Dan C. Mihăilescu – Opinion is everything, that is nothing
Category: ChroniclesValentin Nicolau has got the attention of theatre artists rather late, as new entry in the world of the young Romanian playwrights after 1989. At that time he had recently become a president of Nemira Publishing House, he was extremely interested in making our teenagers familiar with American SF and he was busy editing Steven King and starting to release the works of I.P. Culianu. It was at that time that the conservative elite was disgusted with Alina Mungiu’s “Evangelists”, that Vlad Zografi’s “Peter” was looking back to Marin Sorescu’s myth theatre and Matei Visnisc was having his comeback on somehow still communist stages with plays showing him to be an epigone of Beckett and Ionescu. Horia Gârbea was shocking the audience with his seducing intertextual postmodernism.
Last year, when UNITEXT Publishing House released Valentin Nicolau collection of plays, titled “IF I Were an Angel”, the author had already been selected by the UNITER competition jury to run in the “the best Romanian play of the year” section and he was also selected for the playwriting competition organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. The truth is that new entries such as Radu Macrinici or Saviana Stănescu were less surprising than the fact Ioan Mircea, who had been a metaphysical post for two decades, took up playwriting. But the plays written by Valentin Nicolau proved already fully-fledged for stage. He was a full-grown professional, endowed with remarkable openness and very confident in everything he does. Nicolae Manolescu was rights to write in the preface of that collection as follows: “Valentin Nicolau is undoubtedly a playwright who knows how to write a play, a master of dialogue and of the natural in speech and, not last, an artist resourceful for theatre. All his plays can be staged. They are conceived for the stage. And the stage director has only got minor matters to polish.”
In “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, the first play in his debut volume, Romania was like a train station avoided by all trains, 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 alienating 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).
But this time Romania – like an obsessive set of flaws in the post-dictatorial transition – comes second and it turns into a suggestion, leaving for universal situations, so that they can let their nucleuses and significances flow in on and on. Irony and cartoon tinges, meek and comprehensive humor, as well as the satire elements in “If I Were an Angel” are now replaced by his tendency to buffoonish attitude, to humerous absurd and playfulness free of sense. Of course one can say, if necessary, that the woman in “Say You Like It!” is the embodiment of Romania, ceaselessly raped by politicians (to quote Mircea Dinescu), but the sexual mechanism that Power uses on the electorate is as old as hills (hypnosis, possession, orgasm, infidelity, sadomasochism, perversity, playfulness, before and after playing and so on). Anyway, the candidates’ five failures to possess the electoral object can be staged in any part of the world by any director, provided that local specificity is taken into account, of course. Power and the transfer of it is what the three plays in this collection share. Absolute power, passed from king to fool in “The Photographer of His Majesty” (“The King and the Fool are brothers, they were born by the same mother”), media power and the imaginary transfer of it to the individual elector in “Say You Like It!”, the dusking sexual power and the pedagogy of its transfer in the case of the Bucharest-like Don Juan, the protagonist of “Last Stop in Paradise”. Power is everything and everything is… nothing! This is what these fables express.
There is to be noticed a change from the plays includes in the previous collection. Due to this change, it is not the director, but the actor who becomes the beneficiary of the generosity in the text. As for plays like “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, the staging stands real odds to freedom and improvisation. In “The Last Emperor”, it is actors who are in charge of diversity, juiciness, nuance and ambiguity (just like in “Peter”, the play by Vlad Zografi, as far as the Petre-Zotov couple is concerned). On the other hand, what is challenging indeed is the somehow surprising architecture of the play, which takes off in an extremely playful manner, somehow unmotivated, and then progresses equivocally between derision and seriousness just to land on the soil of a sacrificed cvasi-biblical parable.
The truth is that commenting upon the plays written by an author whose works you have never seen staged is like that joke about the madmen jumping from the springboard into an empty pool every day. “The doctor”, says one of them, “has promised that we’ll get water in the pool, if we behave”. The same goes for the critic, who can only write about the performance staged in his mind, without having seen it performed on a real stage.
So stage direction is kindly asked to pour water in the pool…” (Dan C. Mihăilescu, preface to “The Last Emperor”, Polirom Publishing House, 2001)