The Last Emperor (2001)
„…the plays written by Valentin Nicolau have already proved mature enough to be staged. He is a full master, endowed with remarkable skill and with a very sure hand in everything he writes.(…)
Power and the transfer of it are the main theme that these three plays share. Absolute power, passed on from the king to the jester, in The Photographer of His Majesty, media power in its imaginary transfer to the individual electors in Say You Like It, the sinking sexual power and the pedagogy the transfer of it involves present in the Don Juan-like Mitica in The Last Stop in Paradise. Power is everything and everything… means nothing! This is the conclusive idea of these fables.” (Dan C. Mihăilescu, An Afterward to The Photographer of His Majesty)
Content
The Last Stop in Paradise
- a comedy in two acts –
Director Alexandru Tocilescu staged the play for the Romanian Public TV channel in 2002. One year later Andrei Mihalache staged it at the North Theatre in Satu Mare.
This is the story of Mitica, a Don Juan in Bucharest whose sexual power is sinking, and it begins in a hospital ward. On stage enters Ionel, a young man surviving a suicide attempt due to unshared love and this is when Mitica feels it is time for him to get a disciple and teach him the art to seduce women step by step. And Ionel enters the game. Who is the winner and who is the loser? And who is Mitica, after all? “On my opinion, women’s life will fall apart. Their history will consist in two eras: Mitica’s era and the one after… (…) Is this the end of the world?”
Say You Like It!
A single woman and five candidates to the state presidency. An interminable electoral show and a possible affair with each candidate. Five different attempts to possess and as many failures. The woman, an electoral sex-object, lets herself caught in a play of seduction and she experiences all the stages, getting from abandonment to fury, from bitterness to sadness, from despair to powerlessness… A story about Power and its multiple faces.
The Photographer of His Majesty
- a play in two acts–
Theatre director Alice Barb staged this play at the I.L. Caragiale National Theatre in Bucharest in 2002, producing a performance called “The Legend of the Last Emperor”. Director Vitalie Lupascu staged it too the very same year at the “Elvira Godeanu” Theatre in Targu Jiu and he chose to present it as “The Last Emperor”.
An emperor who is a little mad, a little sad, a little innocent and a little despotic sits on his throne and governs a world like himself, a little mad, a little sad, ruled by how one pleases. The struggle between him and the Jester is never over. The two fight for the foreground ceaselessly. One goes up and the other goes down. They are brothers and they play power. And the dictators plays God a little lit. The world gets shaped and reshaped continuously, following his thoughts: “Do something to make air! Bring a mountain under the window, plant a forest!” How will this world of the two look like in the end? The answer lies in the moving picture taken by The Photographer of His Majesty…