Peter Handke is an Austrian writer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "influential work exploring the periphery and the singularity of the human experience with linguistic ingenuity". The main themes of his work are the reality around human beings, the limits of language and the search for subjective truth. "The Prophecy was written in the writer's early years, when he was in his early twenties. The author classified this work, as well as other plays written between 1964 and 1966, as so-called language plays. The play has no action, no plot lines, no set design: it focuses entirely on the word.
In the beginning there was the word - phonetics and rhythm were the first elements that attracted the attention of the youngest generation of directors, Justinas Vinciūnas. He was looking for ways to render this text as music, to arrange its rhythmic score.
The answer to this question, together with the director on stage, is sought by the actors of the oldest generation of theatre: Algirdas Latėnas, Vidas Petkevičius, Saulius Sipaitis, Gediminas Storpirštis - the true greats of the theatre scene, the generation that is seemingly already retiring from active life. According to the director, the experience of these actors becomes a counterpoint to the formalist style of the play. Prophecy sounds both like a biblical metaphor and an absurd, autoironic ode to everyday life. The four readers A, B, C and D, mentioned in the play, take the form of homeless people. All of them have given up tangible forms of property - observers, rising above everyday life.
In the play, Handke's text is interwoven with the actors' authentic observations and life situations, which speaks of the search for a human place and identity in the face of absurd reality. Handke's work offers the possibility of a reality beyond words. The act of reading itself saves us from the play with forms: the reader is confronted with a mysterious form whose meaning is unknown, but only by articulating it can he try to discover the content. In this way, by abandoning the inner knowledge or the impression of it, one enters into the reality of the text that is invisible to us. It is a reality that precedes the emergence of concepts. This is why "Prophecy" can resonate with those who are accompanied by a sense of the uncertainty of reality. This play is a small, but nevertheless comforting reminder of the truth that lies somewhere beyond," says director Justinas Vinciūnas.
