"Tartuffe" will mock prudishness
On September 27 and 28, Tartuffe by Molière will premiere at the Lithuanian National Drama Theater. Speaking about the upcoming performance, its director Oskaras Koršunovas, says that directing comedy is a most difficult task, but with this comedy he and his team expect to bring Dionysian laughter back to the theater.
From the beginning, O. Koršunovas stressed the connection between the play he was staging and the current Lithuanian government, “In the play, we try to find answers to questions like how much the theater is a tool of the people in power; how much they can affect art; how much the theater can expose those in power; whether we can still stage a work of classics, and if it is possible to have an unconventional approach to this work. Hiding behind the most beautiful values and the most sacred things, Tartuffe, goes after his goals. In today’s politics we see a lot of hypocrisy as well, and a lot of prudishness. I cannot remember this being so universal. Now prudes are everywhere and they compete with each other. This is happening both on the political scene and on Facebook. Facebook is dominated not by real, personal righteousness, but the righteousness of likes. The more likes you collect, the better you are. At all times prudes had stones hurled at them, not likes. The fact that stones have been replaced by likes indicates the death of truth.
Today, staging Molière is difficult, as contemporary theater avoids the canons that come from classicism. While contemporary theater more and more strives to be non-verbal and post-dramatic, in Tartuffe we are faced with a classical drama, so while working on the play we can analyze the theater in general and its current situation in particular and ask ourselves whether it is still necessary to act, how to behave on the stage, whether the text still means anything to us. To me personally Molière is very important; his spirit is present in all my productions. More precisely, the spirit of Dionysus. As politicians can be divided into right wing and left wing, the theater can be divided into Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (vital and alive).
But modern theater has lost its wild character, there is less and less of Dionysus in it. The god has been pushed out of the theater, and, curiously, this was not done by censorship, but by contemporary theater that is more focused on thinking. We lack this primeval laughter when we laugh not because we understand that something is funny, but because it is funny and we do not understand why. I think real comedy should bring back such laughter. When working on Tartuffe we think about this a lot. In that laughter which transcends understanding is the true origin of the theater,” says Oskaras Koršunovas.
Molière wrote Tartuffe in 1664. On May 14, the play was performed in the Palace of Versailles, during the fete The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island. However, King Louis XIV, having taken note of the dissatisfaction of the King’s confessor the Archbishop of Paris banned the play from public performance. The upper class were also unhappy with the play, and the archbishop threatened to excommunicate anyone who would read the play, watch it or perform in it.
Tartuffe was the first play, which became an international event and even managed to engender strife between France, the largest state in the world at the time, and the Vatican, a no less powerful empire. It is impossible to stage this comedy by Molière without a trace of tragedy. He always wanted to create tragedies, but created comedies instead, this resembled his life. We can say that Molière was a hypocrite, but theater is also, to a certain extent, a hypocrisy. There is also political hypocrisy, which is like a virus. With the advent of new technologies, the virus is spreading at ultra-fast speed.
As I have already mentioned modern technologies, I want to reveal that they play an important part in the performance as well. Instead of gaudy make-up, we are using cameras that will follow the actors around. Live streaming will be used for several purposes: first, to talk about our masks in a virtual space, and, second, to analyze acting in general. We had these ideas from the beginning, but we were preceded by Lokis, where everything is of superb quality in this regard. This is not new, many have been using modern technologies in theater for a long time, but the relationship between theater and film is very interesting. It makes us think about the nature of acting. When it comes to Molière’s work, one must think about it.
With the appearance of screens, the entire theater is transformed. It is not the same theater, in which you could barely see the actors’ faces from the last row. Our philosopher A. Šliogeris has said that screens are the new religion and the new gods. Now Tartuffe can come to any family from a screen. This is another topic of this performance. Speaking of comedy, I can say that this genre has long been forgotten. All genres have been forgotten. We live in a non-genre environment, in eclecticism. In part, this is the result of the hegemony of screens, when one can quickly switch between genres, articles and jump from serious material to superficial reads and sources with one finger click.”
The cast includes Giedrius Savickas, Nelė Savičenko, Salvijus Trepulis, Toma Vaškevičiūtė, Kęstutis Cicėnas, Agnieška Ravda, Eimantas Pakalka, Darius Meškauskas, Vitalija Mockevičiūtė and Rasa Samuolytė. Stage designer Vytautas Narbutas, costume designer Sandra Straukaitė, composer Gintaras Sodeika, choreographer Vesta Grabštaitė, author of video projections Algirdas Gradauskas, lights designer Eugenijus Sabaliauskas.
“This production has brought together very strong actors. At first, we rehearsed with two sets of actors, but it was like a collision of titans, which was not so easy to manage. This is one of the reasons why the play didn’t premiere in February. The presence of the actors who once took part in the rehearsal but quit can still be felt and I very much hope that they will return to the play,” says Oskaras Koršunovas.
The premiere of Tartuffe will take place on September 27 and 28 in the Grand Hall of the Lithuanian National Drama Theater. During the premiere, an exhibition of photos by Tomas Ivanauskas taken during rehearsals will be displayed at the theater lobby.
Photos from rehearsals of Tartuffe. By Tomas Ivanauskas.