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felt in the play as if between the lines, that is the invasion of the brutal, the rough and the slovenly into life and their destructive power. Very often the peculiar atmosphere of A. Chekhov’s plays so obvious in reading disappears in the performance. E. Nekrosius’ imagination combines and gives concrete expression to everything: real men with their concrete fates come to life on the stage, their interrelations acquire concreteness, everything between the lines starts to speak, the pauses become meaningful expressive of feeling, thought and mood - the play acquires its space, atmosphere and life. □

Eimuntas Nekrošius I am never ashamed of my naivevess. There are lots of complex plays that

I would not be able to stage yet. I find it strange, when a director takes up Hamlet and starts creating his own philosophy. What for? Everything is so complicated and deep there that a director should do nothing but explain everything to the spectator. Of course first of all he should clear it up to himself. Everything is written there! But to many directors this is not enough. They enrich Shakespeare with their, own philosophizing and make such a mess of it that a spectator cannot make out anything, let alone the essence of the monologue ‘To Be or Not To Be’. The spectator gets the impression that those strange people talked and talked and - finally left the stage. A director’s task (not the only one but the first and foremost) is to make it clear to the audience what that ‘to be or not to be’ means; what it is all about and why, to give it a real foundation. □ From an interview to the weekly Gimtasis kraštas (Native Land), November 5-11, 1987.