„Tales from the Vienna Woods“ – a famous play by Ödön von Horváth that offers a scathing depiction of the Viennese petty bourgeoisie, which played a crucial role in the rise of National Socialism in the interwar period. Yana Ross and Mindaugas Nastaravičius set the play in contemporary Lithuania, provocatively turning the deprivation and humiliations following the loss of the First World War into the ‘victorious’ period following Lithuania’s regained independence in 1991. The binaries of winning and losing that frame the source text are tested to their limits in these cultural conditions. From the outset, Ross exposes the broad (and often ambiguous) spectrum of social consequences of independence, for both its seeming victors and its obvious losers.
The eponymous ‘Vienna Woods’ is transformed into a former gymnasium that can now be rented for parties, funerals or weddings. The set is a downtrodden interior of functional Soviet-era architecture, which draws attention to the pomposity of the former system and the austerity and dispossessions of the current one. The pink paint on the walls has been hurriedly and inaccurately applied to slouching walls and the parquet floor bubbles from flooding that signals broken pipes and poor heating systems. (…) This world is a patchwork that barely holds together. One tries but never quite gets it right. Life in this place accumulates as a series of exhausting, comical and humiliating rituals (parties, funerals, and weddings). And it is clear that there is nowhere else for these people to go. Even when characters exit the stage you sense them hovering in the wings, lost, directionless.
Bryce Lease, The Theatre Times