Dan C. Mihăilescu – Station for everyone
Category: ChroniclesWhat strikes one as a pleasant surprise, from the very first pages of Valentin Nicolau’s debut volume as playwright (“Were I an Angel”, UNITEXT Publishing House, 2000) is professionalism. You have the feeling he is much experienced writer, a connaisseur of the stage, an architect of drama situations, a man with a special gift for dialogue, an expert in quantities, who doesn’t surrender to parasite lyricism (although many a time the theme urges this) and who doesn’t stress the moral idea, but leaves it in the subtext of the playful plan.
The experience the literary critic Nicolae Manolescu confesses, the one related to his membership to the playwriting competition organized by the Ministry of Culture in 1999, was also my experience, as well as that of Ioan Bogdan Lefter and Marian Popescu. In 1998 we were members of the jury for the UNITER competition to decide on the best play of the year: after arguing and deciding on the text to be awarded the prize (to playwright Radu Macrinici), we opened the envelopes and we were thrilled to see that the plays belonged to well-known writers such as Liviu Ioan Stoiciu and Horia Gârbea. And there was one written by Valentin Nicolau, which was sheer surprise. He is not a man of letters, he is a geophysicist, he is not a writer, but a president of Nemira Publishing House, not at all involved in the world of theatre, but a true admirer of SF. What shocked us was that his playwriting was fully-fledged. You had the impression that it was the work of one much experienced in the field and I can remember this is exactly what I mentioned in my survey, which I presented before opening the envelopes hiding the competitors’ identities. Here is what I wrote: “a writer belonging to the generation of Marin Sorescu and D.R. Popescu, a very well-trained expert. Is this a surprise by the Dragon group?” (I meant the first play in this collection, “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, a half-parody of what Romania was like after 1989: the illusionary integration in Europe and the utopian change overnight, a world falling apart and so on, which entitled one to suspect a conservative attitude).
After 1990 there were acknowledged several new playwrights, authors of works confirmed in stage performances: Vlad Zografi, Matei Vişniec, Radu Macrinici, Horia Gârbea, Saviana Stănescu. Due to the thorough, profund way in which the social idea of theatre is present in his plays, Valentin Nicolau’s work resembles those written by the latter two playwrights mentioned above. And he is rather far from the experimental, intertextual and surrealistic playfulness of the others. The three plays included in this collection, one fuller than the other (“very offering”, as experts say), hint at the human condition. So we run into the following ideas: a sorrowful and dizzy flock, arranged by Romanian politicians’ cynicism, which is stupid, by efficient in manipulation (In “The Ghost if the First Class Waiting Room” Romania is like a station which trains avoid, where there work prostitutes, where youngsters catch diseases such as a mercantile approach to life and where the leaders lack all moral sense and all these are haunted by the ghost of Ceausescu); a loss of identity (see the “impossible return” theme in “O, World, Vain World…”, which depicts the altered life of peasantry, showing communism forcing the urbanizing of life and therefore the destruction of the social tissue and so on; life as useless paradox and the parable of alienanting Luck (in “Like Snow White and the Two”), where a young rebel gets to win all the Bingo contests Romanians are crazy about for the time being, which is poison to the youth’s existence, to his whole being, as well as to his communication with the others). Despite his fondness of humour and irony, Valentin Nicolau is not a satirist. You can feel his love of man everywhere, just as his respect for the delicacy of fragile beings and his hatred of the idea to rudely intrude in our unfortunate, Levantine nature. “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” is a play displaying categories, just like in erstwhile expressionism (The Old Man, The Politician, The Boss, The Whore, The Young Man, The Nun and so on) can turn into a stage performance that sells out, no matter what city it is in and no matter what kind of performance it gets. As for “Snow White and the Two”, it is a very good piece good for TV, as good as “The Chairs” and “The New Lodger”, let’s say. We are eager to get to live that day when Romania’s best-known stage directors leave Shakespeare, Euripides and Checkov aside for a moment and replace them with Nicoau, Macrinici & Co., so that the bovarization of Western festivals will leave for an honest staging of today’s Romania in Romania. (Dan C. Mihăilescu, Ziarul financiar, no. 20, October 6, 2000)