OKT/Vilnius City Theatre invites you to venture into new, uncharted X territories this season. Inspired by the story of George Bataille, James Brazis's new play The Story of the Eye is a mystery that opens up many new territories. It is a work of transcending desire, of transgression enforcing the law, of the sacred, of ritual.

George Bataille is one of the most prominent and controversial figures in the world of 20th century literature. Growing up, as he puts it, in a family of a "sick, blind, mad creature" (meaning his father) and, later, a mother who "lost her mind and plunged into melancholy", George Bataille was "afraid of his own madness" all his life, and this is particularly evident in his work, which is always on the edge of the edge of his mind. He begins his independent life in a monastery, which he soon abandons and throws himself into the complete opposite - a very loose life.

George Bataille is one of those overly open and courageous geniuses who are only recognised when they die, and who are not considered to be thinkers or writers, but simply paranoid and insane (as both André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre said of George Bataille). After George Bataille's death, Michel Foucault said: 'Today we know that George Bataille is one of the most important writers of our age'. So, in The History of the Eye, we must not lose sight of the complicated and wild life and work of George Bataille. It was this totality that led George Bataille's contemporaries to regard him as a madman, a debauchee, and, after his death, almost became proof of his sanctity.
George Bataille's The Story of the Eye is an erotic narrative inspired by the works of Sade, by childhood memories, by impressions of a phase of his life in Spain, at the epicentre of the Corrida and its brutality, by his thoughts of his blind father and the disorder of a life of disorder.

  

Produced by OKT/Vilnius City Theatre

Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture