Mircea Morariu – Were I an angel
Category: ChroniclesAbout two years ago I read the manuscript of “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” by Valentin Nicolau, president of a well-known publishing house in Romania, and I thought he was a promising playwright, mastering dialogue and skilled for stage pieces, as well as having a good knowledge of the principle of theatre. But, above all, it seemed to me that he proved to have a sense of the word in a piece meant for stage performance. I appreciated his skill to control the pernicious explosions of chain metaphors that often strangled drama and injure the texts written by authors who mistook plays for epical poetry. “If I Were an Angel” is a collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau, recently published by UNITEXT. And it comes to confirm the positive impressions I have had from the beginning, as well as my opinion that the author is a true playwright.
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, subtitled “If I Were and Angel”, and “Oh, World, Vain World…”, the first two plays in this volume, are the works of a playwright interested in the present. They are the works of one able to reach social diagnosis and use playwriting to put together images of an unfriendly, aggressive reality, in which huge tumors irrevocably affect the vital substance of today’s Romanian society. These are drama reports achieved due to skill, pieces that pursue to demonstrate no theory and are often shocking because of the dialogues focusing on a state of things, an outlook and a certain suffering.
In “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” the author uses the railway station, a well-known topos for places where people wait and meet. A set of nameless characters, identified only by means of their membership to a certain social category, evolve against this colorful background and their long waiting is a metaphor of Romanian society, always in transition. Apparently feverish and noise, this mob is actually stuck in a dirty present. Feeling guilty, these people, carry their dead future in their arm and they prove a sick voluptuousness in bearing the aggression of the past, summed up in “the ghost in the first class waiting room” metaphor, standing for the ghost of communism and of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old people and deaf people, petty bosses and illiterate politicians, whores and nuns are stubbornly waiting together for a train that doesn’t arrive anymore. The politicians, the best-cut character in this play, says some lines that sound like maxims: “This is how I like people to be, merry and unaware” or “We are a people born in the waiting-room”. These are statements expressing in a rough and cynical manner the social reality of a nation feeling no one needs it any longer. The author places in his text some songs, just like Brecht did, to emphasize the overt image of derision and powerlessness: “Who’s there to cry and shout/ the pain and the doubt/ Who’s to ask and roar/ Does the country nothing hear?”
“Oh, World, Vain World…” is a play with a more elaborate structure, calling for several stage settings, but very accurate in rendering a severe state of politics and society. The action takes place in “slums, where the town and the village begin and end”. The colorful pell-mell of workers’ slums is about to be abandoned because the lodgers lost their jobs, the colorful mess now reigning over villages left with no identity are the reasons why for the fate of a social category called the town peasants, hybrid people, neither townsmen nor peasants. Because of the times, they left their native places once to be moved to towns and asked to live in flats in block that are like “greenhouses, where people ripe early and rot slowly”. These people have now got to go back, that is to return to the countryside. But the human costs of it are immense and it may even cost lives. It is now that lies become painful, almost unbearable. Vasile and Gheorghe lied to each other, each one inventing a fortune. In the letters they exchanged over time, they played the very wealthy men, but the there has come the time foe truth and the truth comes out and its effects are dramatic. The garden Gheorghe made himself in his flat is the symbol of their existence, as people now only reached by an urge such as “hide in that wretched room and life won’t find you”. It is playwright’s merit to have chose alienation as topic, which is not at all new, but here it lack melodrama and nationalism, evolving sensibly, which makes the play both severe and credible.
As for “Like Snow White and the Two”, the last play included in the present collection, it is completely different. It seems to owe much to Ionesco’s plays, from which it borrows several elements, but it doesn’t make them absolute. In the apartment of a nice old men there bursts an undesired tenant and soon after him there comes a hotline girl. The tenant proves to be a “professional winner”, participating in fishy frenzy in every possible TV or newspaper contest and winning money, fridges, TV sets, washing machines and luxury cars. The house owned by the one descried as “a hell of an old man” turns into a storeroom. But what is interesting is that Valentin Nicolau get further from Ionescu’s scope and his characters don’t turn into objects. On the contrary, they harbor a feeling of solidarity with each other. Including meditative lines and a number of well set relations between characters, this play makes a beautiful story, a contemporary fairytale that would look good on stage.
Valentin Nicolau’s plays, whether taken from the reality around us or a little mysterious, have got real life in them and they prove genuine. They are characterized by symbolical openness that doesn’t make the story artificial, due to clashes that make the way to the stage easier. And it should be fast, preferably. (Mircea Morariu, Familia, no. 9, September, 2000)