Eimuntas Nekrošius, the great Lithuanian theater director, died in Vilnius on November 20 on the day before his 66th birthday. He was loved and revered by Russian theater-goers and theater-makers. He was one of the masters whose achievement made possible and inspired the current golden age of the Russian drama theater.
Between the mid-1990s and 2016, I saw five of Nekrošius’s productions. Unfortunately, I can’t write sensibly about the theater: few people can without making the director and the show seem ridiculous. There’s still no substitute for seeing the performance or at least a decent video recording. I’ve seen obituaries for the Lithuanian master in pretty much every Continental language but I believe that few of them come close to explaining why his work had deep and lasting value.
But there’s so much interest and appreciation and affection in some of the articles in Italian and some of the Facebook posts in Russian.