Loving Kyiv’s Legends

The current war has cemented many Ukrainians’ love affairs with their hometowns. The more Russian missiles rain down on Kharkiv, Odesa, and Kyiv, the stronger the attachment their residents seem to feel toward where they live. Even Kyiv, thought of as an aloof capital by many, has become an object of affection. The May premiere of Catherine Penkova’s Legends of Kyiv at the Theater of Drama and Comedy on the Left Bank captured this love. 

Penkova’s play, directed by Natalia Sivanenko, tells the stories of many historical events and beloved personages across more than a thousand years of the city’s history. The family-friendly play brings history and fictional tales to life as it connects otherwise scattered incidents into a single tapestry. The theater pulled together a dozen actors from its own company as well as other Kyiv theaters to remind viewers that Kyiv can be, and should be, loved despite the current hardships.

The Theater on the Left Bank has a rich history. The troupe was organized in 1978 and produced its first offering a few months later downtown at the Republic Puppet Theater (now the Brodsky Choral Synagogue). The company moved around until the city government turned it over to Eduard Mytynsky to run as the “Theater in the Lobby” at the former customs building and Cosmos Cinema on the Dnipro’s left bank. The current company took shape with Ukrainian independence and began presenting up to 50 performances a year. Ukrainian language productions steadily replaced Russian language plays following independence.

Known for small, topical plays during the late Soviet era, the theater was given more leeway than more prominent companies across the river. From time to time, the company would insert contemporary works into its repertoire of classical drama. Its diminutive size and out-of-the-way location attracted some of Kyiv’s top actors of the era who were searching for more modern—and pointed—works, since Soviet cultural bosses found small, hidden away venues less threatening.

The company embraced contemporary, topical drama as soon as the fetters of Soviet censorship came off. New company directors Stas Zhyrkov and Tamara Trunova made the theater a seat of social and political commentary following their joint appointments in 2019. Olesya Zhurakivska became artistic director in 2023.

In March 2022, the company premiered Tamara Trunova’s award-winning production of Natalia Vorozhbyt’s powerful play Bad Roads. This work tells the stories of shattered roads and relationships in Donbas after Russia claimed the area as its own in 2014. As a sign of the times, the theater warned patrons that, in addition to sounds of shelling and explosions, some of the characters speak Russian and sing Russian songs. This bilingualism, the warning added, corresponds to the linguistic realities of Eastern Ukraine at the time.

The theater’s left-bank location has shaped its feisty reputation. Located on Brovarskyi Prospekt across the street from the Circle Line’s Livoberezhna station, the theater forces audience members to search it out, just as audiences would when heading to London’s South Bank or New York’s Brooklyn. Opposite the hilly historic city center on the other side of the river, the flat left bank has remained something of an afterthought. Soviet-era housing construction turned the area into one of the city’s most populous areas, as housing block after housing block sprang to life like mushrooms after rain. 

Like the South Bank and Brooklyn, this area remained “the wrong side of the river” to many. But, just as for its London and New York counterparts, this perception has begun to change. As Legends of Kyiv shows, Kyivans have come to love their city, even its less distinguished locations, and left-bank Kyiv no longer seems quite so culturally distant. 

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute