The first thing that I saw was a cauldron… Eimuntas Nekrošius, having invited me to the still-renovated hall of Meno fortas on a sunny day in May, showed it to me. The cast-iron cauldron was dumped upside down in a corner. And a wooden stick lay on the windowsill. Nekrošius lit a cigarette and said, “Such will be Macbeth’s story… made up from a cauldron and a stick… A trap, into which a man stuck his hand...

The beginning of the story was quite unthreatening. The sky was clear. Just three impish witches with a devil’s cauldron on their hips were looking for a new hero for their prophecies. Who will become their toy – a toy of destiny? Whose life are they going to provoke while giggling, fooling around and as if apologising, because they themselves are someone else’s toys? [...] Macbeth directed by Eimuntas Nekrošius is reminiscent of a choreographic musical drama. The choreography of each role, each movement in any point of the stage, the presence of an actor or an object, each sound – musical phrase, knocking or breathing – is part of the director’s precise and clear drawing. This drawing is flexible and does not restrict either the actor or the perceiver. Another thing is that you may not catch up with the director’s thought, as each moment is full of action, slow but intense.

This important theatre text is communicated only by the wind of energy that is whistling in the depths. This whirl of energy enthrals us unfolding the full force of the talent of the great master of imagination, Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrošius, who blends together his actors’ fatigue, concentration and movements on stage. [...] Eimuntas Nekrošius has accustomed us to miracles. It is enough to recall the gloomy barbarian splinters of ice and fire in Hamlet [...]. Each time Eimuntas Nekrošius leaves some space for one more meditation, one more astounding realisation. In this performance the inner action of Macbeth and his bloody crown is seen, reflected and dreamt as if in a dark mirror – it is a tragedy of a sombre individual bound to decay among the dark forces..

Eimuntas Nekrošius’ Macbeth has appeared from insomnia. Though this statement may be an oversimplification, but it is necessary while trying to realise or interpret the whole. One should choose an aspect, an edge, or a point of reference. All the more that everything seems to be so simple and still ineffably complicated. [...] Macbeth is dominated by the most oppressive and intimate human state – insomnia that knows no secrets. It gnaws at one’s consciousness and tosses one into an abyss of “black and deep desires”, conjures “horrid images”, “shakes so [his] single state of man”, invokes witches and ghosts and gives birth to “intangible pictures”. It is a state in between the real and the apparent, between this and another world, between sleep and death

The weather in Macbeth is quite Lithuanian. You go out ready for winter, with nice warm mittens, and come back soaking wet. When Macbeth played by Kostas Smoriginas comes to the stage and wrings out his drenched mittens, you repeat to yourself with firm conviction: yes, the director Eimuntas Nekrošius is a very consistent hyper-realist, who brings to the stage – like Macbeth brings a tree in his backpack – his striking ability to make “foul weather” tangible, even irritatingly recognisable. It is difficult to find space for additional compliments on this theme. As well as for faults.