About us

In 1989, coincidentally or not, during the Three Kings Day, three students of the former Lithuanian State Conservatory (now Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre) and their lecturer decided to take a step that was quite understandable in the times of ‘perestroika’ – to set up a co-operative. However, it was somewhat unusual, and it was not intended to be the first private business.

The group gives the cooperative a simple name – ‘The Theatre’. When you’re the first independent one of this kind, there could be no better name. A few years later, it turns out that the audience can name it better: it’s fascinating, or perhaps a little ironic, that this name – ‘Keistuoliai’ (The Strangers) – was also destined to become almost an appellative.

Keistuoliai Theatre has become a home not only for the people who started it in the poor Lithuanian household that was just starting to breathe with independence, and who are still creating it with their own hands. On the periphery of the capital’s theatre complex, in the skyscraper of Soviet industrial construction, it stubbornly took root and grew up completely free.

Keistuoliai Theatre has become a home for many creative and observant souls who know how to discover and read the common code of oddity, which defies ordinary language. For generations, a trip to the Press house – whether once a year or every morning – means a return home: for some to their childhood, for others to a safe place, where they are not afraid of their oddity, of their uncertainty, or of being always on the way to the ordinary and normal according to the unwritten, but slightly suffocating rules. For others – or rather, for four generations of actors and directors – it is a return to the creative home, to the circle of people that grows every few years, linked not only by the work and the pre-premiere adrenaline, but also by a lively, sometimes painfully strong connection, the craziest ideas, touching texts, music, love for the stage, for each other and for life with all its oddities.