Klaipėda Puppet Theatre is known as the home of original and interesting puppeteers of Lithuania. Theatre director and puppet designer Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė is the most distinguished figure of this theatre. The artist creates not only puppet theatre for children but also constantly stages performances for adults.
In 2008, the political ballet of puppets and objects JUOBA based on the play Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry established Radvilavičiūtė as one of the most interesting puppet experimenters of contemporary Lithuanian puppet theatre. As critic Vilmantas Juškėnas (7 meno dienos) wrote following the tour of the performance in Vilnius, “There's some hope that the potency of our young puppet theatre directors lurks here in Klaipėda.”
While expressing their opinions about the performances by Radvilavičiūtė, critics have observed an endless fantasy of the artist. The rich imagination of the director has also helped her to create performances for children with various kinds of theatrical puppets and even toys. In one of her most recent plays for children The Father and the Sea (Lith. Tėtis ir jūra, 2017) based on the work by Tove Jansson, the main roles are played by the cello and the light reaching the audience through various reflections and surfaces. Thus, there are no Moomins left in the performance, just the exploration of something unusual and new.
Atmosphere is one of the most significant aspects in the theatre of Radvilavičiūtė and this is highly obvious in her latest performances for adults staged at Vilnius Theatre “Lėlė.” In 2014, the performance Sandman (Lith. Smėlio žmogus) staged at the theatre “Lėlė” was elected the best puppet theatre performance of that year and to this day has remained as the most touring performance for adults of Lithuanian puppet theatre.
Sandman is fascinating not because of the precise rendering of the story by E. T. A. Hoffmann. On the contrary, the performance lacks any text or plot. The story is associative and visual. When discussing this performance, Audronė Girdzijauskaitė (7 meno dienos) singled out clean performance and elegance, whereas Kamilė Žičkytė (7 meno dienos) wrote that, “spectators constantly experience the joy of surprise.” According to the critic, such effect is achieved as, “the director adjusts everything precisely: in the black box of the stage - as if in a dimly lit dark cellar - live and illusionary matters merge together,” i.e. actors, masks, body part moulages, and shadows.
When writing about the relation between the form and content of the performance, art critic Helmutas Šabasevičius (menufaktura.lt) noted that, “slowed-down transformations of poses and movements constitute the choreography of illusions that paraphrases rather than illustrates human conditions, and balances on an almost invisible boundary between the reality and fantasy, serenity and anxiety, sanity and insanity.” Theatre critic Šarūnė Trinkūnaite (menufaktura.lt) developed this idea further. According to the critic, the line of the relationship between a man and a woman can be distinguished in the performance; however, “here a constant inner discussion of an actor-puppet, face-mask, mask-another mask takes place, i.e. the monodrama of hallucinating, estranged conscience that no longer recognises itself and has turned into a nightmarish phantom of itself; the conscience that has become 'an angry sandman' in relation to itself. The more this drama in Sandman intensifies, the more beautiful - paradoxical in its own way - this becomes.”
The most recent work for adults by Radvilavičiūtė The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lith. Doriano Grėjaus portretas, 2018) is a chamber performance shown in small space. Similarly to the performance JUOBA staged ten years ago, here the action takes place in a golden picture frame, where people and human body parts perform. Yet this time, instead of kitchen utensils, dishes, pieces of cloth, or vegetables there are miniature copies of well-known sculptures. Therefore, as critic Rimgailė Renevytė (7 meno dienos) noticed, it comes as no surprise that the hall where the performance is shown, “reminds more of museum rather than theatre space. That's why the distance as well as the role of an observer is intuitively acceptable to spectators.”
The story is constructed from images, just like in Sandman. However, The Picture of Dorian Gray is more static. Here, the audience's attention is captured through spacious compositions in small space behind the golden frame. Next to the miniature sculptures the bodies of the actors look like the souls of the characters whose sufferings are reflected in the mirrors through transformed, deformed and multiplied images. The director implies that, “the depth of a mirror tells us much more or in a completely different way than we see in our reality.”
Fragile, unpredictable theatre of Radvilavičiūtė transfers us to an unexpected world that even the spectators who are best acquainted with the selected piece of literature could not have dreamt of. The world of illusions of the director poses a challenge to the mind and feelings of the audience for when there is no text and often no plot, spectators have to refer to their own personal associations, understanding and interpretations; or simply to give in to an enchanting form.
