The Mother

Florian Zeller is the contemporary French novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Already in 2004 he won the „Prix Interallié“ for his novel „The Fascination of Evil”. Zeller wrote a trilogy of plays „The Mother”, “The Father”, “The Son”. In 2020, the dramatist himself directed the film according to the part of the trilogy, The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. The film was awarded six “Oscar” statues, including the best film awards, while Zeller won the Oscar for the best script. „The Father” was also nominated for four “Golden Globe” awards and six British Academy awards. The works of the dramatists were also highly evaluated in theatre: both “the Mother” and “the Father” got the prestigious Moliere award in France. Zeller has written more than ten plays.

The everyday life of Anne, the main character of “the Mother” is a cocktail of sleeping pills, diazepam and alcohol, which she tries to use in order to forget her depression, and also her house and family which she had been living for. How should the mother reconcile with the maturity of her children? How should she learn to live her own life, to take care of herself, to love herself?

“It is a brilliant study of the peculiar case of the psychical organization of the human soul, which may be compared to the patient cases described in good psychiatric works. It is a work of fiction, but in its precision it absolutely equals to the professional works on psychotherapy. Here, there are no attempts to declare a diagnosis, which prevails in that type of plays – that makes this play wonderful. Here, pain and joy grows in between relations with those around us. There is no wish to shock. Everything develops from everyday life, proximity, in a subtle way.” (director Kirilas Glušajevas).

*****

KIRILAS GLUŠAJEVAS

director

Kirilas Glušajevas (born in 1984) – the actor and director, the pupil of the director Rimas Tuminas. In 2004-2005, he studied in the Darlington Arts’ College, United Kingdom. In 2008 he graduated from Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Glušajevas staged the plays in Kaunas State Drama Theatre, Vilnius State Small Theatre, OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Improvisation Theatre „Kitas kampas“, the Alytus City Theatre, the Klaipėda Youth Theatre. He staged such authors as Ingmar Bergman, Ivan Vyrypaev, Dmitry Boguslavsky, Arthur Miller, Sigitas Parulskis and others. He teaches in Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.

*****

REVIEWS:

The Theatrical Epicrisis
Ramunė Balevičiūtė, Menų faktūra

This time the director interested in the liminal states of human psyche chose the play “The Mother” by the French star dramatist Florian Zeller, masterfully translated by Akvilė Melkūnaitė. Together with the plays “The Father” and “the Son” it makes up a trilogy which analyses the family relations in the face of mental disorders. 

Among other things, Zeller’s dramaturgy is interesting because it subtly passes through different characters’ perspectives. You can’t be sure about the version of reality you see: that of the human being having a mental disorder or that of her relatives. In a clash of several worldview perspectives we grasp the relativity of what we call the reality. At the same time there is a question touching the basic humanist values: are we able to take care of the relative as the relation we try to make with her does not satisfy us, as there is no feedback…

[…]

Scene after scene, the Mother’s consciousness, suffering under the influence of medicaments and alcohol and materializing her phobias and terrible fantasies, begins to appear. The mother Anna, played by Rasa Samuolytė, is a sparkling source of energy, the table tennis ball striking the wall. It is dangerous – you never know where it will hit the next moment. She is exhausted, downtrodden and yet still hyperactive. Having hidden her aggression, she attacks her husband Pierre (Dainius Gavenonis) who is a bit late from work. It does not take long until we know that the main cause of her bad mood is a lost connection with her beloved son Nicolas and the fear to be left totally abandoned. 

*****

“Kiss Me My Love”
Ingrida Ragelskienė, 7 meno dienos

In autumn 2023 we said goodbye to the play “The Mother (Vassa Zheleznova) by the director Kirilas Glušajevas. It is spectacular that while staging that performance which in the Vilnius Small Theatre was shown more than ten years the director was just around the same age as the protagonist of his newest work “The Mother”, the son Nicolas. In 2011 he was unbearably young, impudently talented, demonstrably self-dependent, and critics would keep on equalizing this artist with the major directors Rimas Tuminas and Oskaras Koršunovas. On December 18, 2023, during the opening night of Glušajevas’ “The Mother” according to the play by Florian Zeller, I seemed to understand why exactly this year theatrically it was finished with “The Mother” by Maxim Gorky; the newest production of the still young, talented, unique and self-confident artist needed some air, oxygen. Meanwhile, it is a time for the black and demonic mother Vassa Zheleznova (actor Eglė Gabrėnaitė) to make way for the mother Anne (actor Rasa Samuolytė). Significantly, this year the director offered the means of a new artistic existence for both theatres. The Small Theatre has a possibility to liberate itself from the creative period when the presence “the Mother” used to suppose the absence of love as well as crimes and autocracy, while OKT, having enriched its schedule with “the Mother”, has been given a pleasant responsibility to meet the enormous interest of theatre-goers, to satisfy the hunger for a new scenic phenomenon. 

I tried to identify myself as the new spectator who came to the OKT to see “the Mother” during the opening night. I am probably around forty years old, I rarely visit Ašmenos street in Vilnius, I do not really know where it is, the Googlemaps help me as well as maybe some unconscious memories about the club “Langas” which I had visited many years ago. The street is narrow, the cobble stones are rugged, the darkness provokes tension and forces to expect the unpredictable. The opening of the door inside gives three possibilities – to move upstairs, to push the lift’s button or to stop at the poster where the journey to the show begins. The name of the performance, “The Mother”, is as though written with the white piece of chalk in small letters, but on a traditional family picture, not on the blackboard. In front there is a clear faced middle-aged woman holding the bouquet of autumn flowers. She is not high, the face is held up to the camera, smiling lips with a gentle touch of lipstick, the net of wrinkles under the eyes. It is pleasant to see a lovely actor Rasa Samuolytė, which was recently congratulated in the media after having received the National Prize. Behind her there are two men, the young likeable guy with a serious face, comfortably sitting on the small chair with his back leaning at the white tiles of a stove, is due to have a sip of coffee (Aurelijus Pocius in rhe role of the son Nicolas.) The grey-haired man of the young good-hearted face is standing by the gas cooker cooking coffee, watching at the back of his wife (the actor Dainius Gavenonis). It is undoubtedly a family: the mother, the husband, the son, the real, natural connection of love, closeness, blood. At the far backdrop there is a young woman leaning on the doorframe. She could be anyone – the daughter, the sister, the friend, the neighbour, the shadow of the mother’s youth (Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė in the role of the girlfriend Elodie). Having embraced herself she is simply included into that cosy family picture where everybody is wearing the everyday dress of the pastel colours, resembling the ground, faded grass, coffee with milk. 

The poster of “the Mother” is soothing, without any threats of catastrophes and cataclysms which are so pervasive in contemporary theatre. While walking up the stairs you pass the doors behind which there is a repair; the typical staircase of the old town building full of anonymous offices. Behind the glass partition there is the ticket control, the lobby with the cloakroom and the water cooler. There are two benches and the crowd of spectators getting ever denser. If I was a first-timer in the OKT space at the opening night of “the Mother”, I would immediately believe that the small amphitheatre with seats looking towards the depth of the hall is there for all eternity. In the hall it is dark and uncomfortable while sitting on the hard chair, the witness of good and bad times. Will the stage remind of a promised image in the poster downstairs? In the hall there is only a rolled carpet, some metal frames by the walls, some grey curtains having been hung disorderly, naked concrete walls look dirty at first sight. The horrible artificial lighting below the ceiling, further, a corridor and several doors. No similarity towards a cosy, coffee-smelling family kitchen in the old town with a display window to a closed yard, presented in the poster.

Here one should mention that the scenic designer of “the Mother” Marijus Jacovskis was also a designer of Glušajevas’ “The Mother (Vassa Zheleznova)”. This other production is being played no more, while the dark, cramped space poisoned with the thin air and dust filled with massive furniture and weighted down with the beam still appears in the mind as the terror of human tragedy. While creating the scenography of “The Mother”, the artist chooses another way, opening and uncovering the space, emphasising the wornness of all its elements and the traces left after the earlier performances and human dramas. In the show the natural playground is also the lobby of the hall, the staircase, the lift, the street which enters into the show after opening the window, after an unexpected flush of the gust of wind and natural city sounds. As if from the outside the father Pierre, played by the actor Gavenonis, irrupts into the show. It is a man of action, movement, energy. After an irruption into the space of the mother Anne (Samuolytė), satisfied with the uncanny, abandonment and ruin, he tries to create the illusion of the family nest by unrolling the carpet. 

I am reminded that the main visual material of the play “the Mother” represented all four actors seemingly naked under the ornamented carpet. As if they themselves were the emotional sweepings, mental rubbish, just the mean secrets somehow most often swept under the carpets, the hidden ones. It happens so often as the spectators – neighbours, relatives, theatre-goers unexpectedly turn up to curiously have a look at the life of a lovely family reminding of the cosy family picture. Because before our eyes there is such a contemporary, loving, sensitive, kind, supportive and caring family, in which the words like “I love you”, “my love”, “let’s embrace”, “kiss me” is the everyday emotional norm or routine. Maybe that is why the carpet unrolled by the actor immediately becomes a ring of fighters, and the struggle is about the deconstruction of the present situation towards the oneiric case of deadly embrace, the strangling of the mother. Above the carpet there is an incessant preparation, analysis, purge of something essential and sacral for this family. Later, as the deconstructed parts are reconstructed again before our own eyes, we can say that something new has taken place. 

The topic of the play is the everyday life we all know by heart – the separation of the grown up kids, the unfaithful husband wishing to give up the family, the end of youth, the total solitude among the closest relatives. The Zeller’s play which has been written in 2010 is wonderful in that it can masterfully deconstruct itself and be joined again according to the unexpected logical combination. So, what is the quintessence of action turning the many things into the One? The mother Anne, played by Samuolytė. In the surface she is a naïve, innocent kid, impossible to hurt, such a being is impossible to hate or feel disgusted about. Often her actions are met with a laughter in audience because every time you hear the horrible things from such a naively innocent mouth you want to protest with a good-hearted laughter. Of course she has more layers inside her, such as the woman destroyed by her life, the hysteric dependent on medicine and alcohol and searching for a pretext to raise a conflict, the depressive mother who has lost her main role in life, the human being who has lost her orientation in the environment, who has been lost in her fantasies and visions… There are many more layers. The explanation that everything most probably happens in this woman’s unconscious chambers and labyrinths is to be found in the last macabre ten minutes of the show as suddenly the abandoned and absolutely uncanny stage playground with the help of the grey curtains becomes the aesthetically pure space of the horrible dream. Before us immediately there is a hospital ward which depresses us with the massive drapes of fabric, imbibing the scream of horror, emphasizing the hearse of the bed, in which the happy end is impossible. Because the hell is myself.