Horst Faas - War photographer

(A guerrilla leader in Dhaka, Bangladesh, beat a victim during a public execution of four men suspected of collaborating with Pakistani militiamen, who were accused of murder, rape and looting during months of civil war. 1971.)

Horst Faas, a prizewinning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world’s distinguished photojournalists in nearly a half-century with The Associated Press, died on Thursday. He was 79.

His daughter, Clare Faas, confirmed his death. A native of Germany who joined The Associated Press there in 1956, Mr. Faas photographed wars, revolutions, the Olympic Games and events in between. But he was best known for covering Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in 1967 and won four major photo awards including the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes.

As chief of The A.P.’s photo operations in Saigon for a decade beginning in 1962, Mr. Faas covered the fighting while recruiting and training new talent from among foreign and Vietnamese freelancers. The result was “Horst’s army” of young photographers, who fanned out with supplied cameras and film supplied by Mr. Faas and stern orders to “come back with good pictures Mr. Faas and his editors chose the best and put together a steady flow of telling photos: South Vietnam’s soldiers fighting and its civilians struggling to survive amid the maelstrom.

Among his top protégés was Huynh Thanh My, an actor turned photographer who in 1965 became one of four A.P. staff photographers and one of two South Vietnamese among more than 70 journalists killed in the 15-year war. Mr. My’s younger brother, Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, followed his brother at The A.P. and under Mr. Faas’s tutelage won one of the news agency’s six Vietnam War Pulitzer Prizes, for his iconic 1972 picture of a badly burned Vietnamese girl fleeing an aerial napalm attack.

Mr. Faas was a brilliant planner, able to score journalistic scoops by anticipating “not just what happens next, but what happens after that,” as one colleague put it. His reputation as a demanding taskmaster and perfectionist belied a humanistic streak he was loath to admit, while helping less fortunate former colleagues and other causes. He was widely read on Asian history and culture, and assembled an impressive collection of Chinese Ming porcelain, bronzes and other treasures.

In later years, Mr. Faas turned his training skills into a series of international photojournalism symposiums. Mr. Faas also helped to organize reunions of the wartime Saigon news corps, and was attending a combination of those events when he became ill in Hanoi on May 4, 2005.

He was hospitalized first in Bangkok, then in Germany, where doctors traced his permanent paralysis from the waist down to a spinal hemorrhage caused by blood-thinning heart medication. Although he required a wheelchair, he continued to travel to photo exhibits and other professional events, mainly in Europe, and collaborated in the publishing of two books in French — about his own career and that of Henri Huet, a former A.P. colleague in Vietnam.

Mr. Faas also made two trips to the United States, in 2006 and in 2008. His health deteriorated in late 2008. Hospitalized in February for treatment of skin problems, he also underwent gastric surgery. Mr. Faas’s Vietnam coverage earned him the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Award and his first Pulitzer in 1965. Receiving the honors in New York, he said his mission was to “record the suffering, the emotions and the sacrifices of both Americans and Vietnamese” in Vietnam.

Burly but agile, Mr. Faas spent much time in the field, and on Dec. 6, 1967, he was wounded in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade at Bu Dop, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. He might have bled to death had not a young U.S. Army medic managed to stem the flow.

Meeting Mr. Faas two decades later, the medic recalled the encounter, saying, “You were so gray, I thought you were a goner.” On crutches and confined to the bureau, Mr. Faas was unable to cover the February 1968 Tet Offensive, but directed A.P. photo operations like a general deploying troops against the enemy.

The A.P. photographer Eddie Adams came back with the war’s most famous picture, of Vietnam’s national police chief executing a captured Vietcong suspect on a Saigon street. “Generally, we had to go pretty far into the field, but this was a situation in which the war came to us,” Mr. Faas recalled. “It was right next door.”

He often teamed with the Pulitzer Prize-winning A.P. reporter Peter Arnett to produce powerful and exclusive reports like the 1969 story of Co. A, an Army unit that balked at orders to move against the enemy. Mr. Faas witnessed the “combat refusal” episode during an effort to reach the site of a helicopter crash that had killed seven U.S. soldiers and the A.P. staff photographer Oliver E. Noonan.

Born in Berlin on April 28, 1933, Mr. Faas grew up during World War II, and like all young German men, was required to join the Hitler Youth organization. Years later, he wrote that Allied air raids and “the fascinating spectacle of antiaircraft action in the sky” were part of daily life, as was being required “to stand at attention in school and listen to an announcement that the father or older brother of a classmate had died for führer and Fatherland.”

As the war ended in 1945, the family fled north to avoid the Russian advance on Berlin, and two years later, escaped to Munich in West Germany. In 1960, at age 27 and having been an A.P. photographer for four years, Mr. Faas began his front-line reporting career in Congo, then Algeria.

In 1962, he was reassigned to the growing war in Vietnam where he landed on the same day as Mr. Arnett. Mr. Faas for a time shared a Saigon villa with the late New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, who said of Mr. Faas, “I don’t think anyone stayed longer, took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues. I think of him as nothing less than a genius.”

Mr. Faas left Saigon in 1970 to become the A.P.’s roving photographer for Asia, based in Singapore, ranging widely on assignments. He teamed with Mr. Arnett, a New Zealander, on a cross-country reporting tour of the United States as seen by foreigners, and covered the 1972 Munich Olympics where he photographed a ski-masked Palestinian terrorist on the balcony of the building where Israeli athletes were being held hostage, hours before they were murdered at the airport.

The same year, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, along with Michel Laurent of the French Gamma photo agency, for gripping pictures of torture and executions in Bangladesh.

Mr. Laurent, who had once worked for The A.P. under Mr. Faas in Saigon, later became the last journalist killed in the Vietnam War, two days before the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In 1976, Mr. Faas relocated to London as The A.P.’s senior photo editor for Europe, until he retired from the news agency in 2004. He was an editor of “Requiem,” a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the Vietnam War, and was an author of “Lost Over Laos,” a 2003 book about four photographers shot down in Laos in 1971 and the search for the crash site 27 years later. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/a-parting-glance-horst-faas/

Vanishing treasures of Asia

Asia's architectural treasures, from a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan to an ancient city in China, are in danger of vanishing under a tide of economic expansion, war and tourism, experts said Thursday. The Global Heritage Fund named 10 sites facing "irreparable loss and destruction."

"These 10 sites represent merely a fragment of the endangered treasures across Asia and the rest of the developing world," Jeff Morgan, executive director of the fund, said, presenting the report, "Asia's Heritage in Peril: Saving Our Vanishing Heritage."

The architectural gems from Asia's ancient and sophisticated cultures are struggling in the face of economic expansion, sudden floods of tourists, poor technical resources, and areas blighted by looting and conflict -- in other words, the pressures of rapidly modernizing Asia.

"We're looking at these millennial civilizations leapfrogging into the 21st century at a kind of pace that is unheard of, unprecedented," said Vishakha N. Desai, president of the Asia Society, which hosted a conference based on the report.

Kuanghan Li, head of Global Heritage Fund's China program, underlined the urgency in a presentation on work to preserve Pingyao, one of China's last surviving walled cities. The stunning fortifications are impressively maintained and floodlit. But "up to 20 years ago, there were hundreds of similar walled cities left in China," she said. "They have been demolished."

Experts said that global architectural preservation efforts are poorly coordinated and targeted, with the UN cultural body UNESCO focusing almost entirely on sites in already wealthy European countries, rather than in places like Latin America or Asia. More than 80 percent of UNESCO World Heritage sites are located in the 10 richest states, the Global Heritage Fund said.

Elsewhere, "heritage is being dramatically undervalued," Morgan said, warning that the endangered sites were doomed without quick help. "We're going to lose them on our watch in the next 10 years." Shirley Young, head of the US-China Cultural Institute, said the importance of such work goes beyond being "just about beautiful buildings, beautiful sites." "I think we'd agree," she said, "that a world without history is a world without soul." Still, experts highlighted stories of inspiring success stories.

John Sanday, a specialist who has spent years trying to bring Angkor and other Cambodian sites back from the brink of collapse, showed dramatic before-and-after photographs of majestic temples that he first encountered two decades ago. "The trees had literally just taken over and strangling the building, pulling it apart," he said, pointing to ruins that had been made structurally sound once again -- although now under threat from tourism.

"We really hope with a concerted effort we can save these places," Morgan said. The top 10 endangered sites in Asia, according to the Global Heritage Fund, are:

1. Ayutthaya in Thailand, a former Siamese capital known as the "Venice of the East."

2. Fort Santiago in the Philippines.

3. Kashgar, one of the last preserved Silk Road cities in China.

4. Mahasthangarh, one of South Asia's earliest archeological sites in Bangladesh.

5. Mes Aynak, an Afghan Buddhist monastery complex on the Silk Road.

6. Myauk-U, capital of the first Arakenese kingdom in Myanmar.

7. Plain of Jars, a mysterious megalithic site in Laos.

8. Preah Vihear, a Khmer architectural masterpiece in Cambodia

9. Rakhigari, one of the biggest, ancient Indus sites in India.

10. Taxila, an ancient economic crossroads in Pakistan.

Lessons from Cyrus the Great: A more humane perspective

9 Timeless Leadership Lessons from Cyrus the Great

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/04/19/9-timeless-leadership-lessons-from-cyrus-the-great/

The greatest book on business and leadership was written in the 4th century BC by a Greek about a Persian King. Yeah, that’s right. Behold: Cyrus the Great, the man that historians call “the most amiable of conquerors,” and the first king to found “his empire on generosity” instead of violence and tyranny. Consider Cyrus the antithesis to Machiavelli’s ideal Prince. The author, himself the opposite of Machiavelli, was Xenophon, a student of Socrates.

The book is a veritable classic in the art of leadership, execution, and responsibility. Adapted from Larry Hendrick’s excellent translation, here are nine lessons in leadership from Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great (NB: And the historical traditions of the Hittites) :

1. Be Self-Reliant “Never be slow in replenishing your supplies. You’ll always bee on better terms with your allies if you can secure your own provisions…Give them all they need and your troops will follow you to the end of the earth.”

2. Be Generous “Success always calls for greater generosity–though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed. Collecting boot [is] not an end itself, but only a means for building [an] empire. Riches would be of little use to us now–except as a means of winning new friends.”

3. Be Brief “Brevity is the soul of command. Too much talking suggests desperation on the part of the leader. Speak shortly, decisively and to the point–and couch your desires in such natural logic that no one can raise objections. Then move on.”

4. Be a Force for Good “Whenever you can, act as a liberator. Freedom, dignity, wealth–these three together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die. [NB: This explains the rise, fall and longevity of the political instutions, nations and civilizations that we know of] ”

5. Be in Control [After punishing some renegade commanders] “Here again, I would demonstrate the truth that, in my army, discipline always brings rewards.”

6. Be Fun “When I became rich, I realized that no kindness between man and man comes more naturally than sharing food and drink, especially food and drink of the ambrosial excellence that I could now provide. Accordingly, I arranged that my table be spread everyday for many invitees, all of whom would dine on the same excellent food as myself. After my guests and I were finished, I would send out any extra food to my absent friends, in token of my esteem.”

7. Be Loyal [When asked how he planned to dress for a celebration] “If I can only do well by my friends, I’ll look glorious enough in whatever clothes I wear.”

8. Be an Example “In my experience, men who respond to good fortune with modesty and kindness are harder to find than those who face adversity with courage.”

9. Be Courteous and Kind “There is a deep–and usually frustrated–desire in the heart of everyone to act with benevolence rather than selfishness, and one fine instance of generosity can inspire dozens more. Thus I established a stately court where all my friends showed respect to each other and cultivated courtesy until it bloomed into perfect harmony.”

There’s a reason Cyrus found students and admirers in his own time as well as the ages that followed. From Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Julius Caesar and Alexander (and yes, even Machiavelli) great men have read his inspiring example and put it to use in the pursuit of their own endeavors. That isn’t bad company.

Genghis Khan: Caution - Controversial article.

[Blogger's note: This article may be CONTROVERSIAL].

Take from Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/07/9-lessons-on-leadership-from-genghis-khan-yes-genghis-khan/?partner=forbespicks

On one end of the leadership spectrum, there is Machiavelli–conniving, ambitious and ruthless. On the other there is Cyrus the Great–humble, generous and loyal. Along this spectrum of great leaders and motivators, used so often in business books, speeches and anecdotes, there is one unmentionable: Genghis Khan. A man so evil, unwashed and bloodthirsty that he is impossible to learn from. Or so the efforts to suppress his influence would have us believe. (The USSR, for instance, cleared out Khan’s homeland in Mongolia and forbade any mention of him.)

But I’m here to tell you that we can learn more about leadership and getting things done from Genghis Khan than just about any other historical figure. Because almost everything you know about him is wrong

For starters: he abolished torture, embraced religious freedom, united disparate tribes, hated aristocratic privilege, ran his kingdoms meritocratically, loved learning and advanced the rights of women in Mongol society. [Note: I'm not so sure about the running of his kingdoms method though]

He was also the greatest conqueror and general who ever lived, ruling a self-made kingdom of nearly 12-million square miles which lasted in parts for nearly seven centuries. (When United States forces captured Baghdad they were the first successful invaders to take the city since Khan.)

Yes, he was violent and war-like, but never for its own sake. The Mongols found no honor in fighting–only winning. Victory was their aim and they did whatever it took to get it. Then they focused on building peace with equal intensity. [May have explained the short-lived Yuan Dynasty in China and elsewhere]. So while other conquerors died violent, early deaths, Khan died an old man surrounded by his loving family.

1. Have An End in Mind “For the Mongol warrior, there was no such thing as individual honor in battle if the battle was lost. As Genghis Khan reportedly said, there is no good in anything until it is finished.”

2. Lead from the Front “When it was wet, we bore the wet together, when it was cold, we bore the cold together.”

3. Serve a Greater Good Than Yourself “[A leader] can never be happy until his people are happy.”

4. Have a Vision “Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot manage his own life, much less the lives of others…The ancients had a saying: ‘Unity of purpose is a fortune in affliction.’”

5. Be Self-Reliant “No friend is better than your own wise heart! Although there are many things you can rely on, no one is more reliable than yourself. Although many people can be your helper, no one should be closer to you than your own consciousness (and conscience). Although there are many things you should cherish, no one is more valuable than your own life.”

6. Be Humble “The mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion. He warned them that, ‘If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.’”

7. Be Moderate “I hate luxury. I exercise moderation…It will be easy to forget your vision and purpose one you have fine clothes, fast horses and beautiful women. [In which case], you will be no better than a slave, and you will surely lose everything.”

8. Understand Your People “People conquered on different sides of the lake should be ruled on different sides of the lake.”

9. Change the World, But Change it Gradually “The vision should never stray far from the teaching of the elders. The old tunic fits better and it always more comfortable; it survives the hardships of the bush while the new or untried tunic is quickly torn.”

As Weatherford writes, these tenets of leadership did not come to Khan as part of some princely education. He was born poor and illiterate in a world of conflict and strife. He taught himself to be a Khan: “At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will.” We can do the same. And we can do it by starting with the example of someone who at first might make us a little uncomfortable. Genghis Khan’s reputation precedes him (a brutal pillager who shows no mercy to men, women or children), but that was deliberate. Khan allowed rumors of his atrocities to spread to encourage surrender and cooperate from enemies who might otherwise resist. Putting that aside, we can learn from the Great Khan how to be loyal, how to understand our people, how to induce change and how to have a vision.

Cabaret and football: Life before death in the HolocaustBy Kevin Connolly

Cabaret and football: Life before death in the Holocaust. By Kevin Connolly
BBC News, Jerusalem

Songs composed and performed by Jews confined in a Nazi ghetto during the Holocaust have been pieced together by researchers and can now be heard again - a distant echo of the daily lives of men and women who would one day, if not immediately, be sent to their death.

In a hushed studio theatre in the heart of Tel Aviv, the ghosts of the Holocaust are singing again. A small group of performers has been recreating songs written in the ghetto of Theresienstadt - the prison community near Prague where the Nazi authorities gathered Jewish families from Czechoslovakia and beyond between 1941 and 1945.

Composers and songwriters like Viktor Ullman and Karel Schwenk were among the prisoners and they left an extraordinary testament to the durability of the human spirit as they waited at the gateway to oblivion Around 160,000 Jews passed through the ghetto in its four years of operation - 36,000 died there of malnutrition, mistreatment and disease. Of the 90,000 men, women and children who were sent east to death camps like Auschwitz only 4,000 returned.

ut the music of Theresienstadt doesn't sound or feel like a requiem for the dead - much of it was written in the cabaret style popular in Central Europe between the wars. It has a spiky, sarcastic feel to it - shot through with sudden shafts of sentimentality.

Ullman and Schwenk, together with the other artistes, perished in the Holocaust and it took an extraordinary piece of musical archaeology to bring their songs back from the dead. "Five years ago, we interviewed 20 survivors from Theresienstadt," explains Professor Michael Wolpe, the musicologist behind the project. "Each one of them sat down and sang us songs from the cabaret, and there were a few who even play the piano a bit. As I understand from the survivors, [the music] is absolutely like it was then."

Rediscovering the music of Theresienstadt (known as Terezin in Czech) provides a sharp reminder that while most of us have a clear picture of the outline story of the Holocaust, relatively little is known about how daily life was lived within it.

New exhibitions in Israel of photographs of football matches played inside the ghetto underline that perception. Games were played in front of substantial crowds with some spectators looking down on the seven-a-side matches from balconies high above the courtyard that served as a pitch.

Search on the internet and you will easily find the unbearably poignant footage of the doomed players - most had been transported to the death camps within weeks or months of the film being shot. One of the few who survived was Peter Erben - now 91 and living in the Israeli Mediterranean city of Ashkelon with his wife Eva, who also lived through the nightmare of Theresienstadt.

Peter's memories of the Holocaust are grimly compelling - he survived transportation to the death camp because he was moved to Theresienstadt late in the war, when the approach of the Soviet army was already disrupting the operation of the camps. He survived a period in the slave labour camp at Mauthausen in Austria too, his personal story an extraordinary odyssey of good luck woven into a tapestry of despair and depravity.

Of his days playing football in Theresienstadt as he waited through the long months for the inevitable transfer to Auschwitz he says simply: "Football was very important in Theresienstadt - there was a game every week and thousands of people came.

Even the SS men were there in civilian clothes. They liked it too." We have grown used to the over-arching narrative of the Holocaust with all its cruel destruction - but we know little of its grim subtleties, and perhaps struggle to find the words to describe them.

The truth is that Theresienstadt was a place of death but it was less brutal than the ghettos of Poland or Lithuania. It's not clear exactly how that came about - it may have been determined by the character of local commanders, or it may have been that the Germans drew ethnic distinctions between Jews from Central Europe and Jews from countries to the East.

The Czech ghetto was still a gateway to hell but because it was less brutal and squalid than the others it also came to play a role in one of the most extraordinary of all the German propaganda operations of World War II. In an attempt to disguise the true nature of the Holocaust, the Nazi authorities consented to a request from the Danish Royal Family to allow a visit by Red Cross inspectors.

The results were a shameful farce - the inspectors seem to have agreed to speak only to the guards and commanders and not the malnourished inmates who were ordered to sit around in fake cafes drinking water dyed black so that it resembled coffee. Peter was one of those inmates. The Germans even shot a propaganda movie, although they lost the war before they had a chance to show it around Europe.

Oded Breda, director of the Terezin House - a museum set up by survivors to commemorate and study the ghetto - says the film remains a powerful piece of propaganda for Nazi apologists and Holocaust deniers to this day. "That film is still working. Look at it on YouTube and look at the comments that are left.

People are saying, 'Look at Jews during the war, how they even played football. There was nothing [sinister].'" If Oded Breda is right to claim that Holocaust-deniers are still reinforcing their grotesque perversions of historical fact with Nazi propaganda films then there are worrying signs for the future. It is a good moment perhaps to pause and listen to the ghostly voices of the musical past in Theresienstadt, and remember the truth.

Iraq's clash of old and new

Standing on a dusty mound on the outskirts of al-Hilla, two Iraqi officials have an argument about what lies underneath. One thing is certain: three pipelines carrying oil products and liquid gas from Basra in the south to Baghdad pass under the hill. Two of them were built in the late 1970s and early 80s, and the third was just completed a month ago. But according to Hussein Falah al-Ammari of the State Board of Antiquities, there's something more valuable than oil under that hill. "We're standing on the outer wall of the ancient city of Babylon," he said. "The pipelines penetrate the city from both sides, cutting through the northern wall where we are now, through the city and all the way to the southern wall 1.5km (0.9 miles) south from here." Facing the antiquities official is Muayyed al-Sultani from the pipeline company in Babylon. Dressed neatly in a suit and tie, he's accompanied by a camera crew from the Ministry of Oil, as well as four soldiers. One of them flaunts a machine gun with a belt of rounds dangling from the bullet compartment. "With all respect to the antiquities board," he says politely, "our opinion is that there are no ruins here." The two men debated the powers of their respective ministries, the importance of the oil pipeline, and the value of Babylonian ruins. But the discussion was going nowhere The Ministry of Tourism has already taken the Ministry of Oil to court over the extension of the pipeline, which it says is unlawful because it endangers an archaeological site, and did not have the approval of the State Antiquities Board. It says that unless the pipelines are diverted, the bid to get Babylon listed as a World Heritage Site will fail. 'Just dust' On the surface, it's just a hill like any other in Iraq. Situated at the outskirts of Hilla, the modern name for the ancient city of Babylon, it's dotted by thorny bushes and patches of dry grass, and surrounded by palm trees on all sides. "It's just dust around here," said Mr Sultani, adding that while the pipeline was being extended, no traces of ruins were found. But Mr Ammari had a ready explanation. "It's the erosion over the millennia," he explained, insisting that about a metre underneath, the remains of the wall stood largely intact, preserved in "architectural detail". Further in, he said, "we could find military bases, or private housing units or administrative centres". But even if the court orders a diversion of the pipelines, there's no certainty that the bid to have Babylon listed as a World Heritage site will succeed. Few would doubt the "outstanding universal value"' of the ancient city, but there are other criteria for being listed as a World Heritage Site. Among them is "authenticity" of the ruins, and Babylon has already been compromised. Ancient glory Within the inner city walls lie the remains of the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar the Second around 2,600 years ago: layer upon layer of reddish-brown bricks, windswept and eroded over the millennia. But piled on top of the ruins are new structures erected during the past decades. Iraq's former President Saddam Hussein ordered the rebuilding of the ancient city at exactly the spot where the old one stood. The result is a mixture of old and new, and it is difficult to distinguish between the two. The clash of the Iraqi ministries pits the demands of the modern age against the preservation of history. But it could also prove to be an example of history repeating itself. Iraq's oil sector remains burdened with a variety of problems, but its potential is vast, and so are the geopolitical implications if it fulfils it. Ancient Babylon was a bustling commercial hub. Merchants carrying goods from places like India, Persia, and Egypt passed through the city, generating wealth for its ambitious kings, and tempting them with dreams of glory. In today's Iraq, it's the lure of oil that could prove impossible to resist. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17702153

Hamlet - The Play Stalin hated

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17770170 Behind the Iron Curtain, Shakespeare's plays were a way to send secret messages about Soviet society to theatre audiences. Now a Lithuanian staging of Hamlet - designed to make Stalin, who hated the play, turn in his grave - will be performed in the UK. Why do these 400-year-old plays resonate in the former Eastern Bloc? When Lithuania's biggest rock star, Andrius Mamontovas, was offered the role of Hamlet in 1996, he was rather surprised, but agreed to have a go. He has now played the prince for 15 years, and will soon perform the role in London as part of the UK's cultural festival to mark the Olympics. There were nine months of rehearsals for a play that was at the beginning seven-and-a-half hours long, and even today lasts nearly four hours (there is also a cut-down version of just over two). What has kept him going is Eimuntas Nekrosius, one of Europe's most renowned theatre directors, and the special prestige Shakespeare holds in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In Soviet-era Lithuania, there were productions of Shakespeare for which people queued through the night for tickets. Shakespeare was culture with official approval, but as one of the few alternatives to tales about earnest Soviet heroes, it was also a way for theatre directors to symbolically address forbidden issues. Going to the theatre had an excitement it perhaps lacks nowadays, says Mamontovas. "I miss those secret messages... there were always little secret messages from the artist to the audience. But there's no need for that now because you can say what you want openly - it's more entertainment now." Another appeal of staging Shakespeare was its soundtrack. Rock music was sometimes smuggled into productions in an era when many Western acts were banned - and the list of such acts was long and varied. A telling xchange in Soviet Times Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither? Guildenstern: Prison, my lord! Hamlet: Denmark's a prison. Rosencrantz: Then is the world one. Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst. "ACDC, Tina Turner - she was banned for her sexuality - the Stranglers, the Clash, they were one of my favourites. And there was Julio Iglesias," says Mamontovas. The artistic director of Lithuania's National Theare, Audronis Liuga, recalls a landmark musical staging of Romeo and Juliet in 1982. "It was a spirit of freedom, it was very youthful, very joyful, based on a lot of improvisation, very recognisable for this generation of people who were listening to the Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar - this kind of music but not of course legally." This new Lithuanian production is full of music, but no rock - although it's far from conventional, with not a doublet or hose in sight, and a coconut taking the place of Yorick's skull. It is one of 37 companies performing at the World Shakespeare Festival at London's Globe Theatre Then there is the history of Hamlet in the Soviet Union. An early landmark of Lithuania's professional theatre was a production of Hamlet by Mikhail Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton. But Hamlet then fell out of favour. Stalin, it was understood, had turned against the indecisive Prince of Denmark. The uncomfortable comparisons between the setting of Hamlet, the dark world of Elsinore and the Kremlin, was perhaps too close. Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, had usurped the throne, depriving the young Hamlet himself, and there were parallels - for those who wished to see them - in Stalin's seizure of Lenin's leading role and his demolition of rivals such as Trotsky. There was also another layer of symbolism. Stalin, a keen theatregoer, took against the renowned director Vsevolod Meyerhold and had him arrested and tortured, and executed. Best known of all of Hamlet's 1,500 lines It's in Act III Scene I, and Prince Hamlet appears to be talking to himself He's trying to establish his uncle's guilt in murdering his father and usurping the Danish throne The speech is a deep philosophical reflection on life and death The six most familiar words in theatre Meyerhold dreamed all his life of staging Hamlet, his favourite play, but somehow never managed it. He was renowned for having said, with bitter irony, that he wanted his tombstone to read: "Here lies a man who never played or directed Hamlet". From the day he was killed in 1940, Hamlet and the death of Meyerhold became intertwined in the public imagination. Stalin's death in 1953 prompted a series of new Hamlet productions that tested the boundaries of how far the post-Stalin thaw had gone, and so the play gained a symbolic status of freedom of expression. The director of the Globe Shakespeare Festival, Tom Bird, says this resonance is echoed across the region. "There's a feeling in the former Soviet Union that Shakespeare was never censored. So he becomes in a lot of these places not just a writer but almost a freedom fighter, almost a saint. "If you go in to the countryside in Armenia you meet people with the name Shakespeare - their first names are Shakespeare. "The most famous footballer in Armenia is Henrikh Mkhitaryan and his middle name is Hamlet. And no, Hamlet isn't Armenian for Hamish; it's Hamlet, the Dane. It's incredible it's seeped in to everything." But there is also a sense that something has passed. They do not miss the fear, but the privileged position of high culture and Shakespeare has slipped. Tina Turner and Julio Iglesias may have been banned, but there was a deep reverence for Shakespeare. Fifteen years on, Mamontovas is still eager to carry on playing the Danish prince for a few more years. But he knows the clock is ticking. "I am very happy and very lucky to be here, this play has opened a lot of doors for me. I took this on when I was Hamlet's age, around 29, it would be strange if I was still being Hamlet when I'm 50."