A language controversy erupted at a Kyiv theater, where only one "simpleton" spoke in Ukrainian.

On Sunday, December 15, a language scandal erupted in Kyiv. At the "Suzirya" theater, during the performance "Will You Take the Bed?", a Russian-language presentation was featured.

This was reported by one of the attendees, Anastasia Dytruk. According to her, 90 out of 100 minutes were in Russian.

She notes that before the performance began, the artistic director of the theater, Alexey Kuzhelny, warned the guests that the main character would speak in Russian at the start of the act, joking that no one has ever died from hearing Russian here, implying that everything was fine, and that anyone who needed it could have sheets with translations of her lines into Ukrainian.

"Well, I thought, okay. Maybe there are some initial lines for laughter, to set the mood, or something. But it turned out that the main character spoke Russian for about 90 minutes out of 100. There are two characters in the play. A Russian-speaking 'intellectual' teacher and a Ukrainian-speaking 'simpleton', a conductor from Ukrzaliznytsia — a 'C student with hints of a troublemaker,'” she adds.

She then added that after the performance, she and her parents witnessed Russian-speaking guests expressing their outrage at this positioning, this worn-out Moscow narrative: for intellectuals — Russian, and for simple workers — Ukrainian.

"I am absolutely sincerely shocked by all of this. If only the Russian language used, which the artistic director defended at the entrance, had added any value to the performance — but it didn’t! There is no meaning or justification for this production. Would the performance have lost anything if the main character spoke Ukrainian from the very beginning? No! The language issue was not raised, not revealed, and the essence of the entire event was not about that. So what is the essence?! Why does Russian sound from the stage of a theater in the heart of Kyiv? Why does the artistic director defend this right? The author of the play, Anatoliy Krym, is a 'Russian-speaking writer, playwright, and screenwriter originally from Ukraine.' From all this, a metaphorical question arises for the theater director: So whose Crimea is it?” the woman asks.

She writes that all this is happening at a time when there is a stabilization power outage during the performance, when the state is on the brink of survival, and when society is experiencing a crisis of all crises, with people having arguments in defense of the Russian language on the stages of Ukrainian theaters.

Earlier, "Telegraf" reported that an Odessa blogger with an audience of over one and a half million is promoting Russian propaganda.