“I don’t know if I should be happy for eighty years, but it’s good that I have a job, that the theater and maybe the audience still need me,” says Rihards Rudaks, the actor of the Valmiera Theater who is loved by the audience. On August 19, he celebrated his 80th birthday.
On his birthday, the jubilee was on stage – in the role of sculptor Arnold Rubek in Henrik Ibsen’s last play “When we wake up”, staged by director Toms Treinis in “Kurtuvė”. “Rubeck is a rather complex character – a sculptor who is already at the end of his life and who is experiencing a creative crisis. He reevaluates all his life’s work, and this also makes him look back on the mistakes and inactions he made in his youth. In his last plays, Ibsen tends to send his characters to the mountains, where they enter “another dimension”, and in this play, these forever snow-white mountains are the artist’s unfinished and unfinished paintings and sculptures. Because the artist has nothing else, there is only his work – evaluating it, evaluating mistakes and reevaluating everything,” says the actor playing the role of Arnold Rubek.
Or does the jubilee, waiting for his 80th birthday, look back on his creation, evaluate it? “I wouldn’t want to draw direct parallels with this dramaturgical material, I wouldn’t want to synchronize it like that, but the topics we talk about in this show are very familiar to me from the reflections of earlier years. Times are constantly changing, times are crazy and fickle, and theater can tell people much more today than the daily news tapes. That’s why a classic is a classic, because it’s always relevant,” says Rihards Rudāks.
He is grateful to God that he has been allowed to enter the theater through the door of service for so many years. It is almost 60 years, because Rihards Rudāks entered the Valmiera theater at the age of 22, and it has been his only theater all his life.
“The stage is my biggest living space. This is my fate, my burden, my pain, my joy and my happiness,” says the talented stage artist today.
“But the years go by and I don’t want to celebrate birthdays less and less, so I don’t make anything of it. Yes, time is inexorably running forward, and this must be understood.»
Asked what to wish him on his birthday, the jubilee refused: “Health, patience, peace.” For us and the world.”
2023-09-09 09:01:40
#Rihards #Rudaks #stage #80s
