ABSTRACT
In a prospectus for the 2003-4 season at Latvia’s Jaunais Rigas Teatris ( JRT – the New Riga Theatre) artistic director Alvis Hermanis advertised two productions, By Gorky and Long Life, to be rehearsed together in a programme of experimental work that would engage the entirety of the company’s creative labours for the foreseeable future.1 The 2003-4 programme was proposed as a response to a perceived ‘technological crisis’ in the acting profession, namely the usurpation of the actor’s ‘monopoly’ (as exercised largely in cinema and theatre) on the production of imitations of reality, by the expansion of television ‘reality shows’. According to Hermanis this expansion ‘has totally changed the level of credibility which a spectator is ready to accept or – using Stanislavsky terminology – believe’.2 The response of the theatre will be to take the reality shows on at their own game, deploying the professional actors’ mimicking skills so as to produce as it were reality portraits, but with a particular twist. Hermanis uses the word ‘artificiality’. While one piece (By Gorky) will function after the fashion of photography, with the actors appearing supposedly as themselves, ‘using their own names and relationships’, Long Life will involve young actors imitating geriatric citizens of Riga at a hyper-realistic level of pictorial detail that ‘makes no secret of its artificiality’, in the mode of a ‘circus artist who demonstrates a trick and at the same time shows how it is performed’.
