"The Scariest Play" is an entertaining play based on a children's literature classic with an interesting origin story. Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894), a German child doctor and psychiatrist, went to the city just before Christmas to buy a present for his son - a book. When he found nothing but boring stories, he was annoyed and bought a notebook in which he began to write and draw himself. A year later, the notebook was turned into a book called "Funny Stories and Pictures". Today, almost two centuries after it was first published, the book has been translated into many languages and is widely published all over the world (the Lithuanian translation is by Kazys Binkis, a classic of our poetry and drama).
The sketch of the play based on this classic work was created by a young team of Serbian artists: the director, the stage designer Luka Kurjački and the set and costume designer Sandra Nikač.The sketch of the play was awarded the best work by a jury of theatre professionals and the public at the Young Director's Experiment competition held at the J. Miltinis Theatre in August 2017.
In the performance, the director, in his search for a dynamic connection with young viewers, subtly combines the comic, musical and theatrical elements encoded in Hoffmann's poetic tales, which are also perfectly preserved in Binki's translation, with wordplay and the aesthetic of horror, transports the stories of the mid-19th century to these days of big shops, fast machines and smart technology, when the boundaries between right and wrong, right and wrong, become almost impalpable. Especially for a young child just beginning to explore the boundless world.
The first encounter with the young audience during the screening of the sketch of the performance showed that such an artistic approach to classical material can be very influential in order to convey the main idea of the performance - that it is necessary for children to know and learn social norms without moralising, without obtrusively interfering with certain moral and value truths. However unattractive and outdated they may sometimes seem.
The project is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.
