Karolis Kaupinis: Lithuanian Death Notices. The Story of One Performance

“Lithuanian Death Notices. The Story of One Performance” follows a group of theatre makers trying to recreate a legendary production and, in doing so, restore a sense of wholeness to their own present and to the present of theatre. But the work is difficult: the actors wrestle with questions of love and personal fulfilment, the ageing director chases his fading glory, and neither onstage nor backstage can they hold on to moments of success and happiness for longer than a second. Attempts to recreate them or make them anew do not help. The hope that eternal happiness can be attained in a transient world gradually traps the creators in a theatre turning into hell—a performance that is eternally temporary.

In 2024, film director and screenwriter Karolis Kaupinis won a competition for the European Playwrights’ Residency Programme, organised by the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre with its partners—the National Theatre of Spain in Madrid, the Gorky Theatre in Berlin, the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels, and Zagreb Youth Theatre. His play received much favourable feedback at the “Versmė” playwriting festival, and its author was invited to create a production for the LNDT Main Stage.

“The most interesting endeavour in theatre for me is trying to touch eternity, because by its nature this art form is the most ephemeral. It is the fundamental human desire—to transcend our temporary selves. And the transience of everything is now my defining feeling. I suspect it is not mine alone. It seems to me that the fear of disappearance—collective disappearance, not only individual death—is what hovers in the subconscious of many of us, as the Russian regime keeps repeating its threats that sooner or later we will suffer what Ukrainians are experiencing now. So where, if not in temporary theatre, is it worth talking about this sense of transience?” says director Karolis Kaupinis about the work’s relevance.

The production uses many archival video recordings of legends of Lithuanian theatre. According to the director, the central idea of “Lithuanian Death Notices. The Story of One Performance” is that, in these unstable times, lasting hope can come only from believing that everything does not end here and now. The eternity of the next world redeems the transience of this one. “This is an idea that secular people have already driven from their minds, and that is precisely why they struggle so much to come to terms with their own transience. Yet in the present we inevitably have to return to this idea if we are not to lose the meaning of living. With this production, we want to give audiences a sense of togetherness by bringing them together, and create a sense of hope and meaning in a time when politics does not provide it,” says Karolis Kaupinis.

The production uses archival material from LRT, “Lietuvos rytas” and TV3 television, Lrytas.lt, Šiauliai Drama Theatre, and Karolis Kaupinis’s video archives. Excerpts from the following musical works are heard: Giedrė, “Tą naktį grojo Tomas Boo”; a composition by Antanas Jasenka from the production “Įstabioji ir graudžioji Romeo ir Džuljetos istorija,” directed by Oskaras Koršunovas; Claude VonStroke, “Who's Afraid of Detroit”; “The Sweet Enoughs,” “Dream Puppy”; and Eleni Karaindrou, “Ulysses' Gaze” by Henry Mancini.