(based on Maxim Gorky's play "Vasa Železnova")
Theater and film actress Viktorija Kuodytė, laureate of the national culture and art prize, plays the main role of the play.
More than a hundred years ago, Maxim Gorky believed in the eternal life of a perfect person and in 1899 wrote in the letter:
"I don't know anything better, more complex, more interesting than a person. He is everything. He even created God. I am convinced that a person can improve without limits, and all his activities will improve with him from age to age. I believe in the eternity of life, and I understand life as the pursuit of spiritual perfection."
Ten years later, he wrote his play "Vasa Železnova", in which we do not meet any perfect hero, but we find a very bright portrait of the Železnova family - a picture of anti-perfection.
The play "Vasa Železnova" tells a familiar family drama: when the father dies, family members gather at home, waiting for their share of the inheritance. The main figure of the story is the mother Vasa, who punishes, flatters, protects, sacrifices, repents and controls the home, business and the destinies of her loved ones. In this situation, the division of the inheritance becomes only a pretext for conflict, because family values have already collapsed: the mother despises her children, the sons hate the mother, the daughter left an inhospitable home a long time ago, the daughter-in-law commits adultery, and the uncle intends to grab half of the family's property. So, hasn't "family" in this house become just a word describing an institution, which does not allow parents, children, or servants listening in on strangers' conversations to breathe freely.
Director Darius Rabašauskas: "It seems to me that this performance should talk about the code that we pass on to each other: parents to their children, parents to their children and so on. It seems simple and even banal, but this is the truth - we are only conductors of information, and leaving money or a house to children, whether we like it or not, through daily repetitive actions, we will also leave them all the information about ourselves and the world. We will simply write that information into them.
In this sense, the utopia of Gorky's immortal man is fulfilled - information transmitted from generation to generation does not die, until in the end that immortality becomes unbearable - the code cannot be rewritten or deleted, it is recorded immediately and is eternal.
A very interesting paradox of Gorky's work is his speaking about the greatness of man and writing about people like "Vasoj". It seems to me that he believed that man is capable of a lot, but at the same time he saw the horror of man, his lowest instincts, his darkest desires. The author really knew that man has great power - here is the question of where and how that power will be used."
