Mihaela Michailov – The highest degree of mystification
Category: Chronicles“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)