The Golden Apple Tree, the Wine Well

“The Golden Apple Tree, the Wine Well” is one of the most beautiful and popular Lithuanian fairy tales. It is a magical story about an Orphan Girl oppressed by her Stepmother. As in every tale of this kind, it is full of obstacles caused by evil: a wicked witch and her daughters torment the girl by setting her impossible tasks, but with the help of magical forces, good eventually triumphs, and at the end of the tale the Orphan Girl is freed and married by a young King. The creators of the production are drawn to the possibility of using forms of visual theatre that belong more to cinema than to theatre. Although the tale contains many folk songs and rhyming verse, the production tells its story mainly through images. Audiences will see a variety of visual-theatre devices popular since Ancient Greek times, including panoramas, myrioramas, dioramas, the thaumatrope, the magic lantern, myriorama cards, and shadow theatre.

“I first staged this fairy tale with the amateur theatre society ‘Theatrical Initiatives’ (premiere: 18 December 1997). I also designed the sets. At the time, Dainius Vengelis, an actor with Vilnius’s ‘Old Town Theatre’ who performed this one-man marionette show, created his diploma production based on it while completing his master’s degree at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2009 (set designer Neringa Keršulytė). Returning to this fairy tale at ‘Lėlė’, I drew on a collection of spectacles and optical metamorphoses used by puppeteers several centuries ago (mechanical theatre, diorama, myriorama, moiré, Jacob’s ladder, the magic lantern, and others). These forms of spectacle are now regarded as part of the history of cinema’s origins.” (director R. Driežis)