Artūras Areima
The younger-generation theatre director Artūras Areima (born 1982) graduated in events management from Klaipėda University in 2004, which he followed with a BA in theatre directing in 2008, and an MA from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2010.
Areima began his career in state theatres, the Vilnius State Small Theatre and the National Kaunas Drama Theatre. He is one of the few guest directors who stage productions at the Oskaras Koršunovas Theatre/Vilnius City Theatre. This young director has already directed over 20 productions.
At the beginning of his career, Areima stood out with his interpretations of modern classics: he chose to stage pieces by Schiller, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shakespeare and others. He explored memory, and the hopes and anxieties of universal modern man, and subtly developed conflict on stage. However, after a while, he became interested in social problems and other difficult issues.
The independent Artūras Areima Theatre was established in 2014. The director chose the image of a nonconformist theatre for it, and declares his alignment with the countercultural movement. This relates to the latest tendency in his creative work, which has seen the greatest expression in productions created for his theatre: the belief that a stage play should resemble a sketch, and not be a complete picture, so that the director not only constructs work that can be open to interpretation, but seeks first and foremost to provoke. This aspiration is evident in productions such as Medea’s Room (Medėjos kambarys, 2016), based on documentary material, and, under the principle of creative laboratory, Kai Hansel’s mono-play Klam War (Klamo karas, 2017), and Antichrist (Antikristas, 2017), based on work by Foucault, Nietzsche and Wilde, as well as documentary material.
In 2013, Areima was awarded the Borisas Dauguvietis Earring award by the jury of the Golden Cross of the Stage, for his search for new forms of expression on the stage. In 2014, he received the Young Artist Award from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, and in 2015 he was awarded the Kaunas professional theatre creator’s award Fortune, for his provocative directorial style. In 2016, his staging of Falk Richter’s Under Ice (Po ledu, 2015), (a co-production with the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre) participated in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
One of the latest productions by Areima, Antichrist (Antikristas, 2017), is a four-actor spree, featuring fragments of philosophical and political topicalities, the struggle against stereotypes, and with elements of pornography in the background. Arguably the strongest part of this staging is the mastered non-acting genre, which is still rare in Lithuania: the strong, natural presence of actors on the stage, without the need for justification. This play proves that Areima, who taught for a few years at Vytautas Magnus University, has raised a group of actors who are suitable for his work and ready for anything on the stage.