Eimuntas Nekrošius (b. 21 November 1953 – d. 20 November 2018) was the most eminent Lithuanian theatre director, dubbed – not without ample justification – “the last Lithuanian pagan.” In his lifetime, he styled himself as a naïve artist – almost a primitivist, or even as an autodidact. He hailed from the village of Pažobris in the vicinity of the town of Šiluva in Samogitia (Žemaitija). His father was a carpenter and his mother a seamstress. It was not until Nekrošius turned eighteen that he went to the theatre and saw a film in the cinema; there was no electricity – not to mention a radio receiver – in his family home. He visited Vilnius for the first time to take university entrance exams. And he spent the entire night sitting on a bench in a square near the Cathedral, staring at the moon suspended over the Gediminas’ Tower. By accident, instead of studying to become an agronomist, he enrolled in the faculty of acting. Dalia Tamuleviciute, the future managing director of the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius (Vilniaus Valstybinis Jaumino Teatras), alongside other professors of the Conservatoire of Vilnius, suspected him of a form of stage autism, as he was unable to accept and perform any of the directorial commands. Fortunately, they noticed that he had an aptitutde for creating brilliant etudes for his partners and, as a result, he was sent to pursue his studies in Moscow. There, under the tutelage of Andrey Goncharov, Nekrošius attended the famous Russian Academy of the Theatre Arts. While in Moscow, he married Nadežda Gultiajeva, a Russian. As a student, he was a black sheep, barely tolerated by peers, and ostracized upon his return to Lithuania for his betrayal – for having wedded an occupier. However, before long he grew to be the most seminal director of his generation – his early productions staged in Kaunas and his fully-fledged shows at the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius were widely discussed, analysed in detail, and soon invited to Moscow and Petersburg as well as to festivals organized in all the brotherly republics of the Soviet Union.

Formulated in The Square (1980), Pirosmani, Pirosmani (1982), The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1983), and Uncle Vanya (1986), Nekrošius’ style was the antithesis of the Russian school of psychological realism and a slap in the face to the successors of Stanislavski. Nekrošius created his on-stage universes on his own, applying geometric precision and relying on the rudimentary elements of earth, wood, fire, and water. Infusing his productions with Christian and pagan symbolism, he turned the Russian theatre back to its folk, consciously crude, and thus candid and unadorned origins. As Vsevolod Meyerhold before him, Nekrošius kept a sharp lookout for, to a degree, the same. His epoch and idiom were, however, different, and he himself was no longer a euphorically naïve actor, but someone who had experienced History in the raw. He asked questions about memory, identity, liberty and humanity in the times of debasement and spiritual slavery, acting as if the Soviet censorship was of no concern, as if it was unable to decode his theatre. He was no dissident – not even a single one of his productions was officially banned – yet he practiced a Lithuanian form of the theatre of allusion. He re-wrote and re-worked literary originals, concealing the real meaning in the chasm between the text and symbol. In the State Youth Theatre, he employed cast members of his generation, graduates of the legendary Dešimtukas (“ten”; the number refers to ten co-graduates of the Conservatoire of Vilnius). After his domestic success came critical acclaim in the former Soviet Bloc, then in Western Europe, and eventually in the United States of America. The State Youth Theatre in Vilnius toured all the key festivals, and its young director was offered work abroad. Nekrošius refused to leave his country: not an émigré artist at heart, he felt at home in Lithuania. He felt free.

In the 1980s, Nekrošius was the brightest star of Lithuanian culture: he staged Love and Death in Verona, a pioneering – and thus cult – rock-opera in Russian, and starred in films – most notably in Skrydis per Atlantą, a story of pilots Stasys Girėnas and Steponas Darašius, Lithuanian counterparts of the Wright Brothers (USA) or Franciszek Żwirko and Stanisław Wigura (Poland), which made his popularity skyrocket. He looked the part – like a silver screen heart-throb who was, in addition, called a genius. However, in the times of perestroika Nekrošius suffered from a creative drought and for five years was unable to finish any production, cancelling rehearsals and coming to the theatre only to refuse to speak a word. He was sectioned for some time and eventually loosened his ties with the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius. The phase of his life where he experienced artist’s block is the indirect subject of The Corridor, a short-length film directed by Šarūnas Bartas, in which Nekrošius plays somebody reminiscent of himself. A silent, nervous man distraught by the fate of children in rebellion-driven anti-Soviet Vilnius, too feeble to leave his own house, a chain-smoker who puffs out cigarette smoke into an empty barrel of a hunting rifle. Later in life, Nekrošius stated that his breakdown stemmed from two factors – from politics that filled him with utter dread as to what might befall the world, his family and himself in the times of systemic change, as well as from his inability to consume the fruits of his world success. He was unable either to work on commission or to monetise his art, while his associates prodded him into signing such uncomfortable contracts, demanding that he take responsibility for their further careers and profits.

In the newly independent Lithuania, Ruta Vanagite-Wyman founded the LIFE Festival in 1992, whose aim was not only presentation of the most important European theatre productions in Vilnius, but production of its own stage shows as well. Nekrošius leaves the State Youth Theatre, bids his long-time audience farewell by staging a biting self-parody based on The Nose by Gogol, and accepts the post of Artistic Director of the LIFE Festival, which in practice means that he is left to his own devices; rehearsals to his productions can now freely commence.

The Little Tragedies based on Pushkin and Chekhov’s Three Sisters mark the director’s grand comeback. His style changes: his theatre narration speeds up, the cast’s on-stage pantomimic actions derive more frequently from the play’s script, which the performers often double and compromise, transgressing its old semantic senses to build new ones upon them. Nekrošius seems to be composing his productions in the throes of some obsessive-compulsive disorder, as everything on-stage is calculated and interconnected through a series of surprising associations. An actor on stage does not merely generate signs, but controls the flow of references. Vladas Bagdonas, one of Nekrošius’ most cherished actors – who often played the characters ventriloquizing the director’s thoughts – used to say that in his theatre a simple everyday action repeated three times eventually turned into a poetic metaphor.

The themes underlying Nekrošius’ new productions remain unchanged, but their accents do shift considerably. A human being is now no match for death and the void of nothingness, as the director celebrates scenes of dying, agony, protagonists’ farewell to the world, believing that as long as one is dying there is no death. His is not a fight with death but a fight for good death. The death of Chekhov’s Tuzenbach, the death of Don Juan – not as a sinner but as a saint, just like that of anyone who loses their way because of love. Everything ends in Nekrošius’ theatre with the passing of a human being: such a world is impossible, useless, and devoid of a purpose.

From the late 1990s and onto the 2000s – partially outside of the LIFE Festival but within his own arts institution called Meno Fortas – Nekrošius produced a Shakespearean trilogy: Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, three of the most demanding tragedies of the Stratford bard. This was his response to his inability to stage King Lear years before. Lithuanian Shakespeare transformed European theatre. No one before Nekrošius offered such a brutal, literal and barbarous reading of the bard’s plays. Nekrošius acted on the contention that Elizabethan theatre was created by simple and specific people, so he treated the Renaissance poetry literally. He materialized metaphors on-stage, dissected fixed phrases into unexpected ingredients, inserted into the theatre space physical objects employed by Shakespeare as figurative expressions, made his actor recite all the verbs and turned them into things referred to by nouns. In other words, he visualized lexemes and concepts, revealing what was concealed in poetry, bringing its seams to the fore. The language of his theatre is a revelatory if basic, and seemingly anti-intellectual, reading of classics. To conduct such a reading of Shakespeare on stage, he invites a young cast, accompanied by his 1980s all-star ensemble players – the already mentioned Bagdonas, Kostas Smoriginas, Algirdas Latėnas, Vladas Petkevičius – as well as by a meticulously singled out group of amateur actors: Hamlet was played by rock musician Andrius Mamontovas, Ophelia by National Ballet dancer Eglė Špokaitė. And they also spoke Shakespeare, they breathed his phrases as never before.

With his Shakespearean trilogy, Eimuntas Nekrošius became a living legend of European theatre, a point of reference on the scale of the depth of readings and re-interpretations of classics. He was at liberty to do what (and where) he wanted. He was most sought-after in Italy and Russia: he staged The Seagull in Venice, Ivanov in Rome, and The Cherry Orchard at the Stanislavski Foundation in Moscow. He returned to Chekhov and staged his entire canon. Subsequently he made his debut as an opera director – he opted for Verdi’s Macbeth (three times). Gounod’s Faust, Wagner’s The Valkyrie, Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal… At the same time, Meno Fortas toured Nekrošius’ Shakespeare on the world festival circuit. But the director felt that after the accession of Lithuania to the European Union his audience in Vilnius changed: the young Lithuanian intelligentsia left for greener pastures abroad, while the old post-Soviet viewers no longer had funds to buy tickets to attend his sold-out and rarely staged performances in the capital. In his interviews Nekrošius talked about the necessity to change the language of theatre and the need to start all his work from scratch. His artistic dilemmas culminated in a compromise, as Nekrošius did not abandon his work methods but gave up dramas, turning to narrative poems – literary works that at first glance were decidedly unstageable. He chose The Song of Songs and Kristijonas Donelaitis’ The Seasons. This exploration of the theatre potential of poetry depended on treating a poem as a pretext and weaving alongside it – in the form of etudes and on-stage actions – a second, parallel, often very private and impressionistic, narrative of the director. A similar strategy would soon lead Nekrošius to Dante’s Divine Comedy, read, however, as a perverse reversal. Here, it is not Dante the wanderer walking through hell, purgatory and paradise who is examined by god on his understanding of the ways of the world and the mysteries of sin and salvation, but the other way around: the poet grills the Almighty over the rationale behind the construction of cosmos, questioning the chain of being and the human being’s position, as decreed by god. Dante the artist does not remain inside the divine system but examines it from the outside, from a vantage point without. Only art, only usurpation through art can provide a human being with such a distance, i.e. with freedom and a right to name existing and imaginary phenomena, entities, and beings.

Two themes determine the last two decades of the life of Nekrošius as a director: his return to childhood and so to the rural world, and meditation on the role of an artist, on the pains of creation and the aim of art as a practice. Thus, an errant blind Faust by Goethe with a parcel of books on his head. Thus, Kafka’s A Hunger Artist of refusal and introspection, and even Mickiewicz the omnipotent demiurge inscribed in his Warsaw production of The Forefathers’ Eve. In each of Nekrošius’ mature productions the equilibrium of powers is of key importance: three mysterious points united by lines, with differently-directed vectors, creating altogether a triangle. Its three apexes constitute as follows: “a human being as an artist”, “death or nothingness”, “god or something inconceivable”. Everything of any importance to Nekrošius functions in this (and only this) triangular order. Love, memory, good, evil, authority, art and other notions can only be closer to or further away from any of the three points / apexes – being either pulled in or pushed back. Any other phenomenon or issue is erased from the orbit of his artistic concerns.

The year 2008 marks the date of Nekrošius’ intensive fascination with prose adaptations. First, he stages Anna Karenina in Italy, then he embarks on adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot), whom he ignored for decades, examines The Book of Job, and short texts by Franz Kafka, to eventually enter the horrifying confessions of human wrecks in the non-fiction of Svetlana Alexievich (The Zinc). His desire to become a writer remained his most best-kept secret – for decades he would fill up piles of identical notebooks with performance ideas, with variants of the same scene. He would interrogate his associates, asking them whether any of the stage devices he employed was original, whether it reminded anybody of any earlier work of art – he was afraid of unconscious mimicry. This unborn writer within Nekrošius created his own stories – not in writing but in the air, in narratives concealed by on-stage pantomimes, in the accounts and anecdotes he regaled his cast with during rehearsals. Prose adaptations constituted thus a clash of his invisible, unwritten sentences with ones one had to bring to the theatre and distribute among the performers as their lines. With the exception of A Hunger Artist, Nekrošius was consistent in his adaptations and always erased the third-person narrator. He did not want to compete with any authorial voice. He was game for dialogues and monologues of protagonists but not for a rival voluble demiurge.

Five years before his death he is diagnosed with aneurysm – no invasive surgery is necessary, but the miraculously saved director will continue to live with a time bomb in his chest. He he had been destined for an earlier death but the death that he so cherished in his stage productions granted him postponement. For that reason, all the performances dating to that period are leases of life, his extracurricular activities. As his aneurysm is likely to rupture at any moment, he is living on borrowed time. Nekrošius decides to stop travelling by planes but sticks to his regime and theatre and cigarettes. He pursues rehearsals, finishing previously impossible and undoable projects, such as The Forefathers’ Eve in Warsaw; he intends to put a closure on old unfinished business. To this end, Nekrošius returns for the third time to Ivanov in Zagreb, while in Klaipėda he stages Sons of a Bitch by Saulius Šaltenis, the author of The Ballads of Duokiškis (Duokiškio baladės), a politically brave story of šauliai – The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, which in 1978 shocked his Kaunas audience. He takes his Mento Fortas performances to Šiluva, where on a platform built near a church he stages The Book of Job and Paradise. In his words, it was a way of paying off his debt. His aim is to start with literature – the Sumerian and Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh: in the rehearsal rooms of Meno Fortas students of acting prepare scenes from the Mesopotamian work – variants of the mourning for Enkidu, the deceased friend of the ancient king. He stages Gombrowicz’s The Marriage in the National Theatre in Warsaw and makes plans for King Lear to be produced there, intending to finish the twice-abandoned adaptation and, thus, to overcome his largest theatre trauma. He spends time with his grandchildren, gives interviews to Lithuanian and Russian journalists, talking at length about his work with actors. He teaches at the Conservatoire of Vilnius, accepts state awards, attends his jubilee in Vilnius dressed in black, wearing a white Renaissance ruff, as if portraying an age-worn Hamlet. He might be calculating how much time he still had left, preparing a repertoire summary – “last minute” titles were supposed to form a clear-cut timeline of his life and work. And yet he dies abruptly – a fatal heart attack a day before his 66^th birthday. He is interred in Šiluva, in a tiny fenceless cemetery gently neighbouring a dirt road leading to the village. In a photo, it looks as if his grave were lodged between two wooden cottages, mud-caked, two steps away from the porch of his family home.