, to think about its future. We live now with this duality: someone dodging service lives next to someone who’s gone to the front. How do you hold back your emotions? How do you avoid pointing fingers? How do you not let it eat away at you—knowing you’re surrounded by people who haven’t yet formed a common understanding of what kind of country we’re trying to build? These are serious challenges. But what we’re learning now is the science of independence. And it’s absolutely essential.

AK: Just yesterday I read about a severely wounded soldier on the Donbas front who couldn’t be evacuated. A drone was used to deliver blood for a transfusion. Another soldier—who barely had any medical training—performed the transfusion and saved his life. Later he was evacuated. In many ways, culture is the blood of a nation. And just like that blood transfusion, culture needs to reach every Ukrainian, especially those abroad who are living within other cultures. 

I simply want to urge all our viewers and readers: never forget your link to Ukrainian culture. Culture will support you even if your heart is aching. And people like Bohdan here—they’re our first responders. The theater today is like an emergency room. It’s not outpatient care, it’s not a hospital, it’s a place you go to get a fresh transfusion. You leave with clearer thoughts, renewed spirit, and strength to keep living and working in a country that’s been at war for eleven years. You learn to see yourself in that context with clarity. Not through passive “adjustment,” but through purposeful understanding of your new role and your new identity. You’re still with the country. Even if you’re physically abroad, you remain with Ukraine, with Ukrainian culture. And that connection is kept alive through culture—through the desire to read a new Ukrainian book, to see a new Ukrainian play, to go to a Ukrainian film. To ask: What is this about? What does this say about me? All of us are mirrors trying to hold on to the truths we reflect when we come into contact with something new, especially in the cultural realm.

Translated by Anna Petelina