If I Were an Angel (2000)
„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.(…)
As a reader of plays, I can but wish Valentin Nicolau, as playwright, see his plays staged. On a stage that, as I picture it, looks like a platform in a railway station in all three cases.
Life on such a platform – a place to wait in and a place to cross – is present in all these plays, regardless of the place of the action: a flight of stairs in a block of flats, a pub, a borough or an apartment. People come and go – after all, this is just an innuendo that everyone harbors, for beyond their desires and hopes, nothing changes, not even the setting. Or it changes in their imagination.” (Nicolae Manolescu, A Foreword to If I Were an Angel)
Content
Like Snow White and the Two
- a play in two acts –
Winner of the First Prize of the Camil Petrescu Play Writing Competition, the 7th edition, awarded in 2000 by the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Cults
The Nottara Theatre in Bucharest staged the work in 2002. The performance is directed by Radu Berceanu and the performance is called “Pleasure Factory”. It was also performed by the National Radio Theatre (the Romanian Public Radio Station) in 2003 and directed by Dan Puican.
There comes the tenant one day in the one-room apartment where there live the Old Man and Costica the tom-cat. And all of a sudden the world outside invades this one-room universe and everything in it changes. And there comes one more person to trouble the Old Man’s quiet life: the hot line operator. The employee of the “Snow White Pleasure Factory” can make any dream come true… by phone. Caught between the national hysterics seizing people due to lottery-like TV shows, to which the young Tenant grows addicted, and the deceitful pleasure sold by means of erotic “stories” told on the phone, the Old Man’s tranquil existence changes completely. What is there left in the end? A story about Snow White, who is no longer white, and about her dwarves, who are no longer dwarves…
If I Were an Angel/ The Ghost from the First Class Waiting Room
“Best Romanian play of the year” nominee to the prize awarded by the Romanian Association of Theatre Artists in 1998
The platform in a railway stations where trains arrive on and on is haunted by the ghost of a past that nobody can escape. A station agent, a politician, an old man, a nun, a prostitute, homeless people, a peasant woman, together with the deaf, the blind and the eternal travelers live there and they wait… The old man patches his pants, the politician tells the deaf “stories” and shows the blind pictures, the nun sings prays, the whore sells her body and the peasant woman waits for her children who left the countryside to live in the city. People sleep, then they wake up, they live and they try to stop a train. Nothing never changes, everything just wears make-up and the ghost hidden in the first class waiting room – be it Ceausescu, be it the past – haunts the drowsy station… Who stays in the haunted station in the end? Here is the nun’s question-answer: “If I were an angel flying above, the rails would seem to me like the lines in the station’s palm. Can one foretell a station’s fate reading the rails?”
Oh, World, Vain World…
- a play in two acts–
“Best Romanian play of the year” nominee to the prize awarded by the Romanian Association of Theatre Artists in 1999
The work was presented in a play reading performance held by the “Radu Stanca” Theatre in Sibiu Romania, during the International Theatre Festival 2000
The mines have been closed down. And there is no room left in the city. Those who left their villages once must return. After living for years in the outskirts, “where the city and the village end and begin”, Vasile comes back home… with a computer and with the clothes of a man of the city, which he bought from a borough. From the pub to the market and the other way around, from the railway station to the unusual wedding of a little elderly couple and then in Gheorghe’s dull apartment… Years have passed since these two friends, Vasile and Gheorghe, have been writing each other letters, telling shining glamorous lies about a life of achievements. Once they made a promise to each other and each of the two hopes the solution is the other. When Vasile returns he finds that Gheorghe doesn’t own lands and cattle, that is neither rich nor thriving, as he would write in his letters, but lonely and poor, a father of eight children, a husband of a pregnant wife and an absolute master of the wonderful apartment “garden” where he grows chilli. Gheorghe knows the secret: “The windows must stay open. This is how chilli grows in a flat… Like us. Clean air is poison to them.”