One of the guarantors of the production’s artistically high quality is the successfully chosen way of the actor’s existence.
Publicity photo (Mārtiņas Vilkārsa).
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With the production “Mourning suits Elektra”, director Inese Mičule gives the audience the opportunity to enjoy a stylistically filigree reading of O’Neill’s play at the Valmiera theater.
The forces embedded in human nature, the release of which leads to catastrophe, belong to the hidden causes of tragedy in ancient Greek mythology, so various mythic characters that reveal and represent these hidden forces have attracted the interest of dramatists at all times. Electra is no exception, who has been portrayed by Euripides, Sophocles and other authors in their plays from different points of view, keeping her unrelenting thirst for revenge in the center. Sacrifice to the idea of justice and retribution, which verges dangerously on fanaticism, has acquired in the character of Elektra the aura of the highest duty of her life. However, duty is essentially only a framework in which everything can be placed – from good to evil. The boundary between love and hate in a person is very fragile, and Eugene O’Neill in his work “Mourning Suits Electra” has tried to look deeper into what really happens to a person and his life, if only the dark colors of hatred shine in this framework.
The trilogy written by the outstanding American playwright in 1931, which tells about the tragic fate of the Menon family, consists of three full-length plays, the production of which would take at least three evenings in a traditional realistic psychological theater. I wonder if there would be enough audiences today who would be willing to watch for so long how Lavinia weaves her webs of revenge and entangles all the characters of the play in them. I assume that similar considerations in combination with the range of themes included in the play, which has become especially important and essential for a serious theatrical conversation with the audience, have served as a strong stimulus for Inessa Michule to try to find a modern, aesthetically engaging form for the stage interpretation of the trilogy. It should also be said right away that the director has amazingly successfully coped with this difficult task and given the audience the opportunity to enjoy a stylistically filigree reading of O’Neill’s play in the Valmiera theater.
Using the similarity of the fable included in the trilogy with the well-known myth of Electra’s efforts to avenge her father’s death, the director has come to the idea of basing the framework of the production on the structure of a Greek tragedy, cleaning the text from the domestic layer, compressing the peripheral characters into a conditional chorus with the help of Mārtiņš Meijer, and centering the visual action on Lavinia as actions of the protagonist. By purposefully selecting plot episodes from all three plays and distilling the essence from the situations proposed by the author, Inese Mičulei, with the support of the austere scenography of Mārtiņš Vilkārs and the harmonizing contribution of the costume designer Ilze Vītoliņa, has managed to create a perfect performance form that perfectly reveals all the layers of the text’s content meaning.
The house of the Menon family has been permeated by threads of hatred for several generations, they hide behind every action of the characters dictated by Freudian complexes, wrap around every bud of love and turn it into an antithesis. In one conversation, Lavinia tells her mother: “I was born from your hatred, (..) the only thing I have to do is hate you.” When Kristine poisons Ezra in the hope of escaping with her lover Adam Brant, Lavinia turns the house into a temple of hatred and death and becomes its priestess herself, who is ready to sacrifice everything and everyone in the name of “high justice”, including her brother Orin and her fiancé Peter. No amount of remorse can stop her anymore, hatred has irreversibly poisoned her soul and, together with a pathetic satisfaction for her power, drives her further and further along the path of revenge. Even the realization that it leads to total destruction cannot change anything in her mind and she follows this path to the end. Diana Krista Stafecka has grasped the essence of her character with surprising precision and created an extremely strong character in the show, which unerringly directs the audience’s perception towards the questions posed by the director. It seems that the entire psychophysics of the young actress is strung on the string of revenge, and every touch of it causes such vibrations of hatred that it is impossible to resist, and the only way to get rid of them is to willingly choose death. Wonderful acting.
One of the guarantors of the production’s artistically high quality is the successfully chosen way of the actor’s existence. The strict role drawings allow the director to create analytically imaginative mise-en-scenes and to mark the hero’s progress towards his death point in each role. Actors’ dialogues in the play become similar to injections, which turn external static events into internal action with a high percentage of saturation. The stage expressions of the bodies (truth – in Greek aletheia – is nakedness) and plastic etudes perfectly integrate the psychology of the characters, giving Ieva Puķe the opportunity to create a controversial image of Kristine and the other actors to strengthen convincing versions of the characters to be portrayed.
And finally, a few words about the “sad” questions mentioned in the program, which Inese Michule wants to ask the audience with her performance. The director asks rhetorically: “How and where does evil come from, if we are all born the same?” First of all, the assumption that we are all born the same is wrong. It isn’t and never will be (unless technology creates a DNA helix that can be endlessly reproduced) because nature has taken care of it. Schopenhauer once formulated it quite precisely: “If we are innocent at the beginning of life, it means that we do not know the evil side of our own nature.” And secondly, the categories “good” and “evil” are created by people and intertwined with values that give us the opportunity to survive and coexist in this world. Evil as such does not exist in nature. In reality, these are all extremely complex questions that humanity still cannot fully solve, but the production makes us touch them indirectly, makes us think about them, and this is a blessing in this uncertain world.
INQUIRY
Eugene O’Neill, “Mourning Suits Elektra”, production at Valmiera Drama Theater
Director and translator – Inese Mičule, scenographer Mārtiņš Vilkārsis, costume designer Ilze Vītoliņa, lighting designer – Mārtiņš Feldmanis, composer Emīls Zilberts.
Starring: Aksels Aizkalns, Rūdis Bīviņš, Kārlis Freimanis, Ingus Kniploks, Mārtiņš Meiers, Inese Pudža, Ieva Puķe, Diana Krista Stafecka.
Next performances: May 19, 21, 23.
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OPINION
Agita Zariņa-Stūre: “Past and Future. Life and death. White and black. In between – our life, where there are choices to grow, cherish, pamper – evil or light. Watching the show – life (man) nurtures evil like a deceptively white snowball washing down a hill. So huge and heavy that at the bottom of the hill it knocks everything off its feet… The set design by M. Vilkārs, the costumes created by I. Vītoliņa highlight the colors of evil. It turns out that there are a lot of them – dirty gray, shiny and robust black, even naked. (..) The performance is powerful, deep material, modernly stripped down. Surprisingly, its topic is heavy, makes you think, analyze, but it does not tire you. I guess because we can only see black when there is white. (..) Excellent music by E. Zilbert.”
Themes
