Kyiv Academic Puppet Theatre

For eight years, Ukraine’s oldest puppet theatre had no home. After their building, a former synagogue, was returned to Kyiv’s Jewish community in 1997, the company wandered from rented stage to rented stage until 2005, when they finally received their first purpose built theatre in 78 years. The real veterans, though, are the puppets themselves: some of the marionettes taking the stage today are over 80 years old, periodically restored but never retired, their wooden joints older than most of their audiences’ grandparents.

The building the theatre gave up was never really theirs to begin with. It was the Brodsky Synagogue, built in 1898 for Kyiv’s Jewish community, seized by Soviet authorities in the 1920s, and handed to the puppeteers in 1955 after decades of other uses. When the company finally moved out, the synagogue was restored and reopened under Chabad, meaning the same building now hosts Torah study where children once watched marionettes. The theatre’s new home, nicknamed the fairytale castle, was designed with steeples and two auditoriums to seat over four hundred people combined, along with a small museum where visitors can handle puppets from every era of the company’s history. Those oldest puppets have now outlasted a synagogue, a Soviet Union, and eight years of homelessness, and are still expected to perform on schedule.