Sing Freely

At the Voices Berlin Festival, the Lithuanian State Youth Theater presents Travelers. The production is by Hungarian director Árpád Schilling — a perpetual outsider and one of Europe’s leading theater-makers.

The Youth Theater is among Lithuania’s best and stands out on Europe’s theatrical map. Much of the credit goes to Audronis Liuga, a theater manager and producer who has led the company for almost a decade.

During the pandemic, Liuga launched a series of productions exploring the nature of war and the psychology of those who wage it. It began with Austerlitz, adapted from W. G. Sebald’s novel and staged by Krystian Lupa. Then, in autumn 2022, the renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa made his stage debut at the Youth Theater with The Kindly Ones, based on Jonathan Littell’s novel, which had never before been translated into Lithuanian. The third part of this war triptych arrived in April 2023 — an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Liuga invited Árpád Schilling to direct it — the right choice: the novel became a brutal farce pronouncing judgment on virtually any modern society that invents enemies to unleash unbridled violence. The Judge — who pleads for humane treatment of the captured “barbarians” yet is himself humiliated in the end — was played with astonishing depth by Valentinas Masalskis. Everyone astonished in this production: elegant, courteous waiters in a restaurant instantly turned into “special forces,” torturing first those who did not look like their fellow citizens and then anyone who simply displeased them. The four-hour performance swallowed you like a black hole — even after the interval, the house was still full.

At the end of last season, Schilling returned to the Youth Theater, working in the way he most often prefers — with no pre-written text. The piece is born in rehearsals. Anyone who remembers his now-legendary Blackland knows that Schilling’s shows can unfold as a chain of razor-sharp sketches on the most urgent topics of the day. In Travelers, everything is bound together by choral singing rooted in improvisation. And the leitmotif is the theater itself — its history and its purpose.

“At first I wanted to call the show Consolation — meaning we seek a glimmer of hope in a world plunged into crisis,” says Árpád Schilling. “But once I began working with the actors, the perspective shifted. The creation process meant we were making it together: every day the actors took a step forward, every day they faced a new idea, a new task, a new situation. When I asked how they would describe this experience, they said: ‘we are on the road, we are travelling.’ That inspired the new title — Travelers. With this production I want to underline the importance of theater, and that it is alive only when it is in constant motion — across historical eras, styles, themes, changing audiences… We are all traveling within ourselves — spiritually, we undergo continual renewal. For me, traveling means the necessity to be reborn, to refuse to give up. In the same way, theater must keep moving and changing to remain alive.

But we need something that binds us — something greater than fear or pride — not language, not flags, not history. The choir — like a caravan — moves forward, continually finding new meanings. We must live, and we must sing. What kind of life is it if we cannot sing freely?”

Critics have already praised the remarkable ensemble of Travelers — at the Youth Theater, the actors listen and tune to one another like musicians. And anyone familiar with Schilling’s work knows what drives it: irony. Pitch-black, edging into the absurd, sometimes skirting the limits of propriety. Still, it is almost impossible not to laugh.