The playwright’s job is over when the text is written. The staging doesn’t depend on the author of the play, but on the context and the feedback the play gets. The staging depends on the director, on the offers made after the play is presented the first time.

As far as the staging is concerned, do you prefer a certain director?

In this case it is about a director with a slightly imperial approach, a complex and grand one, for this is about a Pub of Gods, where there are magi, devils, angels. It is a special space, full of characters coming from a singular universe.

Are the magi, the devils and the god expressions of man?

It is rather them who go have human experiences and go through human contexts. They have got stories that convey them a human face, as well as human anxieties and ambitions.

Nevertheless, the devils and gods in the play are in the hands of fate.

Everything is subject to the divine. Even if they are unaware, all their ambitions and desires are subject to this great plan. And there is one more thing about the devils: they don’t know the secret of angels and this is why they fail in the end their diabolic plan turns against them.

The opening of this play consists in a sort of ars poetica about the seduction of art, about manipulation and the idea that the audience wants to be enchanted.

The way opens with a scene the Pub of Gods is present in magic. This is a pleading or a personal vision on theatre and actors, on this voluntary participation to the artistic art. It expresses my belief about both the audience and the performers must believe in what they do, in what goes on stage, even if it is not something practical or realistic. This is why the text is always in relation to magic, for theatre is a magical space, where true feelings are possible only if the audience agree to believe that world that comes to life under their eyes is real.

During the reading I couldn’t help associating the protagonist of the play and his magic to his manner of speech. He looked like a “sorcerer of words”, as you called him and the politicians who do their magic by words in front of everyone.

Yes, politicians are sure to be imitators of the space where the devils play with humans. Many a time they are gross imitators and the results are most unpleasant for the people trying to manipulate them. This Machiavellism is an issue we could do much talk about.

I know you give your characters generic names. But this time it is different. This is why while reading the text I wondered about the real people hiding behind the characters.

I usually give generic names. But this play is an exception, still with no references to our real world. The names are not at all something unimportant, they have got certain significances, Vladimir, for instance, means “the master of the world”.

Your play seems an oscillation between good and evil. Still none of the characters represents the supreme good or the supreme evil. Not even the angels are perfectly good.

Angels should be in the heavenly hierarchy above man, but they have always been and they will always be under a curse: God made man in His resemblance. This is why angels can fall and they fell. They may have a weakness or something very humanly strong to seduce them and make them surrender, like Valentino surrendered to the temptation to get a form exceptionally human.

Do you believe in heaven and hell?

Not in the human, cinematographic sense. But I believe they are spaces of existence that follow after the one on earth. I think there is not a single apocalypse of everyone, but one for each, for each of us has got an end. And after all, heaven and hell start here, on earth. After all, life itself can be heaven or hell. The two of them depend on the individual man, not on a common perception.

What can you tell us about your present and future activities?

Right now “Dream Factory” is part of the Nottara Theatre repertoire, after six years. It is now getting ready for the seventh. As for the future, I am working on a project that is not about theatre this time. I want to take up novel writing, but it doesn’t mean I quit writing plays. It is just a temptation I wouldn’t want to resist.  Novel is a genre I would like to use to express something for I feel I have something to express. It will be a special novel to include a play. So not a common novel, but one in which theatre is present and continues to be a powerful presence.

I know you are a geophysicist. So I would like to ask you how come you got to write plays?

It was by accident, which I can hardly understand. Maybe it was because of my laziness in writing or because I don’t always have the time to write and it is by means of theatre that I can afford “excessive life”. It takes me two nights to write a text. Writing is a spontaneous act to me, it is like letting go of what I have been gathering in my mind for a long time. This is why I haven’t written a novel so far, although I would like to. It takes an effort for polishing and improving the text. The novel I am now thinking about will probably take me a few weeks to write. I have a second life in the public space, a rather intense one and I can’t afford to leave work aside for too long.

Oana Raluca Sivu , Sibiu Standard, Aplauze, July 5,  2008

In a way, your success is surprising. When did you begin to write plays? Have you got closer to literature because you are an editor?

The story of Valentin Nicolau’s plays began about two years ago. I won this contest and one of my plays was selected for “the best play of the year” by UNITER this year and last year too.  So my success is somehow ampler. I want to tell you that I needed a confirmation that I do a good job, so I addressed the professional mechanism, that is competitions. And there is also the fact that I have always feared that things will mingle and Valentin Nicolau the editor will be mistaken for Valentin Nicolau the writer. This is why I chose a competition. As anonymous, you can get an opinion from a body of experts in the field.

What kind of play is the piece awarded? Is it realistic, is it experimental?

The play is called “Like Snow White and the Two”, after the fairytale, of course. It has a special story. Editor Valentin Nicolau met with one of the writers whose books are published by Nemira and who told him that there were about ten days left foe subscribing texts to the “Camil Petrescu” competition. So I made up his mind at once, I  went home and I took me five nights to write the play. In the sixth I had a small break to get detached. In the seventh I corrected it and then I sent it. This is the story. Now about the play…Theatre is sure to be grounded on the universal topics of humanity, but in the society we live in we can notice some afflictions, but we can’t approach them overtly. So, universal values are veiled under the contemporary world and its features. This play is about the destiny of three people who meet and then part… In a way, it is a realistic piece. In general, what I write is realistic, for the simple and very profound reason that I think realism is more fictitious than fantasy, that it is more convincing than the most daring fiction.

How does the editor get along with the writer? Do they cohabitate harmoniously or do they burden each other? Doesn’t the editor offer advantages to the writer?

One thing is for sure: I don’t want to and I can’t deceit myself. What is good is good, even if it remains unpublished, so I wouldn’t give myself advantages because I am an editor. Now I have the confirmation of my talent and I am very glad that UNITEXT has offered to publish a collection of my plays to represent me. So it’s like I’ve already told you: it is hard to have two people, an editor and a writer, in a single person. You have to be very rigorous during the day, do a good job at the publishing house, and feel inspired at night. Hence the incompatibility between the two selves. The pressure is considerable, but for the time being I can manage to put up with it. Not to say that sometimes the best ideas cross your mind when you have work to do at the publishing house? So what can you do? Well…

Dan Stanca (România liberă, March 21,  2000)

I don’t think what I feel is regret. As a human being, I think about how would it have been like…If I were an angel in that story, I mean in that play, I would surely see other things that those characters can’t see and understand. The role of the angel hovering on the stage is to give meanings the characters in the play can’t see.

Then let’s ask the question differently: what would you do if you were an angel?

If I were a…good angel, I would stick to the job, which is well regulated. I don’t think angels exceed their job a lot, for they can’t, since their attributions are well specified and they are related to humans, that is to the man they serve. I am now writing a playing to be titled “The Secret of Angels”. I imagine that, since angels have got very precise attributions, they must have a secret too. A secret known only to them. I can just fancy it: the love between two people is the effect of the love between their guardian angels. This secret makes us, the humans, to meet each other and develop remarkable life experiences and always look for each other. Our lives effect from our angels’ searches.

How do you picture such heavenly creatures? Just like in iconography or unconventionally?

I felt tempted to provide my characters with a material representation, a visible angel-like personality. But I have concluded this is useless, for I have seen people who look like angels to me, who have got something special and make me think that what I have seen could be the very angel of that person.

In front of the Public Television building there is a troika dedicated to the memory of those who died there in the 1989 Revolution. Where do you think their guardian angel was in those moments?

That will always be a very special moment. I think the angels might not have been enough prepared to protect humans then. Those were very real times. It meant historical cost for a powerlessness that lasted for decades and maybe the most fragile of men, with their most fragile angels, perished at that time. Maybe it was those guarded by dark angels that survived…When I first stepped in the Television building I had a very strange feeling. My office is now on the 11^th floor and it is the office in which all the previous presidents worked in. I feel under ceaseless strain and I can’t wait to leave this floor and move to a different building. The walls of the Television tower are loaded with something heavy. It seems that too many times the best angels were driven away or crashed by the almost inhuman misdeeds of some people, who had evil “missions” to accomplish here.

As far as you know, has there been any religious service to purify this institution?

The priests were here, but I don’t think there was held such a service for the sake of escape, in order to get all the evil strain out of the building… Something special happened when I changed the board and I appointed Titi Dinca a coordinator of TV programmes. He is a well-known creator of spiritual life programmes. There was a mocking headline in a newspaper: “No. 2 in Television is a priest”. This meanness shows that, as far as the formal management of the institution was concerned, this was a good sign that “something else” was possible.

Have you got a guardian angel whose presence you can feel?

Absolutely! I feel him like a thought before thought. He is something and someone who, before I think, thinks my thought about some deed or evaluation. This thought makes me perceive a presence surrounding me and protecting me against dangers, which are unavoidable. It is like a shirt, like something between you and the aggression you are to be subject to.

Do your children believe in angels?

Given their age, my children know things from what they read. I think only in the course of time, only when you have opened your eyes to this very harsh world, you can acquire intuition, the feeling for the idea of angel. It is very interesting to hear children talk about angels. I would remind you the story of a child who saw a tree that had been cut on a field and he exclaimed: “So no wind to blow from now in!” The idea was that he wouldn’t feel the presence of the wind directly, through the branches and leaves the wind moved…Even if they lack a theoretical consciousness, children perceive angels best.

History has it that, when the Turks were knocking on the gates of Byzantium, theologians were having a dispute over the sex of angels. Does this episode resemble the state of things in present Romania, metaphorically speaking?

Yes, it does, if we don’t transfer it as such. I think right now there is a parallel public discourse that has got nothing to do with the real problems knocking on Romania’s “gates”. There are people who want destruction, just like the Turk armies. Others are frustrated and it seems their faces are turned to angels rather than to the social life. But let me ask you a question: What was more important to the inhabitants of the city assaulted by the Turks? It seems to me that their dispute, which mattered to them, is a form of heroism, which other would call unconscious.

Why do most public persona avoid serious talk about their faith?

For two reasons. Because some pretend to be faithful, for they think this is the only way they can get “acknowledged” by the faithful people. It is a form of theatricality, they play a part, but one they don’t understand. The other form, discretion, is the one I can understand best. Faith is more discreet and private that anything else, even more than memories (and everyone has got his/ her own). I myself don’t find it easy to talk about it, even in this very moment, it is heard for me to find the words…I am not one of those who like to be seen by others and proceed to expressions of faith in sacred places. I don’t think I must necessarily express myself like a possessor of faith in a conventional manner.

What is your opinion on the import of new celebrations such as St. Valentine’s Say in Romania?

These are social bargains. They are things struggling to get some religious grounds too, but they ignore the fact that they are just commercial expressions, expressions of modernity or just another opportunity to “invent” some event. It is the mass media and the public nutrition traders that provoke them. Maybe this fake celebration being a bit of evil and not at all a bit of good. In man’s heart there is a spiritual pantheon of some holidays and rituals. If it gets too crowded, then singularity and intimacy become impossible. And there is no event any more, you just get to derision and trade charade.

Răzvan Bucuroiu, Lumea credinţei,  Year I, no. 4

Dear mister Valentin Nicolau, I have a proposal for you: let’s write a drama piece together. The protagonist is a man who graduated the Faculty of Geology, but quitted the profession. Why?

Initially, the choice for this school was a compromise, even if afterwards I got to love geophysics. My options didn’t come from desire. It was motivated by what we could do at that moment. Sometimes there are fortunate compromises. I chose the Faculty of Geology and Geography because I remembered the words of someone I had met while in high school. He had told me that geology meant learning bout fascinating things and the job itself had two advantages: no bosses and a lot of time to do what you please. Was there a better reason for someone who actually wanted something else?

Some of his university colleagues developed glamorous careers abroad, even in their profession. But others stayed in their country and took up different professions, just like him. How does or hero see the world he left, which is right now adrift?

I have colleagues with brilliant careers in the US, Canada or Australia. As for those who stayed, there are few who still work in geology or geophysics. Anyway, almost all of them made it professionally. It means the school was exceptional indeed. Not only did it prepare us for a job, but it also trained us to face great challenges and changes. The years after the 1989 Revolution were a time of professional reorientation and most radical changes of fate. I am one of those who escaped a certain existence and who has got into other and other stories that seem to be my life ever since. All the important moments in history generate such twists and changes of destiny. As for myself, it is not time yet to stop and look back or explain the past.

The main character in our play took up business. He established Nemira, a publishing house, which made itself well-known very fast, especially by editing SF and philosophy of real interest. Wasn’t it a hasty initiative?

Happening and the unpredictable are part of any story and sometimes they are the engine. The first years after 1989 gave birth to unique, incomparable situations and circumstances. All the “Americas” had to be discovered and all the stories about the beginning had to be experiences again. And everything was on the edge. Nemira has been and will be one of the greatest and most beautiful stories of those years, almost a fairytale. Sometimes I feel I am not the one this happened to. And in order to make sure I open those few recent books on the history of Romanian publishing house. And I read that it happened to me indeed.

Let’s return in time. We should motivate the hero’s option. Was he in love with books? Was he an entrepreneur waiting for an opportunity to express himself?

At that time, “entrepreneur” had a much narrower meaning. I was more of a survivor, one of the despaired ones, trying to earn a living and making all sorts of attempts and get all kinds of jobs. I think the first time I earned some money was when I wasn’t even 13. So I was a driller, a sailor, a painter, a docker, a tutor for maths and physics and I think I missed some occasional jobs. Nemira was something special, something one rarely goes through. It gave me the chance to turn passion into profession and to be extremely successful, financial success included. This is why, I am saying it again, Nemira is an exceptional story.

Let us insist on biography some more. What made our hero become a playwright? Until doing it, did he experience poetry and novel?

I don’t think I can give an answer to cover for the whole question that starts with “what made…” when it comes to a debut as a writer. Maybe only if we believe that every Romanian is born a poet, as many say and even believe. In such a case, things get simpler. As for myself, and I mean it, this is not the most relevant episode. Of course I wrote a few pages while a teenager and there followed more and more. But there were never written by someone feeling they would get published. Maybe this is a first clue. No matter what they were, my trials started when I was faced with a challenge and when this challenge came from my dispute with myself. As far as writing is concerned, as my release on the market is concerned, I was cautious. At that time I was at disadvantage because of being one of the best-known editors. And it is often said that good editors are great writer who failed. And in Romania there is the distrust that a simple, natural victory is impossible. Most Romanians can’t believe that someone can do several good jobs and be successful and they can’t forgive someone who succeeds. Because of this fear I wasted about two years subscribing my plays to playwriting competitions in about the whole country. I must admit I was the first to doubt myself, I needed a confirmation and recognition. And they followed and they validated me. M plays got selected for the UNITER awards two years in a row and I won the big playwriting prize awarded by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Mr. Nicole Manolescu was president of the jury. At about the same time, in 1998, my first play was being staged in a theatre in a Romanian locality. So it was all about happenings and remarkable encounters. I can never forget Victor Parhon and Tudor Popescu, people who meant a lot to me at that time.

Our hero writes plays mirroring the Romanian society after 1989. They unveil bitterly the flaws of a badly cut transition from dictatorship to democracy. Like many authors, he fears provincialism and he transfers everything on a universal plan that has no longer got anything to do with a particular place. Is this a good thing?

I have been taking interest in this Romania, so juicy, so full of significances for a long time now. I don’t think it was the fear of provincialism that made me avoid the particular features of these years. I think it is rather the fact that, beyond daily props and expressions, there are historical invariants that haunt us. I think all the things we go through rebuild national mythologies. We remake archetypes and wonder at our own feelings, as if they were produced only by the contemporary times. Since we are talking about theatre, can those who saw ”A lost Letter”, the play by I.L. Caragiale, staged by director Alexandru Tocilescu, say that it was written a hundred years ago?

The protagonist of our performance is interested in the mechanisms of Power, as it is used at various levels. But is reflection what makes him wish to have power too? Does he become obsessed with victory?

Writers exorcise their obsessions in black pages. Sometimes discreetly, sometimes in nude. The mechanism of power have fascinated me. I hope that by writing I shall get rid of it, all the more that in the latest years I have peeped and not only in government treaties.

As far as the analysis of the human being is concerned, which important discoveries had he made?

Many a time the most important discovery is about something simple, but not at all common, about a revelation, sometimes felt before. There are no limits and certainties and it is stupid to try to understand everything.

And our hero wins once again. He is appointed in a superior position and he becomes a general president of the Public Television Network in Romania? Is this ascent plausible for our character?

As for theatre, what matters is that everything that happens on stage should be possible in real life too. If fiction acquires the force of reality and leaves reality behind by artistic means, the performance is convincing. And The audience will be influenced, as if going through a remarkable experience in his/ her life. As for the act about Nicolau, the president of the Public Television Network in Romania, there still is too much convention. The moves were predictable. Let’s see what comes next.

So his plays are staged in important theatres and in television production. Still he is restless. Is it the author’s prestige or his position’s prestige that such success comes from? How does he drive such questions away?

I feel no such restlessness. I have already told you about some of the trials I went through. The teleplay was broadcast three months after I got appointed and the work had started some six-seven months before. The first attempt to stage the play now in the repertoire of the Nottara Theatre in Bucharest took place three years before the premiere. But in those years there were four different managers to take over the theatre. The staging of the performance housed by the National Theatre took almost a year. Those who know how things work in theatre can tell that in my case too things progress slowly and hesitatingly.

He is still young, but he has got huge responsibilities. How does he deal with them? Is the play he has a part in written by us or by others?

I deal with responsibilities just like I dealt with things when framing paintings, when working on a ship or when wandering about remote places in search of “useful substances” where the others could see only landscapes. I am stubborn enough to try to accomplish things. And maybe because of my respect for the time spent to achieve things I can’t stand to see that I might have wasted it. I am afraid of living a cheap life. As for who is the author, whatever I answer, the question remains unanswered. Most of the time we write our actions and replies ourselves, but someone else dictates them. After we come aware of this, we can become mystics or turn to derision.

Can our hero make the Public Television Network independent and credible? Sometimes the news displeases the rulers more than the news on other channels, which may be more submissive for financial reasons? Is this about courage? r about preparation for a certain moment?

Credibility is the key word to any media institution. As for the Public Television, it still is difficult for it to rediscover this dimension. It has got a burdening history coming from the other world that of state-owned television, actually owned by the party and the ruler’s family. Then it reported on the 1989 Revolution live, an event between sublime and fishy. And there followed transition, when all the powers assaulted the institution, wishing to possess it and make it productive. Now it is struggling to achieve the identity of what it must be in truth, a public television service of the European kind. In the course of history, the Romanian Television has been the mirror of time. Sometimes I tend to believe that, if it changes, something will change indeed in Romanian society s well. In this system of fractals in which a part imitates the whole, change can be determined or at least confirmed by the images the Public Television chooses to display on the small screen.

Do the experiences he goes through mystify him by any chance?

Experiences falsify only if the character is able of it. The important fight is not against the other, it takes places inside us. The great challenge is not to sell everything from inside ourselves and be true to ourselves, belong to ourselves and not sell everything we have inside.

I admit I fail to guess he end. It may be brilliant success or disappointment? Which one do we choose?

In both cases the character’s story can be but a report told by others. As for success, it may be so disappointing! It depends where you look from, from the hall or from the stage.

Interview by George Arion, Flacăra

You are fascinated by power and the faces of it. If I may say this, you are just like the photographer in “The Last Emperor”. You see the world by your camera take takes pictures of instances.  Have you even been prevented from “showing” the images you grasped?

There are obstacles everywhere. Something unpleasant is to prevent ourselves and to blame it on others, without wishing it and without putting up with it. The question is what we understand of everything we see while alive. What kind of witnesses we are and how can we heal from fascination? Fascination can lead to vision, just as it can blind.

“The Last Emperor” looks like a sequel to the biography of the protagonist in Ionesco’s “The King Dies”.  Is this resemblance to Ionesco’s universe accidental or deliberate? Do you take yourself for a descendent of him, for a writer who continues the absurd theatre tradition?

I have never fancies such inspiration lines for myself, no matter how great the masters I admire. If we can make such associations, their cause is natural. It is like a geology of generations. It is hard for me to do more than feel in a certain succession and continuity and I think theory is not my job.

Were you to take distance from your plays and proceed to a critical reading, what would you notice first?

I don’t read my plays again. It would be like returning to an old flame that was wonderful or tormenting once. But I wouldn’t want to see the woman’s face again. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize her today. I’d rather fall in love again with another woman and go through a new story. And there is one more thing. As I am not a laborer on texts, when I finish a play I feel relieved.

The talk about a crisis of contemporary playwriting started a long time ago. There is much talk about what should be done to revive the genre. What is your opinion on this? What treatment should be used to cure the “patient”?

For a play, a chance to life means a chance to turn into a performance. It is easy. And I am convinced the audience is waiting for Romanian stories and characters. Those stage directors and theatre managers who will bet on Romanian playwrights will be surprised to see theatres crowded again. After all, it is a matter of sensibility and courage.

Gabriela Simon (Cotidianul, October 21, 2002)

People know you more as an editor rather than as a playwright. Why do you write plays?

The fact that I am now a playwright is a response to the challenge coming from the society I live in. I think this response stands a chance to reach people and tell them something about our world, about its malign excrescences (that is its forms of existence) that must be noticed and removed. After all, theatre is exorcism to me.

Today’s playwrights are faced with a paradox: they write plays that don’t get staged. How do you put up with it?

Since I am an editor, I know well the quantity of bad books published and I think the same goes for the world of theatre. There are tones of printed paper. But there are also remarkable pieces. Unfortunately, sometimes they pass unnoticed, given the circumstances.

If theatre returned to the power of words, without trying to compete by means of image against cinema and television, people would crowd to theatres again. If theatre managers and the literary consultants were brave enough to suggest contemporary plays for stage performances, it would be a step to meet the audience. I think we can’t go on live within a culture of import. One can’t keep on hearing on stage words translated from other languages and expressing realities not present in our country.

You are a playwright whose works have been remarked and awarded. Do these prizes mean anything to you, do they change a playwright’s destiny?

I won prizes because I try to be sincere, first of all with myself and then with the others. This is why I needed a confirmation from a mechanism of selection and professional, unbiased analysis. If you sit in the editor’s chair, it is easy to mistake things, to be wrong about the huge traps ahead of writers or of someone who wants to become one. But this stage to get a safe opinion is over. This was the only reason why O subscribed my plays to competitions. Since I attained this goal, I go on with my business.

As an editor, how do you take the idea of publishing collections of plays? Do such books sell in Romania?

As far as sales are concerned, this is sure to b a disadvantage. Moreover, I can tell you that no kind of books is very advantageous. But a publishing house doesn’t produce just “spiritual cleansers” and “cultural ready-made”. It is also an institution that must impose certain things on the market, take up an editorial project that doesn’t pursue economic ends only.

Since you are an editor, haven’t you been tempted to edit your own plays, so that they can get to readers and even to theatre directors possibly interested in them?

I am reasonable and honest enough not to make an orchestra-man of myself. So I have decided to be the author and wait for an editor. And luckily, he has arrived. Unitext has offered to publish a collection of my plays and I hope it will be released in one month, one month and a half. It includes “The Ghost in the First Class Reading Room”, nominated to the UNITER prize last year, “Oh, World, Vain World…”, selected for the award this year, and “Like Snow White and the Two”, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. The title of the collection will be “If I Were and Angel”, the subtitle of the first play. I can say they are overt plays, coming from reality. I look around me, I see what I see, then there comes the alchemy and credible situation get shaped so that people can recognize themselves.

Cristina Modreanu (Adevărul, March, 27, 2000)