Directed by Oskaras Koršunovas
Two of the productions I saw at the Sirenos Festival's Lithuanian Showcase were
directed by Oskaras Koršunovas. He's a Lithuanian director highly celebrated
throughout Europe for his expressionist style, and the artistic director of
the company presenting the festival.
The production of Strindberg's The Road to Damascus was produced by the
Klaipeda Drama Theatre. It's a story of marriage (Strindberg was obsessed with
sex), but it's concern is with internal life, with the demons that terrorize
us. Koršunovas has taken these ethereal demons and made them solid. The
stage is alive with bizarre creatures in this production. They're not necessarily
characters, and when they are, they may not be in the scene. Their stage life
is woven into Jurate Paulekaite's set: there are seven large display cases on
stage, and they're usually inhabited by individual actors. Actors push them
around, creep around them, and sometimes climb over them.
The physical world of the stage acknowledges that it isn't the physical world
of the script. Characters mention that they're wearing brown clothes, but the
actors are not. It's really cool; it creates a tension but not a dissonance.
The stage world and the script world intercept when one character goes to take
another's hand. He can't, because the second is behind glass. Actors imprisoned
in glass cases are the picture of isolation.
Strindberg intended stage images to suggest internal life. Koršunovas uses
the script as a starting point, but his stage creation is so richly textured
that it has a life quite apart from the script. When the central character (portrayed
in a superb performance) is asked if he has hallucinations, he replies "No",
and we don't believe him. We're certainly having hallucinations. Koršunovas'
creativity is stunning, but the result here is heavy-handed. Strindberg's delicate
script is stifled beneath its weight.
The problem is that we have no referent for its various visual elements. They've
left the script behind, and they don't have a structure of their own. It's a
tidal wave of staging, and we're overwhelmed. It's a sort of schizophrenia,
in which archetypes run out of control.
If Koršunovas' technique is too weighty for The Road to Damascus,
he's found the perfect vehicle in a script by Marius von Mayenburg, a German
writer, called Fireface (the production from Koršunovas' own theatre,
OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, the host of the festival). Here, his technique is
always connected to the situations in the intense script. Fireface has
a strong dramatic thrust; its characters are propelled through the drama. This
locomotive quality supplies the base Koršunovas needs for his highly developed,
elaborate style.
This is a family drama - I mean it's about the family, not that it's like Walt
Disney. From the moment the lights go up and we see the parents and two kids
sitting with furious, demonic faces, we know that the nuclear group is going
to be examined mercilessly, as in Sam Shepard's plays. As the plot progresses,
the gamine seduces her brother, and he introduces her to the pleasure
of pyromania, setting afire the town's buildings one by one. Mom and Dad, of
course, live in determined denial.
As the action unfolds, Koršunovas animates the violent subtext in eloquent
surrealism. His stylistic language in this production is based on life, and
it's fascinating. The emotional life of the characters rushes violently through
a sort of theatrical narrows.
The actors in Fireface are utterly sure of their work; they dam emotion
when they need to and let it flood when they need to. There's no reticence in
this drama. When a character pours gasoline on the set, the theatre is filled
with the scent of the petrol.
The set, again from Jurate Paulekaite, consists of the usual home furnishings
- a refrigerator, a stove, a bed - but they're thrown into a heap. This is disciplined
expressionism, a weird world with reference to the actual world. Koršunovas
uses the same absurdist kaleidoscope in behaviours: Mother irons the dress she's
wearing.
Many of the scenes are short, and the danger is that the production will become
cinematic. Koršunovas avoids this horror by keeping the characters on stage
nearly all the time. The incest occurs in the visual context of the family.
Koršunovas lacks subtlety, certainly; the play exhibits various types of
yelling. But the contentiousness is anchored in the script, and we don't want
subtlety.
I talked with Koršunovas about the play. He said "On the one hand,
the production talks about a criminal case. But it makes the audience think
that the real danger comes not from outside but from the inside - inside an
institution that's supposed to be the safest one, the family. It makes the audience
think that maybe this institution is really not so safe. Maybe it's here that
the downfall of civilization will come."
- Steve Capra
September 2007