Nicolae Manolescu – Life on a waiting platform
Category: ChroniclesWhile a member of a jury to decide on the best Romanian play of the year, I discovered a new playwright: Valentin Nicolau. We decided he was the winner of the big prize. When opening the envelopes, in the first minute I didn’t realize whom it was about. The name seemed familiar to me, but it was the name of one of the main editors in Romania after 1989 and I had no idea he wrote plays. It was my fault. Valentin Nicolau had already been selected in two competitions. But I ignored it. I had missed this detail.
The awarded play, included in this collection, was his first play that I was reading. Not even now, after reading the other two as well, am I sure that their order in the volume is chronological. The best structure is that of “Snow White and the Two”, which is fully-fledged indeed. Still it may have been written before the other two. But this is less important. 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.
All his plays are parables with generic characters (rarely have they got names and, when they have, it is for specific aesthetic reasons). This is “abstract” theatre, post-psychological and post-realistic, political in its essence (but to a lesser extent in “Like Snow White and the Two”). It is somehow Brechtian (Brecht is also the source of the funny, ridiculous songs), witty, attractive and dynamic.
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” is a mise en abîme of Romania at times of transition from communism, the times we live nowadays. The representatives of all the social categories meet on a platform in a railway station, from bosses and politicians to homeless people and prostitutes. They all are waiting for that no longer arrives. This heroic, comical and satirical allegory includes some pathetic moments, as well as some ridiculous ones, depicting a socially and morally oppressive universe out of which there is no escape. The ghost in the title is that of the past or of Ceausescu, if you prefer.
The Most elaborate play is “Oh, World, Vain World…” First of all because the action implies a certain evolution (or should we say involution?). A block of flats the lodgers are about to abandon, just like the pub on the first floor, a railway station, somehow similar to the one in “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room”, that has now got its own pub, a market in the city slums and another pub, a cottage and another flat in a block. Step by step, the protagonist (who has got a name: Vasile) descends in the Inferno to the darkest and dirtiest realms. So he goes through the opposite of the way the peasantry went through under the communist rule, from villages to town. Vasile returns to his village once the city is dead. Factories close down, industry is a standstill and the former peasants, now half urbanized, are trying to come back to their native places. But the return is impossible. Vasile lives with the illusion that Gheorghe, his only friend still in the countryside, has made it. But this one is a loser too, just like Vasile. They illustrate a category of the lumpenproletariat: the town peasant, someone who is neither a townsman nor a peasant and finds himself in between these two categories, in a space which neither a town nor a village, with neither agriculture nor industry.
“Like Snow White and the Two” is most Ionesco-like, even due to its very simple structure. And it is the only play in this collection that hasn’t got a political component. It is a poetical-metaphysical parable, like the so many ones written by Eugene Ionesco. An old man finds himself with an intruding tenant coming to his one-room flat. The newcomer troubles the man’s modest moral order. Still the flat owner feels the need to communicate. Caught between the two, he proves an irresistible combination of stupor, lack of understanding, shyness and surprise to what is new. The third lodger is a girl the tenant picked up on the hotline and she pops in a malentendu to never get out. What happens ( the tenant hits the jackpot, for instance, and gets to win all the radio, television, bingo and more contests, but he has got neither name nor address, so he uses the old man’s!) is less important. The relationships the characters establish are very delicate, despite their conflicting nature and this is how discreet solidarity seized three people who have got nothing in common, who strain each and detest each other, but who can no longer live without each other. Dialogues are poetical and they prove a hidden humor. The scenes have got rhythm and this play can turn into a stage performance even more exciting than the other two.
As a reader of plays, all I can do is wish playwright Valentin Nicolau saw his pieces staged. And I fancy it should be a stage like a railway platform for all the three plays.
Life on a waiting platform – a place to wait in and pass by – goes for everyone, even if the action takes place on the stairs in a block of flats, in a pub, in a fair or in a flat. People come and go. In fact, this is the universal illusion and, beyond their wishes and hopes, nothing changes, not even the scenery. Or maybe the only thing that changes is everyone’s imagination. (Nicolae Manolescu, Preface to “If I Were an Angel”, UNITEXT, 2000)