Inspired by “The Seekers” by Elfriede Jelinek

30th September 7 pm
Vilnius Red Cross hospital

Director: Oskaras Koršunovas

Cast:
Gediminas Rimeika, Greta Petrovskytė, Ugnė Šiaučiūnaitė, Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė, Kamilė Petruškevičiūtė, Eimantas Pakalka, Augustė Pociūtė, Inga Šepetkaitė, Kęstutis Cicėnas, Gailė Butvilaitė, Lukas Malinauskas, Oskar Vygonovski, Viktorija Žukauskaitė, Ignas Gužauskas, Martynas Ališauskas, Paulina Taujanskaitė, Artiom Rybakov, Karolis Vilkas, Jonas Braškys, Taura Kvetinskaitė

Producers: OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre

In January 2013 70 refuge seekers took hold of one of the churches in Austria’s capital Vienna. By doing so they wanted to make the society and government aware of their situation. The protest was organised against inhuman conditions in one of the refugee camps not far away from Vienna. The seekers were only asking for better translators, work permits, the right for their children to go to school and finally to stop changing the camp’s inner rules daily. For most of them deportation to their original country meant nothing else but death. It did not, however, stop Austria from sending the majority of the refugees back home as soon as the coming summer.
This event became the initial throb that prompted an Austrian writer, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek to write the play “The Seekers” in the summer of 2013. In June, 2016 the reading of the play took place at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, which happened to be the beginning of the creative process that grew into the performance-act. While rehearsing the creative team moved away from Jelinek's play and evoked the myth of Egle, the Queen of Serpents, while at the same time weaving it with contemporary reflections about refugees and how people in Lithuania react to them.