Lithuanian Theatre Spreads its Wings for Flight in International Theatre Festival “Sirenos”

[…] The mystical limit between reality and fiction is constantly erased. Vibrant energy tears of the masks; the lines of the text become voices and screams, revealing lonely efforts of survival. Seated around a long table loaded with vodka bottles, Gorky’s low-lifes drink while talking about themselves – their long forgotten past, their dreams and philosophies. At the same time they are participating, each in their own way, in a fierce struggle between mutual distrust and overly festive drinking. The “Sirens” of Vilnius used to go down to the audience. But the long and narrow space of the OKT Studio’s stage has allowed to eliminate any distance, and in “The Lower Depths” the audience becomes involved in this bizarre feast, led by Satin, where at first sigh incoherent speeches are illuminated by flashes of questions about man and his truth. This is what the dramaturgical fabric of the performance is made of – it separates the fourth act from the rest of the play, deletes the entire preceding story full of passion associated with Vasilisa’s brutal jealousy, and “sews” the thread that only belongs to the characters on the stage. The Baron, Nastya, who fiercely defends her romantic fantasies of love, and Actor, who by killing himself stops the chatter and drops the final curtain on Gorky’s text, gain importance along with Satin. But that is not the end of the play. Here the epilogue begins, in which Hamlet’s words about being and not being, about the divine and bestial nature of man, about the pointlessness of war, and about the actor disheartened by Hecuba’s pain are reiterated. And what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?

Laura Caretti, Hystrio, 2013 No. 1