The Vilnius Old Theatre will host the premiere of the play based on Per Olov Enquist's play "The Hour of the Lynx" (directed by Artūras Areima) on January 31, February 1 and 2. The play raises sensitive and more relevant questions than ever: what does it mean to grow up in a family without love, how does it affect the psyche of a young person, how much are we, as a society, responsible for crimes and self-destruction, and can we anticipate the moment before a catastrophe occurs?
The path to the stage for "Lynx Hour" was not easy. According to director A. Areima, the play was saved by none other than a talking cat.
Between sanity and madness
Directed by Artūras Areima, the play is based on the play "The Lynx Hour" by Per Olov Enquist (Swedish: "Lynx Hour"). I Lodjurets Timma) is a drama of the soul that analyzes what madness is, faith, what a person is and what he is capable of, an exploration of the human psyche, subconscious, a study of human identity and the surrounding moral, religious, political, mythical, informational and cultural environment of humanity.
The performance clearly intends to analyze the nature of crime, the origins of mental disorders, to give the viewer the opportunity to rethink their beliefs and fears, and to encourage dialogue. It also attempts to answer questions such as whether the world of imagination can be as real, or perhaps even more real, than reality, what price one has to pay for prejudices, and how important it is to look at people with sensitivity.
A person from outside
The play "The Hour of the Lynx" was created in 1988 and explores difficult questions of faith, repentance and human morality. PO Enquist's work often uses closed environments, reflecting the isolation and religious attitudes of his hometown. The action in this play takes place in a closed psychiatric clinic, where a teenage murderer and other characters face their inner demons and attempts to understand humanity. The teenager kills an elderly couple without any explanation or motive. A team of scientists conducts an experiment with the patients of this department - some of them are allowed to raise pets and take care of them. The main character of the play learns that the experiment is being stopped - they will take away his best friend, a cat.
A. Areima emphasizes that it is important for him to talk about people on the margins: "They may think differently, they may not communicate so smoothly with society, but they exist, they are next to us. That is what I want to talk about. Empathy, understanding others, is very important. Without a human connection, we very quickly reject those who are different. This world does not need misfits."
Today's discussions about mental health are gaining momentum and will only become more relevant. Aggressiveness, depression, anxiety in children and adolescents are most often associated with a lack of love and care from parents and loved ones. If guilt, shame, helplessness, vulnerability, insecurity, aggression are "untreated", they move into adult life.
Artūras Areima: "The most important thing for me is my home"
The idea to stage this play took a long time to develop, there were no suitable conditions or funding for it. The motive for taking on difficult material was the question of meaning and meaninglessness, the lack of love, its absence, longing, loneliness. A. Areima: “I wanted to talk about this, I find all this in the play. The most important thing for me in this material is home. The hero keeps repeating: “I want to go home”. That grandfather’s house is very important, and so is that cat.
One of the most interesting Lithuanian theater directors, A. Areima, seeks to return the play of dreams and fantasy to theater, in order to allow us to break away from reality: “The Hour of the Lynx” can provide a unique perspective that encourages empathy and understanding. The form of the performance is dreamy, surreal, mystical. […] By creating and showing human cruelty to the audience on stage, by trying to deconstruct the logic, motives, and formation of cruelty, we create an opportunity in a safe way to learn to notice that cruelty in reality, and at the same time to stop and transform it in time.”
The Process. The show was saved by a cat
The play stars Artūras Aleksejevas, Saulius Ambrozaitis, Eglė Grigaliūnaitė, Eglė Špokaitė, Maksimas Tuchvatulinas. When asked about the process of creating the play, the actors did not hide that they enjoyed the process. However, at a certain point, the director had reached a point where he wanted to give up everything, he was about to give up, and had already apologized to both the actors and the team, because the play simply had difficulty "unlocking" - the play was awkward on stage, very static, the material was closed, and there was not enough space to enter the inner world of the main character.
A. Areima: "During one rehearsal, I realized that the main character's words should not be spoken by him, but by the cat. And the cat spoke! The cat actually saved the performance, it broke the linearity and immediately opened up space. A turning point occurred - by silencing the main character, life and certainty were born."
When does the lynx strike?
PO Enquist, through the lips of the play's hero, seems to answer the question of what the lynx hour is, but very vaguely: "That twenty-fifth hour is probably already outside the boundaries of the day. So what hour is that? Is it on this side of the day or the other? Maybe somewhere nearby."
The director's understanding of the lynx hour belongs to some quantum world: "The term is both scientific and fantastic. We have structured time, but it still moves differently. Time is not a released arrow. It can contract, expand. The lynx hour is a state between a dream and a non-dream, which is real, but inexplicable. There is also a clear reference here to what could have happened - after all, there are things that you doubt whether they really happened, are happening. This also affects the performance - mimeticity, imitating the world on stage, is not interesting to me."
PO Enquist: "I wasn't alone. I had pine trees."
The work of one of the most famous Swedish writers, playwrights, and laureates of many awards, PO Enquist (1934–2020), has been translated into dozens of languages. His novels "Captain Nemo's Library", "The Exiled Angel", "The Visit of a Private Doctor", and "Blanche and Mary" have been published in Lithuanian. He is also the author of several film scripts, and his plays and novels have been adapted for film several times. In 1975, he made his theater debut with the drama "Night of the Tribades", after which several significant plays appeared. One of them is "The Hour of the Lynx", which received worldwide recognition and was widely staged. A film was also made based on this play (directed by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, 2013).
The playwright has written about what shaped him as a writer and as a person: "If you were born in the depths of the forest, then the trees, the earth are what you can trust. Instead of friends and entertainment, I had a large forest, which was everything to me. This formed my strong and unyielding character. I was not alone. I had pine trees."
The premiere of A. Areima's play returns one of the most interesting and frequently performed texts of contemporary Scandinavian drama to the Vilnius Old Theatre stage. This production is the result of cooperation between the Vilnius Old Theatre and AAT | Artūras Areimas Theatre.
