The president of The Kyiv Players theater group
Being involved in theater and cinema production, I was deeply interested in meeting with Patricia Maguire, an English teacher at the British Council who moonlights as president of The Kyiv Players, an amateur theater group.
Patricia, or Patsy, as she prefers be called, came to Kyiv almost four years ago and decided right off the bat to organize a theater group. As a British citizen, it was for her “some kind of a national tradition, as in every town and city in Great Britain there is an amateur theater group.” Even when she went to teach in Madrid, spending 25 years there, she still continued her theater activity. But it was only in Kyiv that Patsy tried herself out as a theater leader: “I was always part of a theater group, but in Kyiv there wasn’t anything of the kind before,” she recalled. With the new position she faced new responsibilities and difficulties, “the major one being finding a theater.”
As Patsy explained, the prices for renting a theater are going up tremendously and all the expenses, offset by the income from the performances, usually fall on the shoulders of the group members.
The main difference between European and Ukrainian theatres, Patricia said, is that here tickets are much cheaper. Another difference she pointed out is the repertoire of Ukrainian theatres. “Here they stage more classic plays, whereas in Europe there are more modern plays,” said Patricia, adding that she prefers modern plays that always have something original to them.
The history of The Kyiv Players began when Patsy met someone at a party, who had experience in amateur dramatics, and they decided to start a theatre group together. After gathering a group of five actors, the group staged their first performances, three plays by Anton Chekhov: “The Proposal,” “Swan Song,” and “The Evils of Tobacco.” Now, as Patsy stressed proudly, the group consists of more than 30 members. Besides, as the troupe grows, the choice of plays also changes.
“Now we are doing a reading of ‘Under Milk Wood,’ a major work by Dylan Thomas, a very famous Welsh poet. It is about a day in a village that can be any village in the world,” Patsy said. This newest project has around 34 characters played by all the troupe’s members and will be staged on March 2.
“When I choose the play I have to consider the language,” noted Patsy, pointing out that all productions of The Kyiv Players are performed in English. The Ukrainian audience, as well as the Ukrainian members of her troupe, are interested in seeing and performing works in English. The Kyiv Players is composed half-and-half of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. “I would like to think of us as an international group rather than an ex-pat group,” Patsy said.
A major difficulty for Patsy has been dealing with inexperienced members of her troupe. Being both organizer and theater director, she receives help tackling all of her responsibilities, but as she mentioned, “a lot of members are more interested in being on a stage.”
At the very beginning the group got by without scenery or a piano player. However, “we have overcome the difficulties of the theater, the difficulties of the scenery, of language, and are progressing,” Patsy concluded. She regrets that she must leave the group, as she’s going back to Spain soon.
Patsy explained to me that back in England she graduated with a degree in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, then “tried and liked living abroad.” She decided to try living in Eastern Europe long before coming to Ukraine.
“I was in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1997, I was used to Moscow’s exteriors and adapted quite well to Kyiv – there wasn’t anything to shock me,” Patsy recalled, and mentioning that “here there are lots of old-fashioned things, like trams and trolleybuses, that remind me of Spain when I went there 25 years ago.”
Even amidst her work with the theater, conducting lessons at the British Council, walking along her favourite place, Andriyivskiy Uzviz, admiring the “still original and less commercialized Lavra,” reading books, watching her favourite movies, and communicating with other theater devotees, Patsy still finds time for travelling. One of the places she likes is Poltava region, where she went “to see Dikanka, the place from Gogol’s story.”
