This is a touching story about childhood and people’s relationships – or rather, as director Agnius Jankevičius puts it, about what these relations shouldn’t be.
The production is based on the much-discussed novella Bury Me Behind the Baseboard by contemporary Russian writer and film director Pavel Sanayev. The events unfold during the Soviet era, in a small family circle, where a grandmother takes care of her daughter's eight-year-old grandson, Sasha, living in an apartment.
The grandmother – at first glance, a tyrant prone to hysteria – having lost her son once, goes to extreme lengths to ‘protect’ Sasha, fearing she could lose him too. This fear drives her toward absurdities. The story’s narrator – the grown-up Sasha who is now a film director – reveals the seemingly insignificant family drama to the audience bit by bit, uncovering its palette of colours, psychology and complex nuances.
Pavel Sanayev is the son of Russian actress Elena Sanayeva and the grandson of the prominent Soviet artist Vsevolod Sanayev. The author dedicated the novella Bury Me behind the Baseboard to his stepfather – the famous Russian actor and director Rolan Bykov. Sanayev’s work is partly autobiographical. The author has turned his childhood memories into an expressive, comically absurd, but also very complex work. According to Sanayev, it was only by writing this novella that he finally managed to forgive his grandmother.
According to director Agnius Jankevičius, a student of maestro Jonas Vaitkus, only courageous ones dare to reveal family secrets in their art and on stage. However, what interested and fascinated him most about Sanayev's work was not its documentary nature, but “the signs of the times and life experiences, which often cover one like a concrete sarcophagus and dictate their future actions”.
A dramatisation based on Bury Me behind the Baseboard was created by Marius Macevičius.
*****
“The creative team do not investigate who is right and who is wrong in this work. They are more interested in exposing the active nerve of damned love,” writes theatre theorist Daiva Šabasevičienė.
“It isn’t often that you can say: ‘I’ve seen a performance about ordinary people – people like you and me’,” notes theatre critic Ridas Viskauskas.
Warning: explicit language on stage
Performed in Russian with Lithuanian subtitles
Photos by Dmitrij Matvejev
