Dear Grandmother, How Are You?: The Influence of Anna Lācis on the Development of Political Theatre in Latvia

From the right: Anna Lācis, Māra Ķimele, and Bernhard Reich in Murjāņi, 1960s, LSSR. Photo from the personal archive of Māra Ķimele.

Since the 1970s, Māra Ķimele, granddaughter of Anna Lācis, has been one of the most powerful and influential Latvian theatre directors. Many of Māra Ķimele's productions have become pivotal points in the development of Latvian theatre. Her complex personality and exquisitely interesting family, closely connected to the political and cultural history of Latvia throughout the twentieth century, were reasons why I decided to make the feature-length documentary Māra in 2013. Of course, the project was not possible without the presence of Anna Lācis, and not only because granddaughter and grandmother are united in their choice of career. I was interested in the destiny of two great female artists in the context of power and politics.

The collection of the Latvian Literature and Music Museum holds the large, and still unused, epistolary archive of Anna Lācis. A small fraction of it consists of 51 letters that Māra Ķimele wrote to her grandmother between 1953 and 1978. They cover Māra's childhood impressions, college years, and work in the theatre. Only Māra's letters can be found in the archive, and they found their way there after her grandmother's death in 1979. Anna Lācis's replies to these letters have not been preserved. It is curious that Māra Ķimele herself had forgotten about the existence of these letters; using them in the film came as a surprise to her. Even though each of the letters starts with "Dear Grandmother!" and the style and topics of the letters seemingly point to the close connection between granddaughter and grandmother, the author of the letters denies such a closeness. The explanation is to be found in the memoirs of Anna Lācis's daughter, Dagmāra Ķimele: Asja. Režisores Annas Lācis dēkainā dzīve (Asja: The Stormy Life of Director Anna Lācis) (Ķimele and Strautmane). From her daughter's perspective, politics, revolution, and theatre were always more important to Anna Lācis than her family, her daughter and granddaughter. The fate of one photograph serves as an archetypal visual statement of this attitude and of Anna Lācis's willingness to take history-making into her own hands. It is a studio photograph in which Anna Lācis appears with her daughter Dagmāra when the latter was about five years old. Later on, in the 1960s or 1970s, she ordered a graceless photomontage to replace the daughter with Bertolt Brecht in this picture. Although Anna Lācis had really worked alongside Brecht, had been his assistant and, according to her own statements, had played a name-part in Brecht's premiere of The Life of Edward II of England in Munich, and had maintained a close relationship with him until his demise, there are no photographs of just the two of them. However, there are many photographs in which Bertolt Brecht is alongside her and Bernhard Reich in other ways, in the names of posters and books. Anyone who has worked with the photographs in Lācis's archival materials knows how much she liked being photographed with Brecht. The anecdote of the fake photograph is yet another testimonial on behalf of her loyalty to the ideas of political theatre, which manifested in Brecht's work.

In this article, I will quote several letters of Māra Ķimele to Anna Lācis that I included in the film and attempt to reveal the signs of the era embedded in them, proof of Anna Lācis's and Māra Ķimele's professional quests, and to relate them to the tradition of political theatre in contemporary Latvia. It can be said without a doubt that Asja was one of the brightest and most expressive pioneers of political theatre in Latvia in the 1920s, and contemporary Latvian artists can metaphorically...