Doru Mareş – Country of slums
Category: ChroniclesA 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)