Fantazio

“Fantazio” is a playful and extravagant 19th-century play-fairy tale, which its author himself described as a comedy with a bad ending, or a drama with a happy ending. This work by a French classic feels strikingly contemporary on the stage of the State Small Theatre of Vilnius: the creative team approaches the play through the eyes of young people today and seeks a creative way to engage with its distinctive language. The play opens with the death of the kingdom’s jester, while a wedding feast is being prepared in an attempt to avert war with a neighbouring kingdom. Rejected and pursued by creditors, Fantazio (actors Martynas Nedzinskas and Tomas Rinkūnas) accidentally becomes the king’s jester, thereby changing the fate of the kingdom itself. At first glance, the plot of “Fantazio” resembles a fairy tale: the princess (actress Miglė Polikevičiūtė) is to marry the prince chosen for her, but she meets Fantazio—a charming yet poor, common townsman. Beneath this fairy-tale surface, however, lie universal human truths and wisdom that transcends time. The play’s central character, Fantazio, is a wanderer who cannot and does not want to conform to “the norm,” and who will always be “different”: a misfit, rejected, undervalued, misunderstood, and unlike others. He is a jester whose thoughts may be laughed at, but which linger and “settle” in people’s minds; he can be seen as a prototype of the author himself, Alfred de Musset.