Sorin Radu Cucu – The curtains of transition
Category: ChroniclesSome one or two years ago I wrote and article in this publication starting from the famous maxim that every Romanian was born a poet. But I was complaining about the numberless books of bad poetry that were being printed at the time. This is why, when I have noticed that the book I agreed to review, is no collection of sloppy verses, I’ve been relieved. The reason is not that I’m no poetry reader, but the very opposite. As far as Romanian contemporary prose is concerned, there are all sorts of tops. But the sad things is the same: When will the foreigners read our works?
This time I am not commenting on some new novelist, for the lists are already full and the younger ones must wait to penetrate the canon. Now I have got to playwriting. Every Romanian was born for show, this is for sure. But prose writing is easier and more metaphysical (maybe there is someone to read it and write in the newspaper) and this is why few dare write plays. The standard is high (Caragiale, Ionesco) and the anxieties of influences influence many potential playwrights. But luckily it doesn’t influence all of them. The texts participating in the UNITER competition and the “Camil Petrescu” Playwriting Competition prove it. Unfortunately, the plays belonging to the young generation of the 90s, except for the works of Vlad Zografi, I think, are little known. In some cases not even the literary critics pay enough attention to this genre.
Although he is known only as a publicist, Valentin Nicolau proves his call for playwriting. December 2000 saw the release of “If I Were an Angel”, a collection of three plays by him, published by UNITEXT. And it confirms my opinion is correct. The three pieces, which critics know since the above-mentioned competitions, offer daring topics focused on the world we live in, an upside down world, haunted by the past and menaced by the ironical present. As for the future, it is out of question.
The background seems conventional, easy to stage. “Action takes place in a railway station housing the characters and traveler” in “The Host in the First Class Waiting Room”. As for “Oh, World, Vain World…” we can notice the pub in the slums, somewhere between village and town, as main topos. “Like Snow White and the Two”, the third play in the collection, limits the place to an single room flat, symbolical of the memory of one of the characters. I am focusing on this in order to show the way in which the playwright manages to turn this space into a character participating in the performance on stage, which usually happens in plays with parables in their subtext. The station is not a common one, but a kind of mise en abîme of Romania’s adventure after the 1989 Revolution. As for pubs, they are spaces where the realm of the village and that of the town mingle dangerously. In “Oh, World, Vain World…” there are town peasants, a hybrid between townsmen and peasants, which is visible in their speech and identity. The flat in which Gheorghe, a towns peasant, lives, makes a “matrix” space, where he has got a “garden” to grow chilli in it. This is where the existential split (Gheorghe commits suicide after the encounter with Vasile, his friend) comes about. Still this play is less convincing than the other two, without leaving aside the impact of a non-doctrinaire philosophy of failure, present in every memorable scene. The station is a more powerful topos and the play is a parable with an obvious political dimension. It is not names that individualize the characters, but the category they are in. The characters are typological, a typology that destroys their human existence, for any category that sets limits is a closed universe. The station itself functions as a ghetto of history: the present haunted by the past, people waiting to escape (an overt hint at foreign investors), the nation’s complexes of inferiority and of superiority as well: “Excellent! You can’t be caught! (…) Just wait and see how these guys will wonder and they’ll unlock the locks of briefs with greens, just like crackers.”
In the end, the characters themselves get to play into an act of metatheatre which the reader can’t notice, for he is seduced by the comical situations and the dialogues of “abstract”, post-realistic theatre. It is a play carrying a critical message, where the nostalgia for innocence is present too. The play’s philosophy isn’t consolidated by the making of distopias, but by the wish to disclose with the instruments of art the diseases society suffers from and which get nailed to the wall.
But not for a minute is this sick world tragic. Just like in the plays by the famous I.L. Caragiale, a master skilled in the dramatic representation of daily life, no matter how severe state of things they should express, situations don’t make you cry. On the contrary, they make you burst into laughter. Language is an important vehicle in this point as well, just as it is a source for the comical. Valentin Nicolau’s pieces spring from unexpected zones. The author works with parody and humor and we can trace no particular literary inspiration. One source is sure to be the television shows developing fast after 1989. The political pamphlet pursues to comment on certain political events. The play leaves this superficial level behind, breaking conventions, ignoring the context of a particular event and turning into a pattern of ideologie critique.
Valentin Nicolau is loyal to the ideas expressed in the last play collected in this volume, “Like Snow White and the Two”. The structure is much more simple: the old man, the tenant and the hotline girl reach the same room by accident. They don’t need names for various reasons: the old man because he lives in the past, the tenant because he wanted to no longer be an actor in his own life.
And the hotline operator is a colorful character too. She is brave enough to turn an imaginary relationship into a real experience, in fact, a mess. She can understand nothing of what goes on in the one-room flat with old furniture and memories and she would like to be more than an intruder. But of course she stands no chance. Costica is the only one that has got a name and he is the one the old man can communicate with. He is a tomcat who gets poisoned by his master’s neighbors because all the pussycats in the area were pregnant by him.
The characters are very credible, they are part of the social space. This is more obvious with the hotline girl whose codename id Snow White, a typically postcommunist character. Old men and tenants existed before too. The phone and TV mania coming up after 1989. The playwright manages to write a genuine play about such changes in the social space. The tenant is the embodiment of some social vices. He has got the right to reject normality, call the hotline for Snow White and participate in all the contests on TV. But it is not exactly his right to win. So we laugh at the bingo mania in the media, a madness making us the tenants of our own lives.
The tenant doesn’t have a job any more (“It is the time we start work at… What work? I’ve no work any more.”) for work has become something dull. He just makes phone calls, writes fill-in forms and presses the buttons on the remote control. But the mysterious public enemy no. 1 of TV contests can’t get all the prizes simply because he is not he: “There was no Costica Pasa (…) His interviews and a couple of older articles about a missing person. (…) This boy went out to buy himself some cigarettes. And he got a newspaper too… (…) He opened the ad pages, he chose a rent announcement at random and he escaped the normality oppressing him. He fled to a different destiny… You change the place, you change chance.” This latest confirmation of the playwright’s gift will make me buy tickets to see one of these plays on stage. The author has done a good job. I hope the director will be no disappointment! (Sorin Radu Cucu, Orizont, no. 1 (1420), Juanuary 20, 2001)