“Lucy Skates”. Photo by D. Matvejev

The theatre and opera director Oskaras Koršunovas (b. 1969) is the most prominent member of the middle generation of Lithuanian theatre directors, who has created over 70 theatre productions, in Lithuania and in various theatres abroad. He graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 1993 with a BA and an MA in theatre directing. While still a student, he presented his trilogy There To Be Here (Ten būti čia, 1990), The Old Woman (Senė, 1992) and Hello Sonya New Year (Labas Sonia Nauji Metai, 1994), on the main theatre stages in Lithuania and later abroad, based on the works of the 20th-century Russian avant-gardists Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, which revealed an utterly new language of directing that had not been practised in Lithuanian theatre before.

Later, he turned to analysing the socio-cultural environment and began staging plays by contemporary dramatists, becoming the first director to explore the society of independent, post-Soviet Lithuania, and its conflicts and relationships. Koršunovas’ work is described as a combination of classic and contemporary theatre: his stagings of plays by Mark Ravenhill, Marius von Mayenburg, Jon Fosse and Sarah Kane influenced works based on Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bulgakov and Strindberg, and vice versa.

The independent Oskaras Koršunovas Theatre (OKT/Vilnius City Theatre) was born in 1997, and its first premieres appeared in 1999, making it the year from which the theatre’s history begins its count. This theatre brought new actors, set designers and composers to Lithuanian theatre scene, and also contributed to the formation of a new generation of theatregoers. Productions by the OKT participated in festivals around the world, including the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival in the UK, and the Festival d’Avignon in France.

Koršunovas’ new creative stage was marked by the production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 2008. The director discovered a new space – the small OKT/Vilnius City Theatre Studio and made it his base for in-depth searchings in which the creative process is no less, perhaps even more important than the result. Created here were the performances of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (2010), Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2013), Miranda based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2011), Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (2013), Sarah Kane Cleansed (2017), Bertold Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding (2016), Ivan Vyrypaev’s Delhi Dance (2017), Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (2018), Martin Crimp’s Attempts at Her Life (2018), Laura Sintijos Černiauskaitė’s Lucy skates (Liučė čiuožia, 2019) and Dmitry Danilov’s A Man from Podolsk (2019).

Koršunovas creates not only in his theatre, and not only in Lithuania, but also in other European countries. He has directed in such foreign theatres as the National Theatre in Oslo (Norway), the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm (Sweden), the Comédie-Francaise Theatre in Paris (France), the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Art Theatre (Russia), also at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw, Poreia Theatre in Athens (Greece), the Reykjavik City Theatre (Iceland) and the Aarhus Theatre (Denmark).

Koršunovas is not unfamiliar with educational work. Between 1997 and 2001, he taught at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and returned there again in 2012. His first class graduated in 2016, and the final productions that Koršunovas created with the young actors became part of the new OKT repertoire.

Koršunovas has received over 30 national and international theatre awards. He is a laureate of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art (2002), a Chevalier of the second degree Order of Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, and the Swedish Royal Order of the Northern Star. He is also a winner of the prestigious New Theatre Reality Prize (2002), the V. Meyerhold Prize (2010), and a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters (2009). He has received three Golden Cross of the Stage awards (2004, 2011 and 2012) and the Borisas Dauguvietis Earring award (2009).

One of the latest performances directed by Koršunovas in Lithuania is Lucy Skates (2019) based on the 2003 play by Lithuanian writer and playwright Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė. This is the third interpretation of this play on the Lithuanian stage and the second in the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre (in 2007, it was staged by director Yana Ross). This time, the action of the performance, which focuses on a couple’s relationship, is presented through retrospectively looking at the 2000s, which are described as “wild” – the time of the formation of a consumer society in Lithuania. The lines of the young generation actors convey short messages and getting lost in the reality of supermarkets, which influence the definitions of man’s and woman’s roles and the shift they are undergoing, as the generations and their values are changing in an increasingly fast-moving time.

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