The pre-holiday bathing of children in a respectable city family is suddenly cut short when the nanny grabs an axe and beheads one of the girls. The ending of the story is just as abrupt – after a series of sudden deaths, the play is simply left without any characters. Such is the plot of a prominent Russian absurdist Alexander Vvedensky, offered to the audience by the creative team of director Jonas Vaitkus.
In this irrational play, the spirit of waiting for wondrous Christmas reigns, while the characters, relegated to caricatures, flounder and suffer. At the same time, the ensuing bedlam of alogisms, naivety and horror becomes a source of certain sacrality. This is a paradoxical fusion of poetry, metaphysics and linguistic artistry, where the subconscious is more significant than the conscious, and the fragmentary – more expressive than the whole.
The musical production is performed by fifty actors, led on stage by conductors Vytautas Lukočius and Nelė Kovalenkaitė.
“Vaitkus’s art no longer fits into any kind of cultural boundaries,” writes theatre critic Daiva Šabasevičienė.
“This time, Vaitkus concretises his global idiocy manifesto, which he has signed many times over,” thinks theatre critic Šarūnė Trinkūnaitė.
“This style, this synthetic and solemnly tragic action, this half-opera and half-performance meets precisely the needs of the times: how to combine avant-garde with showmanship without lapsing into a comfortable relationship with the audience,” writes Russian theatre critic Pavel Rudnev.
Performed in Russian with Lithuanian subtitles
Photos by Dmitrij Matvejev
