Many people have said about Rudolph Plēpis that he is a God-given actor who has an absolute sense of theatre. In his autobiographical book, he himself compares his life to a game of blackjack: the dice of the game take you to the top one moment, but the next moment you are down. Plēpis experienced many great peaks and many hard falls in his creative and personal life, but he himself also quotes what Zenta Mauriņa said:
“No matter how many times you’ve fallen, you have to get up, you have to continue the course of life honestly.”
Rudolfs Plēpis evaluates what is happening in the world today, including Ukraine, more from a religious point of view. Every day the actor listens only to the radio and, in his opinion, there is no specific analysis of the fact that this is already a repeated extermination of Ukrainians (the first was the Holodomor in the 30s). “And why can’t the two Slavic peoples coexist? Why,” he asks. Asked to answer his own question, the actor says: “First of all, it is the desire to return the Russian Empire – I understand it like that. It has always been like this, starting with Peter I, who “opened a window for Europe”. It is a tendency to rule. ”
Plēpis does not deal with predictions of how things will turn out, he only states: “I am very surprised by the impotence of the world, that a single Satan cannot be stopped. The whole world cannot stop a single Satan. So imagine what power Satan has. I think it’s the agony of Satan – everything that’s happening, not only in Russia, Ukraine, but also wars in the countries of the East. It’s agony”.
Talking about life in Latvia and what makes him happy, the actor says: “I’m happy that a lot of new things are happening. First of all, these countless new theaters, young artists – that makes me very happy. I think it’s very hopeful, and that’s why maybe you don’t need to turn up your nose so much, but believe and hope Now Christmas is coming: faith, hope, love.
You have to believe and hope, and it helps to get up. Because turning up your nose all the time doesn’t help.”
Plēpis does not dare to judge the performance of his new colleagues from the short snippets broadcast on the radio, but adds: “Either way, people are fighting and I think everything will be fine!”
When asked if he relives his creative life – being on stage – in his dreams, the actor reveals with a smile that he does not appear in his dreams, but his deceased colleagues very often: “They already tell me – it’s a change of time . I see Vija Artman very often, I talk to him. Exactly. But I saw myself on stage… At some concert. It’s already morning nightmares, it’s not serious.”
Rūdolfs Plēpis could not say that the burden placed on his shoulders in an actor’s work, in an actor’s life, would be too heavy.
“I always felt like I had to do it and – thank God – it wasn’t a burden. It was just a joy for me, and even more joy, something is working”,
points out. “And I also don’t feel nostalgic or depressed about not having a theater anymore. I mean, it makes sense. What was was was.”
Plēpis has thought about stage life since his early days. And he didn’t want to be an actor, but a theater director. Little Rodolfo asked his father to make an improvised ticket office and small stairs in the room, which already had a partially raised floor (because there was a passage underneath).
The first experience of the Youth Theater for Rudolph Plēpis was during his school years: in one show he sold the alphabet to Buratino, in the next – “The boys of Pāviliela” – as he recalls, together with other children he lived on the stage and played the character Lesika, from which the actor Imants Skrastiņš named him, on the other hand, in the production “Goose Feather” with their elementary school friend Artūras, they played, in the words of Plēpias , a very delicate task: to carry a plucked goose on stage.
As a student of the Technical College of Cultural Workers, Plēpis and his fellow students visited fishermen in the Atlantic Ocean with concerts. “We sailed the Atlantic Ocean for a whole five months. We were taken from ship to ship with such a large net, because we couldn’t get any closer to the ocean without getting hit,” he recalls.
There are many testimonies about the rich creative life of the actor – voice recordings, films and other works. In the group of recordings selected and played in the program “Laikmeta kruspunktė”, Rudolf Plēpi is particularly moved by the good words of his colleague Dinas Kuple in the 1986 radio portrait of the actor. At that time, Kuple highlighted his organic acting breadth and boundless and interest in his scene partner. “Dina Kuples was a brilliant actress and a wonderful person,” Plēpis says with emotion.
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