The Sound of Silence

This is the not the first time the award-winning Latvian director, Alvis Hermanis, has experimented with a silent production which transcends the limits speech imposes on expression. Prior to “The Sound of Silence” (2007), the director created “Long Life” (2003), a production which unfolded inside a room in a commune of run-down old people in a shaky post-Soviet republic.

The room is the core narrational unit of this second production, too, its unitary space the only element linking the fragmented actions and an entirely open concept of time. For the director, the heroes of both productions are the same people forty years apart. And while decline was the focus of the first production, the subject-matter of the second is utopia. In essence, the work is a study of 1968, the “annus mirabilis”—viewed through the prism of the Eastern Bloc—of western utopia. This is underlined, too, in the production’s ironic subtitle: “a concert of Simon & Garfunkel 1968 in Riga that never took place”.

The sequence of images engage with the music in a sort of silent on-stage karaoke which creates a theatre of characters that lies somewhere between naturalistic theater, vaudeville and the Marx Brothers. Youth and utopia are omnipresent, as are the erotic impulse set against the backdrop of sexual liberation, the contrast between emotion and knowledge, conformism and revolution. Numerous motifs run through the production: the kiss, reading, sleep, metamorphosis and—above all—the music of Simon and Garfunkel. The production consciously favors the direct, recognizable image in honor of the light-weight utopia of ’68, though it does so without concealing its nostalgia for an era which, viewed from the present, looks like a golden age.

"Best Performance" of the fall 2007/08 (Annual Show of the Theatre Performances in Latvia)
"Grand Prix", International Theatre Festival KONTAKT, Poland 2008
"The Press Award" awarded by journalists of International Theatre Festival KONTAKT, Poland 2008

Co-production: spieltzeit' Europa/Berliner Festspiele and New Riga Theatre.

Fragments from the film "Self-Portrait", shot in Riga, 1972, by Andris Grinbergs.