If theatre history, like the art of history in general, admitted the magic ‘if ‘, Varnas’ creative period would be placed at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th, till 1936 at the latest, when the surrealist era came to an end and Federico Garcia Lorca was shot.
"Revolutions eat their parents", as one of the characters says in Peepshow by George Tabori. Indeed, for a long time we had thought that the real father of the national liberation movement and the singing revolution of Lithuania – theatre – would reach even greater heights and would tell us everything that had been forbidden to say; however, events on the streets and squares simply erased it from the minds of people.
The recent theatrical experiments of the Central and Eastern European countries are noted for a tendency to use untraditional spaces. The customary scena all’italiana increasingly gives way to spaces seemingly not adapted to theatre. This tendency has become particularly distinct at the turn of the century – the changing social and cultural reality encouraged and still encourages the search for new means of communication.
Until the 1990s, theatre in Lithuania was an institutional art supervised by the state. In the 1990s, however, artists went in search of new stages and greater independence. Meno Fortas, established by Eimuntas Nekrošius in 1998, and the company founded by Oskaras Koršunovas, are the most successful companies today.