Valentin Nicolau » Chronicles

Nicolae Manolescu – Life on a waiting platform

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:48:54 +0000

While a member of a jury to decide on the best Romanian play of the year, I discovered a new playwright: Valentin Nicolau. We decided he was the winner of the big prize. When opening the envelopes, in the first minute I didn’t realize whom it was about. The name seemed familiar to me, but it was the name of one of the main editors in Romania after 1989 and I had no idea he wrote plays. It was my fault. Valentin Nicolau had already been selected in two competitions. But I ignored it. I had missed this detail.

The awarded play, included in this collection, was his first play that I was reading. Not even now, after reading the other two as well, am I sure that their order in the volume is chronological. The best structure is that of “Snow White and the Two”, which is fully-fledged indeed. Still it may have been written before the other two. But this is less important. 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.

All his plays are parables with generic characters (rarely have they got names and, when they have, it is for specific aesthetic reasons). This is “abstract” theatre, post-psychological and post-realistic, political in its essence (but to a lesser extent in “Like Snow White and the Two”). It is somehow Brechtian (Brecht is also the source of the funny, ridiculous songs), witty, attractive and dynamic.

“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” is a mise en abîme of Romania at times of transition from communism, the times we live nowadays. The representatives of all the social categories meet on a platform in a railway station, from bosses and politicians to homeless people and prostitutes. They all are waiting for that no longer arrives. This heroic, comical and satirical allegory includes some pathetic moments, as well as some ridiculous ones, depicting a socially and morally oppressive universe out of which there is no escape. The ghost in the title is that of the past or of Ceausescu, if you prefer.

The Most elaborate play is “Oh, World, Vain World…” First of all because the action implies a certain evolution (or should we say involution?). A block of flats the lodgers are about to abandon, just like the pub on the first floor, a railway station, somehow similar to the one in “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, that has now got its own pub, a market in the city slums and another pub, a cottage and another flat in a block. Step by step, the protagonist (who has got a name: Vasile) descends in the Inferno to the darkest and dirtiest realms. So he goes through the opposite of the way the peasantry went through under the communist rule, from villages to town. Vasile returns to his village once the city is dead. Factories close down, industry is a standstill and the former peasants, now half urbanized, are trying to come back to their native places. But the return is impossible. Vasile lives with the illusion that Gheorghe, his only friend still in the countryside, has made it. But this one is a loser too, just like Vasile. They illustrate a category of the lumpenproletariat: the town peasant, someone who is neither a townsman nor a peasant and finds himself in between these two categories, in a space which neither a town nor a village, with neither agriculture nor industry.

“Like Snow White and the Two” is most Ionesco-like, even due to its very simple structure. And it is the only play in this collection that hasn’t got a political component. It is a poetical-metaphysical parable, like the so many ones written by Eugene Ionesco. An old man finds himself with an intruding tenant coming to his one-room flat. The newcomer troubles the man’s modest moral order. Still the flat owner feels the need to communicate. Caught between the two, he proves an irresistible combination of stupor, lack of understanding, shyness and surprise to what is new. The third lodger is a girl the tenant picked up on the hotline and she pops in a malentendu to never get out. What happens ( the tenant hits the jackpot, for instance, and gets to win all the radio, television, bingo and more contests, but he has got neither name nor address, so he uses the old man’s!) is less important. The relationships the characters establish are very delicate, despite their conflicting nature and this is how discreet solidarity seized three people who have got nothing in common, who strain each and detest each other, but who can no longer live without each other. Dialogues are poetical and they prove a hidden humor. The scenes have got rhythm and this play can turn into a stage performance even more exciting than the other two.

As a reader of plays, all I can do is wish playwright Valentin Nicolau saw his pieces staged. And I fancy it should be a stage like a railway platform for all the three plays.
Life on a waiting platform – a place to wait in and pass by – goes for everyone, even if the action takes place on the stairs in a block of flats, in a pub, in a fair or in a flat. People come and go. In fact, this is the universal illusion and, beyond their wishes and hopes, nothing changes, not even the scenery. Or maybe the only thing that changes is everyone’s imagination. (Nicolae Manolescu, Preface to “If I Were an Angel”, UNITEXT, 2000)

Mircea Morariu – Were I an angel

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:47:51 +0000

About two years ago I read the manuscript of “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” by Valentin Nicolau, president of a well-known publishing house in Romania, and I thought he was a promising playwright, mastering dialogue and skilled for stage pieces, as well as having a good knowledge of the principle of theatre. But, above all, it seemed to me that he proved to have a sense of the word in a piece meant for stage performance. I appreciated his skill to control the pernicious explosions of chain metaphors that often strangled drama and injure the texts written by authors who mistook plays for epical poetry. “If I Were an Angel” is a collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau, recently published by UNITEXT. And it comes to confirm the positive impressions I have had from the beginning, as well as my opinion that the author is a true playwright.

“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, subtitled “If I Were and Angel”, and “Oh, World, Vain World…”, the first two plays in this volume, are the works of a playwright interested in the present. They are the works of one able to reach social diagnosis and use playwriting to put together images of an unfriendly, aggressive reality, in which huge tumors irrevocably affect the vital substance of today’s Romanian society. These are drama reports achieved due to skill, pieces that pursue to demonstrate no theory and are often shocking because of the dialogues focusing on a state of things, an outlook and a certain suffering.

In “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” the author uses the railway station, a well-known topos for places where people wait and meet. A set of nameless characters, identified only by means of their membership to a certain social category, evolve against this colorful background and their long waiting is a metaphor of Romanian society, always in transition. Apparently feverish and noise, this mob is actually stuck in a dirty present. Feeling guilty, these people, carry their dead future in their arm and they prove a sick voluptuousness in bearing the aggression of the past, summed up in “the ghost in the first class waiting room” metaphor, standing for the ghost of communism and of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old people and deaf people, petty bosses and illiterate politicians, whores and nuns are stubbornly waiting together for a train that doesn’t arrive anymore. The politicians, the best-cut character in this play, says some lines that sound like maxims: “This is how I like people to be, merry and unaware” or “We are a people born in the waiting-room”. These are statements expressing in a rough and cynical manner the social reality of a nation feeling no one needs it any longer. The author places in his text some songs, just like Brecht did, to emphasize the overt image of derision and powerlessness: “Who’s there to cry and shout/ the pain and the doubt/ Who’s to ask and roar/ Does the country nothing hear?”

“Oh, World, Vain World…” is a play with a more elaborate structure, calling for several stage settings, but very accurate in rendering a severe state of politics and society. The action takes place in “slums, where the town and the village begin and end”. The colorful pell-mell of workers’ slums is about to be abandoned because the lodgers lost their jobs, the colorful mess now reigning over villages left with no identity are the reasons why for the fate of a social category called the town peasants, hybrid people, neither townsmen nor peasants. Because of the times, they left their native places once to be moved to towns and asked to live in flats in block that are like “greenhouses, where people ripe early and rot slowly”. These people have now got to go back, that is to return to the countryside. But the human costs of it are immense and it may even cost lives. It is now that lies become painful, almost unbearable. Vasile and Gheorghe lied to each other, each one inventing a fortune. In the letters they exchanged over time, they played the very wealthy men, but the there has come the time foe truth and the truth comes out and its effects are dramatic. The garden Gheorghe made himself in his flat is the symbol of their existence, as people now only reached by an urge such as “hide in that wretched room and life won’t find you”. It is playwright’s merit to have chose alienation as topic, which is not at all new, but here it lack melodrama and nationalism, evolving sensibly, which makes the play both severe and credible.

As for “Like Snow White and the Two”, the last play included in the present collection, it is completely different. It seems to owe much to Ionesco’s plays, from which it borrows several elements, but it doesn’t make them absolute. In the apartment of a nice old men there bursts an undesired tenant and soon after him there comes a hotline girl. The tenant proves to be a “professional winner”, participating in fishy frenzy in every possible TV or newspaper contest and winning money, fridges, TV sets, washing machines and luxury cars. The house owned by the one descried as “a hell of an old man” turns into a storeroom. But what is interesting is that Valentin Nicolau get further from Ionescu’s scope and his characters don’t turn into objects. On the contrary, they harbor a feeling of solidarity with each other. Including meditative lines and a number of well set relations between characters, this play makes a beautiful story, a contemporary fairytale that would look good on stage.

Valentin Nicolau’s plays, whether taken from the reality around us or a little mysterious, have got real life in them and they prove genuine. They are characterized by symbolical openness that doesn’t make the story artificial, due to clashes that make the way to the stage easier. And it should be fast, preferably. (Mircea Morariu, Familia, no. 9, September, 2000)

Mihaela Michailov – The highest degree of mystification

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:44:47 +0000

“If I Were and Angel”, the collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau, display several perspective which pursue a similar effect. The structure and the characters mirror a sordid world, fascinating because of its triviality and dirt. It is a world of slums and of characters subject to the often grotesque show of background puppets, who come to the foreground one by one to take their parts. It is a world where there “faith and lack of faith” cohabitate better than anywhere, just like God and the fallen angels.
With cinematographic minuteness skillfully mastered, each of these three plays – “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, “Oh, World, Vain World…” and “Like Snow White and the Two” – glimpses seemingly insignificant details and expresses them in ambiguous dialogues, which consists in an ingenious combination of plain remarks and abstract allusions, of morbid cynicism and pathetic attitude, thus proving confident in the expressivity of the absurd. So what is marginal becomes the substance for stage. Generic characters (the Old Man, the Tenant, the Thief) are masks hiding the void of a chaotic search, they play and under-play the roles of continuous Beckettian waiting: “We will start it again tomorrow… Tomorrow…”
In “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” there is a symbolical character, the Traveler, portrayed in what is typical of him: the obsessive waiting for a train on a platform in a railway station. Trains come and go in front of the audience-actors, but they never stop. The voices on the platform – the Politician, the Whore, the Nun – and the mutes – homeless people, blind and deaf men – express one by one their state, both condemned and privileged, a state they are subject to: “instead of going somewhere you’d better wait to go nowhere… We are a people born in the waiting-room.” It is a generic room that suggests a generic image and in the end every character parts with it to prepare for “new” waiting: “the characters get in their own suitcases and the close them”. The platform decides on the places of these participants depending on its own coherence, turning into a bizarre, still a familiar space, that one can recognize in every detail, which conveys more meaning to the speeches thy perform. The blind, the deaf and the homeless say as follows: “We can’t see and we can’t hear? Don’t we live, although unborn? We are few and we make a piece of the station and we don’t talk about ourselves…” At the end of this platform world there looms another station, from which there can be heard the song the Nun is singing, which is present in other plays as well and which suggests virtual openness: “Were I an angel flying above, train rails will seem to me the lines in the palm of the station…”
The space in “Oh, World, Vain World…” consists in filthy pubs and it stresses, as mentioned in the directions for stage, the derisive atmosphere and the unavoidable waiting/ standstill: “We kill time by waiting.” Characters’ lively dialogue linger on a component that all the plays written by Valentin Nicolau share: dissimulated failure and the inherent mystification of the truth, which seems an escape due to a false identity, seen as compensatory, but in fact destructive.
This mystifying strategy is also at work in “Like Snow White and the Two”. Characters relate to an imaginary alter ego (as temporal order or mode of existence) and they take up a part with dual implications, but without doing away with the necessary lucidity: “There is no one thousand and one nights. There is just night after night. And all nights are dark and tormented.” Every character gets himself a temporary identity, a piece of destiny, in order to transcend the normal state of things and bring a different kind of representation. Artificial mimic turns faces into grimaces and the parts in the drama get to be jay. Everything unveils and at the same time veils a form of mystification of the whole story: “When you say you went through this world, you’re lying to the world, old man.”
Making use of interesting parables, the plays written by Valentin Nicolau focus on aspects of the Romanian society after the 1989 Revolution, expressed in practical terms (slum music, bingo games and homeless people). These are typical of a space that stretches much further beyond the world of rail stations and slums. (Mihaela Michailov, Observator cultural, no. 26, August 22, 2000)

Marina Constantinescu – Playwriting. Playing

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:40:16 +0000

It seems that the problem with the contemporary plays written in Romania is that they are talked about rather than staged. The playwrights in the older generation are still active. The works of Dumitru Solomon are staged most and the plays by Matei Vişniec are performed in France, Romania and America as well. The new generation playwrights get published, they say what they have to say and their pieces are staged. Sometimes. I am talking about Vlad Zografi, Radu Macrinici and more. An interesting new name that has mad it to the scene, keeping a low profile and making no fuss, is Valentin Nicolau, a geophysicist and now a president of Nemira Publishing House in Bucharest. It is to be noticed that most of the new playwrights have got a science background, as most of them are physicists, engineers and so on. This triggers a different use of the Word, maybe more concision and, not last, another kind of human experience and perception of reality.
“If I Were an Angel”, the collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau published by Nemira, is a good illustration of the statements made above. It includes three plays, we don’t know if the author has written more. And these three plays were remarked in various competitions: “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” or “If I Were an Angel” was selected for the UNITER award in “the best Romanian play of 1998” category; one year later, “Oh, World, Vain World…” won the same prize; “Like Snow White and the Two” was the Great Prize of the “Camil Petrescu” Playwriting Competition in the 7th edition, held in 1999, a competition organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Still the texts weren’t ordered in this collection only chronologically and only on accounts of awards. Not at all. This order expresses a fulfillment of writing, of the sense for drama and for stage. There is something very important we must mention at this point. There three plays weren’t written as literature first of all, but made as an offer for stage performance. The dialogues are true and overt and the characters in the author’s world have no sophisticated speech, but they develop more in terms of situations, context and moves and they thus create a parable of the palpable reality we live in. Valentin Nicolau is a very resourceful mind and he puts the spotlight on the individual and human relations as they are in postcommunism. The characters of his political, abstract or psychological plays are contained in the sauce of existence, which is rough and maybe unmerciful, making a universe wearing no make-up, but expressed in words. Conflicts seem plain, because they are of the kind we run into everywhere. This is why they don’t shock at once. But underneath such conflicts we can feel torments, alienation, loss of identity and our every day obsessions, together with the issues typical of the transformation that our postcommunist society is going through. It is a society still marred by the past and burdened by the present, still a society on which universal difficulties effect, a world of people confused at the turn on the millenium. Such threads get to tide the characters, strangling them or at least making them uncomfortable. In all the three plays there is a search for a new definition of man at the end of the century, for the means to fit in the new reality and avoid failure. But in all these pieces individual failure of that of society is present. Moreover, it is the main character. There is dark, gloomy and even cynical humour in “If I Were and Angel.” Characters seem to have lost their guardian angels, they looked abandoned by a meaning to guide their lives to and they choose incidental things, the better or worse context, almost not at all successful.
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” makes us spend some more time in a railway station, not to take a train, but to look at things. And there seem to be no trains in this station anyway or, in other words, that train everyone needs doesn’t seem to arrive: the train to take us away from the past and carry us to a present, if not to a future. The text is both political and social. It is the theatrical radiography of a case, that is today’s Romania. Waiting rooms are also haunted by a profiteer boss – a boss of powerlessness and disaster -, a prostitute, a nun and several people pretending to be deaf and dumb and making a mass to be manipulated. There is also a peasant woman, many homeless people and a demagogic politician who rules over the degradation caused by this time of transition. The dictator’s ghost still frightens people and the train going to a settled society arrives no longer. “Oh, World, Vain World…” has got an almost cinema-like cut. The spaced present in the previous play are present in this one as well: a train station and pubs. Things get complicated in human, moral and social terms: alienated people, peasants expelled from their villages and moves to towns to work on industrial sites, who become neither peasants nor townsmen, people who swarm in lies and dirt, condemned to never find their place and feel fulfilled. There is one single solution that seems true: death, but attained by committing suicide, the supreme sin for Christians.
“Like Snow White and the Two” may be the best-structured and most substantial of these plays. It is very close to the theatre of the absurd, it displays modern writing and subtle humour. It is not at all a political play. I would say it is a metaphysical play. All the three characters are places in situations they have never gone through before. A single and lonely old man, full of habits and memories, wakes up one day to face an intruding tenant, who works like magnet on a hotline operator. A series of misunderstandings almost mystify the truth and places them in a truly absurd scene. The tenant proves to be a participant in every possible game: Bingo, “listen and win”, “watch and win”, “shut up and win” and so on. He is not just a player, but also a winner. Soon the old man’s one-room apartment turns into a storeroom crammed with TV sets, squeezers and so on. Well, the old man had never lived such an adventure. And neither had the phone operator, who had been raped when a child, learnt what to love meant until experiencing such a strange and straining cohabitation. But her traumas healed. And there is one thing that is out of any all control: the tenant has got no identity. So he borrowed his name from the old man’s tomcat. But after the cat is killed, the mystery breaks. And the guy vanishes just like he came, out of the blue, but troubling a preexisting order.
We are looking forward to a good stage director reading at least one of these plays. A performance on a text by Valentin Nicolau is sure to appeal to the audience and meet specialists’ expectations. One way or the other, we run across the playwright’s world anyway, because it is our world, the world of the end… of the world. (Marina Constantinescu, România literară, 2000)

“If I Were an Angel”, the collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau published by Nemira, is a good illustration of the statements made above. It includes three plays, we don’t know if the author has written more. And these three plays were remarked in various competitions: “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” or “If I Were an Angel” was selected for the UNITER award in “the best Romanian play of 1998” category; one year later, “Oh, World, Vain World…” won the same prize; “Like Snow White and the Two” was the Great Prize of the “Camil Petrescu” Playwriting Competition in the 7th edition, held in 1999, a competition organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Still the texts weren’t ordered in this collection only chronologically and only on accounts of awards. Not at all. This order expresses a fulfillment of writing, of the sense for drama and for stage. There is something very important we must mention at this point. There three plays weren’t written as literature first of all, but made as an offer for stage performance. The dialogues are true and overt and the characters in the author’s world have no sophisticated speech, but they develop more in terms of situations, context and moves and they thus create a parable of the palpable reality we live in. Valentin Nicolau is a very resourceful mind and he puts the spotlight on the individual and human relations as they are in postcommunism. The characters of his political, abstract or psychological plays are contained in the sauce of existence, which is rough and maybe unmerciful, making a universe wearing no make-up, but expressed in words. Conflicts seem plain, because they are of the kind we run into everywhere. This is why they don’t shock at once. But underneath such conflicts we can feel torments, alienation, loss of identity and our every day obsessions, together with the issues typical of the transformation that our postcommunist society is going through. It is a society still marred by the past and burdened by the present, still a society on which universal difficulties effect, a world of people confused at the turn on the millenium. Such threads get to tide the characters, strangling them or at least making them uncomfortable. In all the three plays there is a search for a new definition of man at the end of the century, for the means to fit in the new reality and avoid failure. But in all these pieces individual failure of that of society is present. Moreover, it is the main character. There is dark, gloomy and even cynical humour in “If I Were and Angel.” Characters seem to have lost their guardian angels, they looked abandoned by a meaning to guide their lives to and they choose incidental things, the better or worse context, almost not at all successful.
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” makes us spend some more time in a railway station, not to take a train, but to look at things. And there seem to be no trains in this station anyway or, in other words, that train everyone needs doesn’t seem to arrive: the train to take us away from the past and carry us to a present, if not to a future. The text is both political and social. It is the theatrical radiography of a case, that is today’s Romania. Waiting rooms are also haunted by a profiteer boss – a boss of powerlessness and disaster -, a prostitute, a nun and several people pretending to be deaf and dumb and making a mass to be manipulated. There is also a peasant woman, many homeless people and a demagogic politician who rules over the degradation caused by this time of transition. The dictator’s ghost still frightens people and the train going to a settled society arrives no longer. “Oh, World, Vain World…” has got an almost cinema-like cut. The spaced present in the previous play are present in this one as well: a train station and pubs. Things get complicated in human, moral and social terms: alienated people, peasants expelled from their villages and moves to towns to work on industrial sites, who become neither peasants nor townsmen, people who swarm in lies and dirt, condemned to never find their place and feel fulfilled. There is one single solution that seems true: death, but attained by committing suicide, the supreme sin for Christians.
“Like Snow White and the Two” may be the best-structured and most substantial of these plays. It is very close to the theatre of the absurd, it displays modern writing and subtle humour. It is not at all a political play. I would say it is a metaphysical play. All the three characters are places in situations they have never gone through before. A single and lonely old man, full of habits and memories, wakes up one day to face an intruding tenant, who works like magnet on a hotline operator. A series of misunderstandings almost mystify the truth and places them in a truly absurd scene. The tenant proves to be a participant in every possible game: Bingo, “listen and win”, “watch and win”, “shut up and win” and so on. He is not just a player, but also a winner. Soon the old man’s one-room apartment turns into a storeroom crammed with TV sets, squeezers and so on. Well, the old man had never lived such an adventure. And neither had the phone operator, who had been raped when a child, learnt what to love meant until experiencing such a strange and straining cohabitation. But her traumas healed. And there is one thing that is out of any all control: the tenant has got no identity. So he borrowed his name from the old man’s tomcat. But after the cat is killed, the mystery breaks. And the guy vanishes just like he came, out of the blue, but troubling a preexisting order.
We are looking forward to a good stage director reading at least one of these plays. A performance on a text by Valentin Nicolau is sure to appeal to the audience and meet specialists’ expectations. One way or the other, we run across the playwright’s world anyway, because it is our world, the world of the end… of the world. (Marina Constantinescu, România literară, 2000)

Marian Popescu – A playwright who knows how to choose his topics

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:39:06 +0000

„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)

Doru Mareş – Country of slums

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:37:51 +0000

A laureate of the „Camil Petrescu” Playwriting Competition, organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, and a multiple nominee of “Best Play of the Year” Competition, arranged by the Romanian Association of Theatre Artists, Valentin Nicolau makes his book debut with “If I Were an Angel”, published by UNITEXT, which is one more step for contemporary playwriting. So far known as president of Nemira Publishing House, prestigious in Romania, this new playwright is actually a writer in full control of his tools, the owner of a personal style and of a special intuition of what theatre needs and of the text performed on stage. This first collection consists in three plays, with the last one being the best one here, and the preface belong to Nicolau Manolescu. Of course the critic’s primal intuition is a way to access the text’s connotative playfulness: “It is theatre of the absurd, post-psychological, post-realistic, political in its essence (less in “Like Snow White and the Two”), somehow in Brecht’s manner, glamorous, witty and dynamic.” As for myself, I think that not even the play Nicolae Manolescu mentions lacks political substance, although the political dimension is present in the subtext, in contradiction to the first play, “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”. The flaw of the latter text is the very parable covered with a rather transparent veil. Anyway, the last two plays in this collection establish positive cultural relations and they bridge the gap left by the neighbors I will refer two at once.
In 1999, “Like Snow White and the Two”, the play written by Valentin Nicolau, and “The Inflatable Apocalypse”, a play by Saviana Stănescu, won the two main playwriting competitions in Romania (“Camil Petrescu” and “The Best Play of the Year”). They consist of two very personalized approaches to the picture of a society in which the last solution left is the bingo game in its various forms, lottery, a game intruding via the media more than ever, together with guys sliding in older anxieties (as typical of the human condition) and with us (as a state of things). For Saviana Stănescu, anxiety is projective and it turns into a sort of SF with takes black humour and the poetical play of words for witnesses. For Valentin Nicolau, the world in which God is replaced by lottery gives birth to a text closer to psychological realism, which is aesthetically undermined by playfulness tinged with humor for reasons of balance only. Three characters are enough for Valentin Nicolau to define his scope: the Old Man, the Tenant and the Hotline Operator. The second one has got monopoly over endless winning in the very mediatized bingo, whereas the woman with a sexual trauma exceeds at a hotline at night time. The tenant participates in the bingo game out of boredom, and in order to survive, but he doesn’t go to cash his money (which would have turned him into a guarantor of the system boring him), for “This is the country of Bingo. The Kingdom of illusion and deceit. National psychosis is the billion, this is the country of Watch and Win…” As far as the Tenant is concerned, a victorious use of the system is proof of generalized harmonization in absurd. The refusal following next, by his disappearance and defiance of the media, shows his intuition of the solution to annul the idea of becoming part of the system. “Life outside the uterus is so hard!” he says at a certain time, thus defining the state he is avoiding and making himself anonymous: “life is a documentary about digestion and excrements. About the falling of the hair, rheumatism and anxieties… Loneliness and…” Unfortunately, there rings the postman to bring more prizes so it is up to us to guess the last stage of this state effecting from boredom and weariness, that is from life. This is somehow a slide into a fiction no one has asked for, that is a fiction a la carte, which we all eat with flavours and, in the best case, while making confuse comments. It is a fiction that creates us, not one we create, hence the title. The white belongs to Snow White, the name the Hotline Operator has taken to use at work. The Old Man is subject to the fiction of memory, residing among the tombs were friends are buries. By turning identity down, together with the identification systems, a fugitive in the free world of anonyms in which every future is possible, after all, it is only the Tenant that saves himself. Or doesn’t he?…
“Oh, World, Vain World…”, the second play in the volume, makes even more obvious the playwright’s cinematographic call. We are now beyond the open space of the one-room apartment in “Like Snow White and the Two” and we go out in the slums, but without leaving the author’s obsessions behind. Traumas are about the same, but there isn’t any solution such as the Tenant. The fiction that lives our lives is now related to a couple of friends: Vasile and Gheorghe. They both left their native villages and out of self-respect as a means to survive failure each of them will try to look in the eyes of the other like an active winner, like a different kind of bingo winner. Vasile seeks to break with fiction by returning home (Scarlett O’Hara in the slums, of course). In his initiation voyage he runs into many fairs (each odd scene in the act I) and pubs (the other scenes). This effects in a very favourous text (…). The town peasants in the universe imagined by Valentin Nicolau prove nothing pleasant, idyllic or exotic. Maybe the text itself is so, maybe it is humorous because it can’t be otherwise. The Town peasant is a combination between a peasant and a townsman, a person who lives in a world the Priest describes best: “Neither the world’s great sinners nor its saints live in slums. It is only in our slams that you can find a very gray mixture of faith and lack of faith.” So what people do is drink, but they would like to do something else to, but they keep on drinking, and salvation comes from nowhere, because the builder gives birth to monsters (isn’t sleep another fiction that lives our lives?). “Our village isn’t there, it’s then” / here is what Gheorghe notices and, since there is no time machine, what is left is suicide in the simulacrum garden in his apartment in the slums of the city. It is in this garden that the truth strikes him every now and them, while he is drunk, but there is no use, because for those who fail to reach suicide illumination the solution doesn’t consist in the return to nature, but to drinking: “When drinking, people forget life mocks and defies them. The main thing is that you should know to make it bearable. This is why there is slums music, cheap booze and generous women.”
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” will mark the true approach to the society and history, a parable of the 1989 Revolution in Romania, maybe risky for this very reason, despite the various tricks the playwright uses. The main significance has got an elaborate dimension here too, but it is structured in a different manner: the play could have been titled “The Old Man with the Matches”, the game played by the omen man who checks the rails in useless train stations, where trains arrive when travelers are sleep or they do things similar to sleeping. One could say this text is a training ground for the playwright so that he can work out the themes in the other two plays included in the collection. But his technique is ingenious, this typological is classical and offers no surprise for the sake of the demonstration. Valentin Nicolau has got intuition and he is able to avoid making a mistake such as doctrinaire writing, which is why he can approach more spaces of the aesthetic in the texts to come. (Doru Mareş, Observator cultural, no. 26, August 22, 2000)

Dan C. Mihăilescu – Opinion is everything, that is nothing

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:31:51 +0000

Valentin 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)

Dan C. Mihăilescu – Station for everyone

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:29:27 +0000

What 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)

Sorin Radu Cucu – The curtains of transition

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:49:48 +0000

Some 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)