Laura Kutkaitė: The Breasts of Tiresias

In her second production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Laura Kutkaitė—named Best Young European Director at the Fast Forward festival in Dresden in 2022 for her debut work, “The Silence of the Sirens”—takes the French poet, playwright and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880–1918) surrealist work “The Breasts of Tiresias” as her starting point. Together with the actors, she constructs a new text without committing to the original play. With the creative team and actors, she creates a surreal world of associations, whose logic at times resembles the world around us more than we might like.

In G. Apollinaire’s work, a blue-faced figure, Thérèse, rebels against her husband. Her beard and moustache grow, and she cries out about how masculine she feels. Thérèse becomes Tiresias (a blind prophet in Greek mythology), so Thérèse’s husband decides to give birth to the children himself. At the end of the work, Thérèse returns to the one she had fled.

“While reading the play, two things affected me deeply: the portrayal of a woman as strong only when she is a man, and the reduction of a woman to her womb. And perhaps more than anything, Thérèse’s return to her husband. I want to immerse the audience in a kaleidoscopic choreographic dream built on associations. I’m interested in creating the performance as a stage poem. I want to send Thérèse back to the Husband once more, meet an older Thérèse and ask her: would she regret this step? Would she feel remorse? This becomes an almost unanswerable rhetorical question, bound up with people’s beliefs and imposed social constructs, and with deeply rooted ideas of femininity and masculinity.

“Because of my clear feminist stance, my performances resemble manifestos, but there is always a tear within them. At the heart of this work is profound doubt about the very act of making a manifesto. In this performance I do not assert; I question. That is why, for the first time, I feel hope. I want ‘The Breasts of Tiresias’ (I mercilessly amputate one breast from Apollinaire) to be a dialogue about gender, dissident sexuality and the right to one’s own body. We must constantly fight for the right to our own bodies, because they also have a public dimension. The body, as the most radical form of our present, in theatre and beyond, is a social phenomenon of today, a battlefield. In the performance it becomes the primary space in which we raise questions through the merciless metaphor of war,” says director Laura Kutkaitė.