In 2021, he was invited to participate in the foreign program of the international theater festival “Sirens” with the play “Eichman in Jerusalem” created at the Zagreb Youth Theater. The director constructs performances-researches in which the greatest vices of people are exposed and the deepest recesses of the souls of sinners are explored. The audience in his performances become a reflection of society, so the lights in the audience hall are rarely turned off. In Lorenzi‘s previous play Eichmann in Jerusalem, based on Holocaust documents, the director took on the task of identifying the origins of evil, while the latest Slovenian play The Stranger multifacetedly explores the nature of human loneliness and otherness.
The philosophical novel “The Stranger” describes the events in the life of the young Mers, which lead him to murder. On the stage of the National Drama Theater, the timeline of this period up to the commission of the crime is presented rather uninventively. Throughout the first act of the play, the actors sitting on chairs in a semicircle alternately read or present excerpts from the book in their own words, aiming to acquaint the audience with factual information as consistently as possible. The straightforward content of this part is saved by a cozy, theatrical atmosphere reminiscent of a play reading. The environment mentioned in the text is “voiced”: several actors buzz into the microphones, imitating bees flying at Mers’s mother’s funeral, the sweat gushing from the unbearable Algerian heat is depicted with a water jet, and some elements of the situations are acted out (actress Diana Anevičiūtė lies down on a rectangular platform at the front of the stage, reading a passage about mother’s funeral, the dead body of the murdered Arab, portrayed by Šarūnas Rapolas Mieliėšius, lies there. By the way, the actors make it very clear that they are not acting, but only reproducing the course of events.
Those of the audience who had not read “Svetimo” before, may have remained interested. Others, who were familiar with the play’s literary material in advance, could be annoyed or bored by the forced repetition of the work. But if you listen more closely to the text, it is doubtful whether these are still the experiences of Camus Mers, who lived in the fifties. The further, the more reminiscent of the flow of thoughts of a representative of modern society. The subject of existentialism philosophy is a lost and confused person who has lost faith in higher forces or moral values, compared to the person of our time. The same lonely wanderer. The only difference is that Merso became an expression of the collective consciousness of the middle of the 20th century, while in the present time it is mourned individually.
Such a radical understanding of Lorenzi’s performance is encouraged by the investigative method of the director. It has a lot of similarities with another play “Repeat” presented in “Sirenose” last year. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I)” based on the creative principle of director Milo Rau. Lorenzi tries to turn the theater stage into a kind of courtroom, so it is easiest to explain this method using criminal vocabulary. Using history or fiction, Lorenzi primarily recreates the scene. In this case, the place of the event is literature or a historical period, objectively presented to the audience gathered in the theater. The director’s desire not to have a preconceived opinion and to get to know the subject of the investigation in a new way is transmitted to the actors and finally to the audience. The non-binding presentation of evidence allows the audience to feel like detectives, to find new meanings and connections.
The next step is to collect the symbolic clues that became the “Stranger” in the play: a copy of the novel, a revolver, a folding knife, a handful of sand and a couple of rags. Judging by the prolonged duration of the second act of the play, the most important stage of the director’s method follows – the trial. The persistent judges of Mers’ actions – actors Dainius Gavenonis, Birutė Mar and Augustė Pociūtė – reflect the cold-blooded institutional power mechanism. When the interviews of the characters of the work begin, one hears only what one wants to hear. This paradox is also illustrated by the huge yellow letters “SAULĖ” installed on the back wall of the stage, suggesting that the written word (fact) is more important to the court than the full-fledged image of a person or thing.
As in the first act, in the second the artificiality of the action and its space is obvious. The courtroom resembles a movie set located in a pavilion: Merso is pushed to the back of the stage between bright elongated lamps, music plays and lighting changes as the interrogators change, a refrigerator filled with soft drinks is placed on the side of the stage, near the judges’ table. The feeling of uncertainty is getting stronger. As the judges face the audience and deliver long monologues involving moral questions, Mers’s verdict is accompanied by golden confetti cannons.
By inserting, for example, the motive of murder due to racial hatred to the questions of the judges, the director places the work, which has become a manifesto of the philosophy of existentialism, into a modern context. It is definitely a never-before-seen and insightful interpretation of The Stranger, constructed according to the director’s time-tested creative method. In an ever-changing world filled with virtual and physical objects, expanding “local” military conflicts, and a flood of false information, lives the modern-day Merso, a renegade who has to care about everything, and in the end cares about nothing. The character created by Camus lost the case and was sentenced to death. A modern-day Merso would apparently be “revoked” and the death penalty would be the removal of his account from social media.
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
FB.init({
appId: ‘117218911630016’,
version: ‘v2.10’,
status: true,
cookie: false,
xfbml: true
});
};
(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) {
return;
}
js = d.createElement(s);
js.id = id;
js.src = “https://connect.facebook.net/lt_LT/sdk.js”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));
#Convicted #acquitted #Review #play #Stranger #Culture
