With the play “Valley of Admiration” the well-known plot of “Little Book of a Great Memory” published during the Revival is returning to Latvia, supplemented with some twists found in Middle Eastern literature.
The director of the production, Matīss Kaža, introduces his work with the following words: “”Valley of Admiration” differs significantly from my previous theater works in that the play seems to have no social or political topicality based on today’s reality.” But in reality, the show is as relevant as it is rarely. Reality has provided such a glorious coincidence as the premiere of “Valley of Admiration” on February 5, immediately after the news that “SIA “Daugavpils regional hospital” on the last working day of January has dismissed almost 50 employees – citizens of Russia and Belarus”; “Paula Stradins Clinical University Hospital has terminated working relations with ten citizens of Russia and Belarus, as required by the National Security Law”; “The Eastern Hospital has terminated employment with 13 citizens of Russia and Belarus…”
Has Latvia’s self-destruction mechanism been activated?
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It is possible that Latvia has just now started the mechanism of self-destruction, with the description of which Herodotus began the secular history of the Western world. This is about the case of Psammetichus (664-610 BC), who became the ruler of Egypt precisely because, in order for him not to become a ruler, it was decided to “send him to the swamps”, where he “aware that he was wronged, intended to take revenge on his enemies” (“Legendary Antiquity”, R., 1969, pp. 113-117).
So, Latvia has created people whose unfathomable desire to take revenge on the Latvian state corresponds to their belief in the groundlessness of the dismissal, because they would not have done any harm to Latvia and the Latvians, with one exception – if Latvia had not done what it did now. Moreover, it is not only about the mentioned 50+10+13 people, but about a much larger group of people. There are also those whose dismissal did not earn a place in the news of the LETA agency, relatives and friends of those who were dismissed, and perhaps also those who may themselves be attracted to this case with the conclusions that Latvia looks too hopeless (stupid, dependent on foreign dictates…) if it has to resort to such a straw as the extermination of doctors – poisoners, following the example of the former Soviet dictator Stalin. And now we know how long, that is, not long, this straw held Stalin. However, just as justified as the horror is the rejoicing and belief that the show of power will strengthen and prolong the existence of the Latvian state.
People’s completely opposite reactions in the same situation tend to be explained by what is happening in their heads, but no one has yet managed to explain what is happening there. This is what the show “Valley of Admiration” tells about, whose audience gets the satisfaction of making sure that they (the audience) and, more broadly, all of us who have reason to count ourselves among educated people, are not a hair more stupid than all the other educated people around the world.
The show depicts true events
In order to reach satisfaction, one has to make a show and the other has to live with it, observing the techniques of learning about brain activity, which in some moments give the impression that now something will be discovered, but then again it is proven and shown that nothing happens in this way and nothing happens in another way either. The audience, of course, already knows that. If, by February 5, 2026, humanity had progressed further in its ability to predict human behavior than it did 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, then this sensation would be spread much more quickly than through theatrical performances. But that is exactly why it is a theater whose basic repertoire will include plays and other literary works that people already know at the level of the plots and often even the texts. “Valley of Admiration” gives an opportunity to identify with the characters of the play as losers, whose theatrical helplessness in getting to know people’s soul and mind makes it easier to come to terms with everyday helplessness, but at the same time to see the techniques of turning the defects of helplessness into effects, as both scientists and artists often succeed.
The play needs a text, the text needs a plot and authors. The plot is taken from life: “A person came to the author – a young psychologist at the time – in the laboratory and asked to test his memory. This person – let’s call him Sh. – was a reporter for a newspaper, and the initiator of coming to the laboratory was the editor of the newspaper department,” Alexander Luria (1902-1977), who was once young, but rich in life experience and merits at the time of writing the story, began the story about the events of forty years ago. His first meeting with Sh. took place in the 1920s, was described in the mid-1960s and published in 1968 in the book “Маленькая книга о большой памяти”, published in Russian. Its English translation soon became a bestseller in the United States. This fact is stated in the annotation of the Latvian 1989 edition of the book. The book’s fit in a person’s palm confirms the word “small” in its title:
S. Luria’s writing about the meeting with Sh. is embedded in the text of the play. The play was created from the book by Peter Brook (Peter Brook 1925-2022) and Marie-Hélène Estienne (Marie-Hélène Estienne, 1944) and translated from English by Matīss Kaža. In English, the play is known under the name “The Valley of Astonishment” and with only two authors, to whom A. Lurija is also added in the Latvian version.
People with superhuman abilities also live among us
Sh. applied by S. Luria. it is no secret, but Solomon Shereshevsky (1886-1958) is recorded in reference literature. A. Luria and then several other prominent workers in Soviet psychological science have convinced themselves of Š. able to memorize and repeat practically unlimited strings of words, numbers, letters and other symbols from one listening session, and to repeat these strings even after 10 or so many years.
How is possible what people quite rightly believe to be impossible? Sh. the answer is that he turns each memorized word, letter or sound into a complex of all senses – sight and hearing, touch and taste – and gives this complex a place in a simple plot. The usual plot is that Š. imagines the way home and places all these complexes on that way. When asked to name the repeated signs, he remembered not exactly those signs, but his much more vivid images. And it is very easy to remember vivid images!
If from Sh. in general, something can be extracted from what was said, only that writing down human memory and probably all other mental abilities exclusively to the head (brain) is an exaggeration. If the manifestation of superpowers clearly shows the connection with the whole body, then this connection should also function in a less noticeable way in people’s everyday or normality mode.
It is equally certain that Sh. the technique of remembering is not a tutorial for anyone else, who would go crazy if they tried to go from remembering even a few signs to expanding those signs into multi-sensory images. For those who do not have this expansion by themselves, they have to make do with what they all try to teach us in school: trying to extend the number of symbols that can be memorized by making them recite rhymes and solve even simple mathematical problems that require the use of symbols that are even more distant from human senses for all non-mathematicians. There is also such a passage in the book of S. Luria as Š. discussed with a mathematician how it succeeds only in expanding mathematical symbols into images so that they can be operated with more freely than normal people do, for whom mathematical symbols are only signs on paper, in a computer or in their minds.
The story of Š. is not a story about delays, which, however, is reliable because it has been confirmed by many, moreover, specially qualified people. Although on the Internet it is possible to look at a person whose abilities are not identical, but similar orientation and scope as Š. Every now and then there are children who can play not scales but concertos on the piano, and it goes without saying that a ten-year-old today is reading notes on a mobile phone, not from a piece of paper, but the obvious incredible is what is seen here:
The meaning of the video is that the boy learns solo piano concertos or symphony piano parts by rotating for hours on his axis and holding the mobile phone in front of his eyes, the movement of which moves the row of notes sliding across the screen, without bothering either the phone screen or his fingers by scrolling the phone screen. So, he perceives a line of notes many thousands of characters long and is immediately able to play it in the format of a public concert.
The story of Peter Brook
The fact that S. Luria’s book became a bestseller in the English-speaking world attracted the story of Sh. the attention of P. Brukas, who is prone to all kinds of experiments. This English-born theater worker was popularized in Soviet Latvia for decades.
On January 10, 1956, “Sodomju Jautatne” recalled “with what difficulties it was possible to get tickets to the performances of Peter Brook’s English troupe” in 1955, when the admission of artists from a country hostile to the Soviet Union was used as a form of release, including as a sign of a period called “thaw” in the history of the Soviet Union. P. Bruks justified the trust given, because on December 18, 1965, “Rīgas Balss” was able to mention P. Bruks among 46 artists who had placed a call against the US war in Vietnam in the newspaper “New York Times”, which is visible in the USA and around the world. An arena was created there at that time, in which Padomia starved with the United States after England (Great Britain) had already been relegated to the margins of history. Then everything went like clockwork. On July 7, 1973, “Literature and Art” did not miss the fact that “Peter Brook goes to Africa”, because “after several years of work in Paris, the well-known English director Peter Brook decided to explore unexplored regions of art”. The same can be said about the fact that P. Bruks transplanted the composition of a scientist from Soviet Union or Russia into the work of art, supplementing it with elements of works of art from Asia. The frequent mention of P. Brukas continued until the restoration of Latvia’s independence, when we had our own African travelers.
In the council, P. Bruka was not only delighted, but even worried that something bad might happen to him. On March 7, 1964, “Literature and Art” reprinted a message received from Moscow that “the English director Peter Brook, whose recent production of “King Lear” at the “Royal Shakespeare” theater received a great response, has embarked on a new, very questionable experiment.” Namely, in a small theater, surrealist plays are staged and – most importantly – referring to the French author Antoine Artaud (Antoine Artaud, 1896-1948), who died in an insane asylum and before that managed to declare that “theatre can only be at a level where there is still nothing human”. It would be a pity if P. Brooks followed in the footsteps of A. Arto. However, everything ended well with P. Brook.
The show up close is spectacular
A. Arto’s “theatre of cruelty” slogan is used both in the play by P. Bruk and ME Estienne, and in the play created by M. Kaža, in which the “doctors” played by Viļas Vadņiņas and Gerda Lapoškas try to use Š. the special abilities of Guna Zariņa, personified in the female gender, as a clairvoyant, through which to see or in any other way find out something that no one has found out before them. Of course, they don’t succeed in anything they planned, which in some sense even gives satisfaction, because the shameless got the same nothing they deserved.
In “Valley of Admiration”, G. Zariņa develops the same theme as in the recently premiered “Docentes”, but in the opposite way: there she is a social science worker who “gets stuck in the butter” when her research begins to connect with her life even without her will, but in “Valley of Admiration” she begins to reflect on these studies from a person who is used by scientists. In this way, she at least partially avoids or distances herself from really unpleasant moments in which a person is made a guinea pig or, in the system of Soviet psychology, a Pavlov’s dog.
You can refer both to the fact that in JRT’s Small Hall he is closer to the audience than in the New Hall, and to the concentration of the interplay between only three actors, all JRT premieres, and to the abilities of director M. Kaža to manage all these resources, but as a result, those who are connected by the theme of “Docentes” have to move to “Valley of Admiration” for the performance. “Spatial photographer and costume designer” Reinis Dzudzilo, movement artist Ramona Levane and composer Elīza Dombrovska also made sure that what was happening there left the necessary impression.
date:2026-02-15 04:30:00
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