Marian Popescu – A playwright who knows how to choose his topics
Category: Chronicles„The Last Emperor” is the second collection of plays written by Valentin Nicolau. Just like the first one, titled “If I Were and Angel” and printed by UNITEXT Publishing House in 2000, it consists in three plays. In both these volumes the subtitle is actually the title of the opening play and the prefaces were written by two well-known literary critics (Nicolae Manolescu and Dan C. Mihăilescu. The book covers were designed by the author himself. But these are all the resemblances, for it is the choice of the topic and theme that makes the difference between the two books. Nicolau is one of the very few playwrights who know how to choose their topics. After 1990, in Romania there have been very few playwrights whose works prove consideration for the real stage and interact with it. And there is also the fact that the hierarchies, topics and themes used by the Romanian playwrights before 1989 haven’t been revised yet. On the other hand, Romanian theatre is very traditionalist when it comes to the admission of new authors and texts. There has been much talk and written comment on this and there has been noticed a wish and a flaw, a deficit coming contemporary works behind the times and theatre managers also behind the times, which has got effects unacceptable for the staging of the new Romanian plays. Valentin Nicolau is trying not to be behind the times in the collections he has published so far.“The Last Emperor” produces performances in which social and political issues, typical of his first collection, are shadowed by the option for political, electoral and sentimental seduction. Dan C. Mihailescu is right to outline in the preface that Power and the transfer of it is what the three texts share. But it seems to me that the anatomy of seduction is the scope of the authors’ new topics. In a manner different from that of Alina Mungiu in “The Evangelists” and “Studio Zero” and of Vlad Zografi in “Peter” or “Oedipus in Delphi”, Nicolau structures his pieces on main components, to which he adds a certain pedagogy of the choice for topics. “The Photographer of His Majesty” (also called “The Last Emperor”) develops upon a theme as old and fascinating as Power and he makes the ego penetrate parable lines. Terror is both an exercise of the ruler’s lucidity and an exercise of madness. The ruler’s relationship with times, via the Photographer who has reached court, is different from the one established in, let’s say, Marin Sorescu’s play “The Third Pale”, in which Vlad the Impaler is the model for the painter’s work. In the play written by Nicolau, the Emperor is sacrificed after the world he modeled can no longer contain him. His inflatable kingdom is a project that brings him closer to an absent God. The Fool, the brother, is the one to take over. In a world where image replaces the natural, there is need for a different image. It is Power and possession that are seductive and the sexuality of Power is deeply at work. The avatars this idea has had in Romania after 1989 are not to be ignored. And I think this play calls for a new approach to the political element in the act of ruling. The second play, “Say You Like It!”, is a didactic exercise on seduction and sexual possession as triggered by the electoral struggle.The confrontation of candidates is on TV and there is a Woman watching it, one who wants to see the Man beyond electoral promises in every candidate. Their physical features are analyzed in the language of comedy and drama and the Woman’s excitement reaches various stages, just like her disappointment and dissatisfaction with what the politician Don Juans pretend, which is always the same thing. Her fantasies and wished take the candidates away from the small screen and what happens next is sure to violently contradict her expectations. “Political” rape and sexual-political language create powerful images in Romanian newspapers. You can see it in the “Acadamia Caţavencu” weekly and in the now famous article by journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu, called “A Spit in the Face of Politicians”. As we can see, Valentin Nicolau uses different means to transfer the theme of the first play into the erotic game’s irony and pragmatism: in fact, seduction is a strong electoral argument. Let us remember, for instance, how some female electors would perceive politician Petre Roman at electoral times.And in “Last Stop in Paradise” we have the portrait of the seducer training his successor. Mitica is a hospitalized Don Juan now and he is exercising the transfer of “power” on a younger man, Ionel, a sparring-partner who will take his place, just like the Fool in the first play does. The universe in the hospital an the suffering bodies fuel the erotic game. It is at this point that the playwright proves very good at making an extremely interesting analysis, using irony and grotesque as well.What is typical of this collection of plays is the personalized drama language. His plays have not found their personality and the author has got to master conflict developing techniques, just as he proves his intuition of the human changing due to the fundamental transformations of Romanian society in the last decade. This is what makes his work distinctive among the works belonging to the new playwrights. His volume is coherent, something hard to find in the others’ plays. New authors such as Alina Nelega, Saviana Stănescu (with the four texts for stage included in “Black Milk”), Ştefan Caraman (with “21st Scenes in Stephen’s Life”) and Cristian Juncu (“Two Plays”) are illustrate to express the new playwriting in Romania. After the interest taken in the works of Vlad Zografi and Alina Mungiu, after the experiments produces by the above-mentioned writers, the plays written by Valentin Nicolau make a safe offer for stage. (Marian Popescu, Observator cultural, no. 73, July, 2001)