On the anniversary of Nekrosius’s death, the Lithuanian Youth Theater invited his play “The Wedding” on tour.

On the fifth anniversary of the death of the great Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius, the Lithuanian Youth Theater invited his last performance, “The Wedding,” based on the play by Witold Gombrowicz from the National Theater in Warsaw, on tour. Went to the last show Esther Steinbock.

They say that theater directors live as long as their performances last. But the life of performances has a limit, especially if we are not talking about consumer goods. Yes, the repertoire of the Youth Theater in Vilnius still contains “Zinc” based on the texts of Svetlana Alexievich, and the Vilnius company “Menofortas” created by Nyakrosius himself sometimes performs his play “The Hunger Man”. Until now, at the National Theater of Poland one could see Nyakrosius’s last work, released by him a few months before his death – “The Wedding” based on the play by Witold Gombrowicz. But then he began to run out of spectators, and then the Lithuanian Youth Theater invited the Warsaw troupe to play the last “Weddings” in Vilnius.

The fact that the farewell took place on the Molodezhny stage had, of course, an obvious symbolic meaning: it was here that Eimuntas Nyakrosius began his great directorial biography, it was here that “Square”, “Pirosmani, Pirosmani…”, “Uncle” were staged in the 1980s Vanya” are performances that went down in the history of world theater and changed many viewers’, speaking without posthumous exaggeration, ideas about the possibilities of theatrical language.

Of course, in such solemnly sad cases, it is customary to talk about a “testament,” that is, to look in a work of art for some final message to those remaining in this world. It is not in “The Wedding”; it is not a parting word or a final statement by the great director. Rather, even on the contrary – in the coordinates of Nyakroshyus’s world, “The Wedding” seemed, despite three acts and almost four hours from beginning to end, to be almost a chamber work. In the finale of “The Wedding,” when the four main characters, having experienced this whole phantasmagoria about power, the search for meaning and the triumph of death, simply silently, as if exhausted by themselves, sit down on chairs, and the trumpeter, who sounded so invitingly in the prologue, draws from his the instrument only some faint wheezing, the viewer involuntarily rhymes this devastation with the fate of the director – he left, tired of this incomprehensible world.

However, one can also see in “The Wedding” a director’s prophecy: after all, Gombrowicz’s heroes, Henryk and his friend Vlado, are fighting in the trenches of the World War, and the entire grotesque, strange plot of “The Wedding,” which arises in the imagination of the heroes, can be considered simply the product of a consciousness traumatized by the war . Two friends appear on stage, literally shackled by injury – they share one cast for both arms. And getting rid of it, in fact, frees the sick fantasy, in which the home turns into a tavern, the father into the King (the outstanding Polish actor Jerzy Radziwilowicz, known to everyone from the films of Andrzej Wajda, easily and accurately appropriates all the “masks” offered to him). , the mother – as the Queen, and the bride – as a walking girl (all four are played by the lively and sensitive Danuta Stenka, who simultaneously knows both women’s secrets and the secrets of psychoanalysis). Eimuntas Nekrošius knew the world of dreams like no one else; all his performances, taking place nowhere and never, can be considered both obsessions and revelations.

But here he is more concrete than ever, he does not drown the absurdist Witold Gombrowicz either in mythological pathos or in arbitrary, playful theatrical transformations.

He – as it turned out, in the end – is seriously trying to understand the dramatic despair of people who do not understand the meaning of a perverted, changeable, collapsing reality.

And yet Gombrowicz is inseparable from parody, ridicule, and Nyakrosius belonged to that vanishing group of theatrical titans who were alien to arbitrary and irresponsible play with everything that came to hand. The Lithuanian master “took out” his unique metaphorical world from the real darkness and brought it into the real light, he did not flick a pliable switch back and forth. And the heavy, multi-layered “Wedding,” which is quite difficult to read on paper today, in the hands of Nyakrosius turned out to be, if not light, then free and natural.

This does not mean that Nyakrosius had no place for humor. At the beginning of the performance, when the stage is just turning into a tavern, signs are hung on the rope with which the characters are tied, indicating the states – “open”, “closed”, “waiting”, “slippery”. To cheer ourselves up with sad humor, we could have hung the message “closed forever” on the curtain at the end. However, such cooling was required only by those of the spectators who aggravated the solemnity of the moment for themselves. But the Lithuanian audience is generally reserved, there were no farewell speeches, they clapped, briefly exchanged impressions, took their coats and left. The auditorium, as usual, was locked and the lights were turned off. Nothing remains of the theatre, even the great one. But performances still live longer than they are performed – as long as those who saw them are alive.