Puppet of Devil, from the performance Ukrainian vertep

Puppet made by the artist Oleksiy Shcheglov for the performance Ukrainian vertep in the Kharkiv Puppet Theater in 1975. It was the first attempt - after half a century of bans - to adapt the traditional Ukrainian vertep to Soviet realities. To stage a play was the idea of the main artist of the theater O.Shcheglov. Theater director Viktor Afanasyev did not immediately agree to the proposition. Without proper support, Shcheglov began to prepare for the play himself. He carved puppets out of linden. By design, they, like traditional ones, were rod-shaped but had a special modernized artistic solution. Puppet Death was in the form of a skeleton in a coffin, the devil had strings on his belly and black marks on his figure after firing. It is an association with fire and hell. Oleksandr Iniutochkin was appointed director of the performance, he was a student of the Theater Institute at the time. Iniutochkin wrote a script based on texts of classical nativity scenes.