Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952-2018

Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952-2018): the theater lost “a kind of genius” The celebrated Lithuanian director, whose repeated visits to Porto were seen as events, died on Tuesday, the day before he turned 66. Only an unusual intelligence, a paradoxical intelligence, both clinical and poetic, could ever imagine that the potency of the invariably postponed desires of Olga, Macha and Irina, the three sisters of Chekhov's homonymous play, fit the metaphor of a table top. spinning, fatal as fate, on stage, minutes on end. Eimuntas Nekrosius, the Lithuanian director who died this Tuesday of a heart attack, the day before he turned 66, had this intelligence. With its monumental version of “O Idiota”, by Fiódor Dostoievski, that TNSJ opened the season, 2009/2010 on September 11 and 12, 2009 with the return of the “gross and vital theater” of Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius. The theater director, Nuno Carinhas, describes the show Os Idiotas, with which Nekrosius returns to this stage for the fifth time since 1992, as “a pièce de resistence based on O Idiota”, by Dostoievski. There are five and a half hours of theater with two breaks for breathing. All Eimuntas Nekrosius' visits to Porto were events - since the first stop at PoNTI, in December 1997, the year in which the Lithuanian director left the audience of the Teatro Nacional S. João (TNSJ) completely under the influence with a prodigious montage of “The Three Sisters” - and there is one more event Eimuntas Nekrosius on the march. It is with him, and with his monumental version of “The Idiot”, by Fiódor Dostoievski. After throwing himself at practically all the monsters of Russian literature (Gogol, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Tchékhov) and one of the founding texts of the Lithuanian language (“Estações”, by Kristijonas Donelaitis, which had a world premiere in Porto, in January 2003), Nekrosius has just arrived at an author who has always considered "extremely dangerous". “We all have something of Prince Mishkin's soul and personality. His status as an idiot is an ideal state that any of us would like to achieve ”, explained the director days before the world premiere of the play, on June 17, at the International Festival of Villa Adriana, outside Rome. There were spectators who left in the middle, noted “Corriere della Sera”, but the overwhelming majority of the audience stood up at the end of the play, at 2:30 am (the full version of “Idiots” lasts five and a half hours), for a Standing ovation of five minutes. He still doesn't know how to do short shows ("I can't tell anything in less than four hours. The more intermittent the attention, the longer the shows must be long"), and, of course, he still doesn't know how to do bad shows. Like the previous Nekrosius events that the TNSJ showed (in addition to "The Three Sisters" and "Seasons", there was a "Macbeth" in 1999 and an "Othello" in 2001), "Idiots" lives on a singular deconstruction of the text - reduced to four nuclear characters - and a very strong score of objects - a mirror, a door, beds of bars - which become an autonomous narrative. The last time he was in Porto, Nekrosius agreed to show how he performs feats with almost nothing to a group of stage directors that included the current director of TNSJ, Nuno Carinhas. “Meno Fortas shows are said to be avant-garde objects, but it seems that we are seeing the end of something. It is as if that language came from the background of the times ”, he told PÚBLICO at the end of one of the work sessions. Lúcia Sigalho, who was also there, summed up the Nekrosius event to this: "A couple of snaps right on the face". In September, we turn the other cheek.