The 74th season, starting in September, will feature six premieres, the first of them – Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, directed by Yana Ross and presenting a bold and uncompromised view at one of the biggest Europe’s wounds – the Holocaust. The renowned theatre and film director Jonas Vaitkus will be staging Kazys Binkis’ The Undergrowth, the classics of the Lithuanian dramaturgy and first staged back in 1940. The season’s high point will become a co-production of the iconic Danish company Hotel Pro Forma and the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, a multimedia children’s play Cosmos, telling a poetic story about the modern discoveries of physics and astronomy. Young talented directors, Valters Sīlis from Latvia and Saara Turunen from Finland, will each stage plays about identities: Sīlis in his Barricades will be exploring the still recent revival period of the Baltic States and how it is viewed by the current thirty-year-olds, while Turunen in her The Broken Heart Story will pose a question of how to be happy when the outside world expectations mismatch those of the inner world. One of the most productive directors Gytis Padegimas, who has already staged over one hundred plays, will present Off Target by the Icelandic playwright Sigurður Pálsson. Padegimas aims at challenging directorial theatre so popular in Lithuania, focussing instead on the creative abilities of actors as the main creators of the play.
Today the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre is the platform that invites to co-operate and create the elite of Lithuanian theatre who bring delight to world’s most grand stages, win main prizes and promote Lithuania as a theatre country. The theatre also prides itself in discovering new talents and providing the stage to bold productions thus presenting the entire spectrum of artistic visions and ways, subjects and issues of current theatre landscape. Moreover, the theatre’s repertoire is a mirror of the Lithuanian society, which helps the foreign audience to come closer to its achievements, hopes, problems and pains.
LNDT Artistic director
Audronis Liuga