A theater festival in Klaipeda, Lithuania: Diversity means the future

The “Drama Theater” in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda has an eventful theater history behind it. Today, the neoclassical building on Theaterplatz in the historic old town houses stages equipped with the latest technical know-how. For the past seven years, the crew around festival director Tomas Juocys has been shaping contemporary theater discourse with “TheAtrium” festival. “We are moving forward purposefully, at the height of the day, provocatively, challengingly,” says Tomas Juocys. “Our goal is to put Klaipeda firmly on the European theater map as a diverse festival.”

The festival with guest performances from all over the world runs until the end of June. Until the end of May, eleven contemporary plays selected by a seven-person jury from 50 nationwide applications from the ten state theaters and around 150 independent groups were invited to the “Showcase”.

Highest suicide rate

The range of productions presented in the “Drama Theater” is impressive. For example, the festival radically takes up one of the most problematic issues in contemporary Lithuanian society: suicide. Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in Europe. Which may also have something to do with the extensive consumption of alcohol; After 8 p.m., alcoholic beverages are no longer available in supermarkets. Whereas the bars stay open until midnight and are packed.

There was a great interest in “Fragment” based on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, a visually stunning production that the Russian exile director Dmitry Krymov worked on collectively in improvisations with the ensemble of the Klaipeda Drama Theater. The proven opponent of the regime Krymov, multiple winner of the highest Russian theater award “Golden Mask”, became the victim of a mysterious apartment fire in New York in 2022 and was in a coma for nine days.

Central to his production: a grotesque inferno of flames, borrowed from the third act of the “Three Sisters”. The Lithuanian actor Darius Meskauskas plays a helpless doctor. Meskauskas castigates the new “Russian fascism” in the person of Putin and praises the “playful” cooperation with Krymov. He feels “alive” and “in harmony with the team”. He gives “empathy” as the leitmotif for the acting profession. He would also like to correspond to this leitmotif as an acting professor in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

Meskauskas’ student Jokubas Brazys and a very young ensemble set Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in captivating and depressing scenes for the Vilnius City Theater. For four hours he spelled out almost unbearable experiences of violence, including rape, on an empty stage. He is concerned with “the prison of love,” says the director in an interview. And, yes, one could think of his showcase contribution “also of Russia, of violent Russian attacks or abusive Russian men”.

dissident performances

This connotation runs through the festival, according to director Tomas Juocys. That’s why they invited two Chekhov productions. “These are dissident performances and Chekhov saw himself as a Ukrainian anyway!”

Political clarity is reserved in Klaipeda Pavlo’s aria. The Ukrainian author, actor, director and former chief dramaturge at the Left Bank Theater in Kiev is translating his direct invasion experience into a 14-day war diary from Kiev for the Lithuanian city theater in Alytus: depressing, at times hysterical, with reference to the unbearable murderous images from Bucha. During the final applause, he wrapped himself in the Ukrainian flag. But his game was received quite coolly in Klaipeda, a city in which less Ukrainian expressions of solidarity can be felt in words and pictures than, for example, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

MeToo in Lithuania

And something else played a strong role this year in Klaipeda: MeToo and how it is dealt with in Lithuania. In “The Silence of the Sirens” the young Lithuanian director Laura Kutkaltè and her all-female ensemble accumulate experiences of abuse by female performers on stage and behind it.

According to the actresses, their self-empowerment opera reflects “how irrelevant the subject has become in Lithuania after a brief outcry of indignation”. At the “Fast Forward” guest performance in Dresden, the ensemble was honored and celebrated with standing ovations lasting several minutes.

In Klaipeda, after the performance, the agenda was discussed. But the young performers are full of energy and they empathically believe “that contemporary Lithuanian theater can have an effect on society”.