The show is recommended for viewers from 7 years old.
Danish director Kirsten Dehlholm's new production in Lithuania based on Astrid Lindgren's book The Lionheart Brothers, already known to Lithuanian audiences, has been in development for more than a year. Kirsten Dehlholm is a Danish director and video artist, best known as the director of the Hotel Pro Forma group, which creates plays, operas, interdisciplinary projects and performances in various countries around the world.
How would a child be told about war and death today? I have never produced plays aimed at a particular age group. It is important for me that both children and adults understand the play. I like to unite the audience and not leave a gap between them. It seemed to me that it was impossible to talk about the war, it was impossible to tell it on stage. But the more I thought about children and war, the more I remembered the book "The Lionheart Brothers" by the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Although the book is written for a younger audience, I found it to be a wonderful book that contains many important themes. I was also impressed by the text of the book itself, which I think is very good, strong and meaningful. So we wanted to keep it authentic. In the show, we found it important to tell the main story. "We refined the text by removing many side stories," said the director. Dehlholm, together with playwright Anne Mette Fisker Langkjer, selected the entire play's dramaturgy directly from Astrid Lindgren's book, without rewriting a single phrase.
In this performance, the narrator of the story becomes Karl Leon, or in other words - Toast the Lionheart. Using his inner world - illness, death, betrayal, tyranny, brotherly love, loyalty, courage and other experiences - the aim is to convey an emotional connection and reveal various layers of history.
The creators called the work a visual audio drama, in which the story of the Lionheart Brothers is told through sounds, images and voices, using various audiovisual technologies. The aim of the creators of the show is to arouse the imagination and senses of the audience, so the sound created by the Danish sound designer Kristian Hverring, which enveloped the entire audience hall, became one of the most important highlights of the performance. It will not be a traditional staging of "The Lionheart Brothers", the director said. We want to present the play in a different way. And the sound, in my opinion, reaches the human subconscious much faster and deeper than the image.
