The Tempest

Didžioji scena

Saturday, May 11th, 2024

William Shakespeare

The director – Peeter Jalakas

The playwright – Taavi Eelmaa

The scenographer and costume designer – Kristel Zimmer

Composers  – Gavin Bryars and Yuri Bryars

The video director and scenographer – Emer Värk

Translated from English by Tomas Venclova.

The cast: Artūras Sužiedėlis, Henrikas Savickis, Dainius Svobonas, Ričardas Vitkaitis, Arūnas Stanionis, Ridas Žirgulis, Gintautas Bejeris, Agnieszka  Ravdo, Martyna Gedvilaitė, Mantas Bendžius, Deividas Breivė, Motiejus Ivanauskas, Kamilė Lebedytė.

“The Tempest” – one of the latest dramatic works by W. Shakespeare, staged many times in various places in Lithuania. Written in the XVII century, this tragicomedy reflects the disappointment of the ideal of humanism and connects reality with the magic and fantasy elements of fairy tales. On a distant nameless island live the outcasts – a wizard and an artist, Prospero, with his daughter Miranda. Prospero controls the elements of nature, evil and good spirits. He seeks revenge on his enemies, who once made him run away from Milan and took his duke throne. Using spells, he stirs up a tempest in the sea, in which the enemies’ ship is sailing, breaks it, and flings away the crew to the same island. Once the enemies are lured, Prospero chooses forgiveness.

“The Tempest” is one of the few works by W. Shakespeare with a happy ending.

Peeter Jalakas, an Estonian director and avant-gardist, creates a modern and theatrical show where live theatre and modern technologies are merged, employing the exotic surroundings of the island. The director offers a unique interpretation - he proposes to look at the inhabitants of the nameless island as the beginning of a new, more perfect, better humanity. The audiences are invited to try to imagine a future in which the roles of mythological creatures, spirits, and nymphs are taken over by artificial intelligence. This interpretation questions Prospero's forgiveness and nobility, it emphasises the lack of human essence. The ending is happy, but did human kind had contributed to it?