Faithless

In 2024, the actress Alvydė Pikturnaitė was nominated for the National Theatre Award in Lithuania (Golden Stage Cross) as Best Actress.

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The State Small Theatre of Vilnius, in collaboration with VšĮ “Darbininkai”, kindly invites you to the performance Faithless made by young generation’s director and creator of audiovisual experiences Naubertas Jasinskas. It is a visual poetic narrative based on a script by Ingmar Bergman, a famous Swedish modern filmmaker and theatre director. It is one of Bergman's last works, which he never managed to turn into a film, until it was done in 2000 by Liv Ullmann, a well-known actress, former lover and his muse in movies (Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, etc.).

In Faithless I. Bergman is concerned with the world of an artist, his soul-wrenching conflicts, passions, creative explorations and failures. Working on the script, he has drawn on rich personal experience. 

In this work, the aging writer is haunted by his imaginative but very realistic character Marianne, who tells her dramatic story and that of the writer. Marianne is an actress, her husband is a famous conductor, they have a little daughter Isabelle. They all are a beautiful, harmonious family. But then she falls in love with a family friend, a theatre and film director, who is not doing well. This irresponsibility turns everything into a terrible family tragedy.

According to director N. Jasinskas, the play is primarily about the conflict of love and infidelity in a man: how and why does the so-called duality emerge in a person, where the inability to express one's needs comes from? Why do we deny our lust, even though it is inexorable? What happens when we don't talk, when the truth becomes ignored and silenced? At the end of his life, Bergman rethinks the prospect of broken or so-called compromised relationships.

The performance is told from the point of view of the faithless - the woman, thus changing the usual gaze that was of Bergaman's alter ego.

“It seems to me that people are living a very sad life at the moment, the quality of life is poor. I want to understand the reason why. I think there are a few things that are important here: there is some kind of both cultural and religious aspect, a kind of indication of how we are supposed to live, and often this appears as an unquestioned reality. That’s why we do not talk about the things of great importance. Infidelity is one of them. What is it? Bergman divides infidelity into physical and spiritual. In the cinema he was the first to reflect on spiritual infidelity as more significant than physical infidelity (previously, the reverse was true in the cultural narrative). In the light of this idea, it is interesting to consider what spiritual, emotional infidelity is and how it shows up.”

Naubertas Jasinskas, director

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About the director

Director N. Jasinskas was born in Šiauliai in 1995. In 2018 he completed his BA and in 2020 MA (supervisor internationally acclaimed director Yana Ross) in theatre direction at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. In 2021 N. Jasinskas was nominated for the National Theatre Award (Golden Stage Cross) for his play fabrica (Sirenos International Theatre Festival in Vilnius) in the category of the Pandemic Resistant Theatre and in 2022 he won above-mentioned award in the category of the Young Artist for his play bowel staged at the Kaunas City Chamber Theater. In 2023 N. Jasinskas was nominated for the National Theatre Award for the Best Director for his play End of Eddy (State Youth Theater) and Sigita Šimkūnaitė and Sandra Straukaitė were awarded for this award for this play’s set design and costume design.

N. Jasinskas stage works are characterised by two clear directions: the quest for the new theatrical forms and the drama theatre performances, which offer the possibility to explore different perspectives of human relations.

Ages 16+: explicit content, strobe light.

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The project is partly funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Project sponsor – Vilnius city municipality.
The play is presented by arrangement with Josef Weinberger Limited, London on behalf of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.
The right to show the play is granted by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation: www.ingmarbergman.se.