Scylla Wants to Be Human

The Vilnius State Small Theatre production “Scylla Wants to Be Human” is based on Paulina Pukytė’s play “Mountain Pose.” The author’s writing draws readers in with its unusual form, subtle humour, paradoxes, and searching gaze at culture and literature. The play “Mountain Pose” seems to speak in the voices of ancient heroes, but fiction is quickly woven together with reality, history with the present, and Greek mythology with Lithuanian history (or the mythology of that history). The well-known female characters in the work also take on importance, prompting a return to ancient texts with a fresh perspective and a discussion of them from a new angle.

Director Gabrielė Tuminaitė continues her creative dialogue with P. Pukytė, presenting a production with an interesting and highly engaging form. The work’s character keeps audiences from getting bored and makes them think from different perspectives: while its content may seem light, it is also an intellectual and striking game. A girl named Scylla, who has wandered in from the myth of the ship-sinking monsters Scylla and Charybdis, feels as though she is stuck in a “mountain pose.” Yet she no longer wants to be merely an immobile rock, with just one, albeit powerful, function—to attack and destroy. Scylla wants to be human (an allusion to the title of “Adomas nori būti žmogumi,” a film that has become a classic of Lithuanian cinema). But what does it mean to be human? What does it take to become one? What do you risk?

Scylla begins in the traditional way, by visiting the life coach (a so-called “coach”), the witch Circe. The passing Odysseus, who once almost managed to sail “between Scylla and Charybdis,” and the “storyteller” Homer also teach her a thing or two about life. But will that be enough for Scylla, who embodies other women-myths as well?

Even during the quarantine, director G. Tuminaitė enlisted video artist Aneta Bublytė and cinematographer Eitvydas Doškus to explore, through this play, the similarities and differences between theatre and cinema, experiment with their possibilities, and investigate how they can work together without overshadowing one another, instead complementing each other in essential ways to form a unified, mature work of art.

Using absurdity and satire, the production speaks about relationships between people as a form of “brainwashing” one another. In a contemporary postmodern language, it criticises restrictive stereotypes that uphold gender inequality and other “traditions,” as well as the position of women—especially women artists—in a patriarchal, sexist world. The well-known figures of antiquity, whom we may have heard of to a greater or lesser extent, find themselves here in a different context, one unfamiliar to them.