Mistras

The play Mistras by Marius Ivaškevičius, like his earlier Madagascar, suggests an untraditional eye at some famous historical personalities. He also invites us to leave aside stereo- type notions when considering the identity of the Lithuanian nation.

The action in Mistras focus on the life and destiny of Adamas (Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). At the same time, it is the quest for a “real” hero that we are subconsciously looking in life today. The audience is presented with a picture of Lithuania as an “exotic” country, a country where “everything is amorphous and not crystallized: Russia, inside it, Poland, inside Poland, Lithuania, and inside the latter, Indians ready to explode”.

It is a country where people raise a glass to wish each other “to revive in literature”, and of which you can say “all strange lands are equally strange”.

Rimas Tuminas’ production gives us the impression of a grand miracle play, sounding at the same time as requiem for the magnificent era of Romanticism, when the human spirit was endowed with magic powers, which, following the general belief, could have an effect on the world.

At first sight, the Romantic approach to life is very far from life today (old-fashioned solemnity, intense feelings, grandiose ideas), but Tuminas counts himself as an unfulfilled Romantic, and manages to find convincing parallels with today’s reality.

Mistras is Lithuanian landlord, Andrzej Towiański, who proclaimed himself the Lord God’s Marshal, God’s Vicar on Earth, and founded a sect in Paris called “God’s Cause”. His mystical ideas completely enslave the poet Adam Mickiewicz, who at the time is searching for sources of inspiration for his creative work. This unusual duo, combining numerous cultural associations, lead us to reflect on the relations between the teacher and the apprentice, the seducer and the one who desires, between the creator and his creative work.

In Tuminas’ production, Mickiewicz rears up like a Faustian personality, challenging God himself; whereas Mistras embodies the eternal and many-faced evil genius. At the same time, Mistras is a feast for the senses. It is full of spellbinding sights, as well as of genre transformations absorbing the spectator in the dense theatrical atmosphere.