Remembering Indra Briķe: From Spīdola to the Grandmother

Latvian actress Indra Briķe, who worked for many years at the Liepāja Theatre and later at the Dailes Theatre in Riga, died on 9 October. A tribute in the weekend supplement of the newspaper Diena looks back at her career. Its author says he never knew her personally, but that her stage roles left a lasting impression on him as a spectator.

According to the article, Briķe had hoped to recover and return to the stage. That had happened before: after a period of illness she came back and appeared in both existing and new productions. A role had been planned for her this spring in the play Sapnis par rudeni, but the production was cancelled because of the health problems of actors.

Liepāja and Kroders' company

Briķe received major roles from the start. Director Oļģerts Kroders wrote in the newspaper Literatūra un Māksla in 1982 that no other Latvian actress had been given so much significant work in her first five years. In Liepāja she played Spīdola, Sonya Marmeladova, Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias, Nina Zarechnaya in Chekhov's The Seagull and Scarlett O'Hara in the stage version of Gone with the Wind.

When Kroders moved to the Latvian National Theatre in 1989, Briķe came to Riga somewhat later. After a short time at the New Riga Theatre, she became an actress of the Dailes Theatre, accepting director Kārlis Auškāps's offer of a permanent post.

Awards and nominations

Briķe won a Spēlmaņu nakts award, the Latvian theatre prize, in 1993 for Madame de Montreuil in Marquis de Sade and for Irene in When We Dead Awaken. She was later nominated for Thérèse Raquin in Mikhail Gruzdov's production, for Raudupiete, and for the Grandmother in Bury Me Under the Floor. In the last case the award went elsewhere, and critic Silvija Radzobe described the role as proof of the actress's enduring talent.

She did win the prize for Peggy in the two-person chamber play Pielūdzēja Nr. 1 (Misery-style drama after Stephen King) in the 2016/2017 season. The article notes that at the Dailes Theatre, Inese Kučinska will now take over Briķe's role in the play Pirmavots.