The Youth Theatre will open its 61st season with a premiere. One of the most prominent figures in contemporary Lithuanian theatre, director Oskaras Koršunovas, is currently directing the play The Wild Duck (1884) by Henrik Ibsen.
This production of H. Ibsen’s drama is a continuation of the Youth Theatre’s consistent repertoire strategy. While reflecting on modern man and the psychological and philosophical themes relevant to him, the theatre resorts to important and complex texts from world literature and dramaturgy.
H. Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck tells the story of the Ekdal family, whose seemingly happy daily life is disrupted by a guest from the past. Gregers Werle, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, reveals the hosts certain secrets about their past and destroys the illusion of their happy family and home. Where others see happiness, Werle sees only lies, and the wild duck shot by the old Ekdal, who was a passionate hunter, and then saved and nursed back to life by the Ekdals becomes the symbol of the family trapped in lies and illusions.
This version of The Wild Duck is not only the Youth Theatre’s return to the themes and philosophy of H. Ibsen’s plays, which have been interpreted on its stage many times, but also a symbolic attempt by Koršunovas to once again ‘dive’ into well-known dramaturgical material, and the director’s return to the theatre, where more than 35 years ago his debut on a professional stage – the play Ten Būti Čia (Paūmėjimai) – found a home.
According to Oskaras Koršunovas, “The more the world finds itself in a mess, the bigger the divide between truth and justice. The more know-it-alls out there, the less justice. When truth is replaced by post-truth or propaganda, and justice is determined by ideologies, when truth is proclaimed in social networks, and justice carried out by likes and algorithms, it is high time for theater to turn to morality and speak about it in the way that only theater can: with utmost perfectionism, with all emotional purity and intellectual transparency. I can’t think of a play more suitable for this than Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. It just needs to be planted in the present, so that the moral tension of the play resonates with the words and signs of our time.”
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) – a Norwegian writer, one of the most prominent playwrights of all time, is also known as the founder of contemporary drama and modern theater, the “father of realism in theater”. Ibsen’s “problem plays”, his “drama of ideas” had a significant impact on global trends in theater and dramaturgy at the turn of the 20th century. However, today theatre scholars as well as theatre makers still value Ibsen not only as a writer and playwright, but also as a philosopher, and critic of society. More than a century after the author’s death, his plays Peer Gynt, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman and others are still being staged around the world. We can also associate the Lithuanian theatre’s liberation from realist aesthetics, its certain modernization, which directly affected the development of our directing, acting, and stage design, with Ibsen. It would be hard to find a theatre in Lithuania that hasn’t had a famous Ibsen production in its repertoire; his texts have been interpreted by most prominent Lithuanian theatre directors, such J. Miltinis, H. Vancevičius, J. Vaitkus, O. Koršunovas, G. Varnas, V. Masalskis, A. Jankevičius, A. Areima, and others.