“Pray for us, the ones that remained on this miserable earth.”

There is nothing else we can add, Andrei Șerban manages each time to come up with surprising recommendations. On the new Studio Hall at The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, you can watch his dramatisation (signed in collaboration with Daniela Dima) after Ingmar Bergman’s production, Cries and Whispers. In the movie, one of the three sisters of a respectable English family has cancer in the terminal phase. The other two come to spend the final moments with her.

It is a suitable narrative introduction for the sweetish director to be able to descend into his favourite themes: God’s absence, the inexpugnable Bergmanian silence, the torture of the impossibility of communication, the insolvable despondency impregnated with the interior demons, physical and psychical pain, all these combined into the comprehensive paste of the oneiric ambiguity. A good beginning so that Andrei Șerban could lash overtly, ludicly-serious, three levels of the staging, predominantly playing with the auto- referentiality and the fragmentation, that are so appreciated by modern productions. Inside the space of installation from the foyer, the public hears”I am Bogdán Zsolt and tonight I am going to interpret Ingmar Bergman (…). Please pay attention to the translation, the text is important.” (the quotations are estimative). Anyways, from the outset, the previously mentioned drawing of the actors’ artistic bibliography makes the spectators accomplices to the preceding experiences: Kézdi Imola interprets, tonight as well, Maria, like in Uncle Vania, and like in The Three Sisters (Mașa).; Varga Csilla interprets a servant, like in Uncle Vania…and so forth.[1]. It is the first step from the deliberate and postmodern amputation of the story with three levels: the auto-referential level of the actors that draw on the previous roles, the one of Bergman’s crew and the one of the movie’s actual development. The second level, with the shooting of the sequences in the typically chronological distortion, is the level of the discussions on the movie set, of the dialogue with the Assistant Director, of the actress’s questioning regarding the part of the dying woman, and of the director’s inability to explain the border line between truth and fiction (the woman that died appears form death or from a dream…or how?) At this level the director’s relationship with the actresses holds the foreground, as well as the pleasant erotic tension generated in the background, second after second, by the protagonists that fight for his attention, while Bergman maintains a diplomatic ambiguity.

The last level, which entails the deep structure of the Swedish director, is the level of the actual story, unfolded within the setting of Carmencita Brojboiu, of a hallucinating red, heavy, blood-like colour (the colour of the soul, after Bergman’s notes), which incites the cerebral cortex and devours everything: history, actors and spectators. To the themes of the third level, with all the profundity of the Swedish director that they contain, Andrei Șerban’s reading of Bergman’s quietude is added and also the references the moment of grace or the sporadic ecstasy generated by harmony and the sensation of togetherness, the main dimensions of the beauty of living in fellowship. But these powerful and comprehensive emotions are mostly- within the perfectly coherent dynamic of Andrei Șerban’s complete discourse –recounted and not experienced on the stage; and the story recounted in this manner implicitly brings consciousness and distance. The performance accesses the artistic logic of the audience, willingly displaying the seams, which are distanced from the raw emotion. When in the end it appeals to the last one, it does so through clichés of perception, namely, through the recalling of the fundamental values, easily recognizable in attitudes and discourse: virtuousness, the Christian sacrifice embodied into the climax-image, Pieta, or the discourse of the priest on the verge of the rebellion against God (maybe the most powerful moment of the production), when Bogdán Zsolt displays his magnificence. Oh, but how many unfolding of faces, characters, attitudes and conditions would Bogdán Zsolt display (My God, what a talent!), who with his impeccable technique differently interprets all masculine figures; how the characters are fragmented and fragmenting, the production being more of an intellectual experience. In the absence of a character which should grow, mature from A to Z and imperceptibly embrace within its subterranean energies the spectator abandoned in the fiction, the easiness of the actor in impersonating the three men and the discernable histrionics interrupts the fathomless fluids of the public’s emotion.

And if the spectator starts from the auspices of auto-referentiality, of the actors’ interpretations of the previous characters, it is impossible for them not to make the connection with Astrov form Uncle Vania, the precedent role interpreted by Bogdán Zsolt under Andrei Șerban’s guidance. It is said that the chance of such architecture of the “alive”, of an overwhelming emotional mobility, which floods the audience every minute with a multitude of reactions, through cues, intense looks and tense perception, is given to an actor once in a lifetime. In the collection of characters interpreted by Bogdán Zsolt, in Cries and Whispers, the audience admires the naturalness, the exquisite technique and the talent of the actor. One of his exceptional creations is the husband of the beautiful Maria, downcast, modest, stoop-shouldered, flap-eared, pitiable, and physically beaten by the burden of not rising to the expectations of his inconsistent wife. But the character’s interruptions and the short dimensions block the performer’s magnetism, cutting off the dose of humanity of the previous Astrov.

With what does the director, Andrei Șerban replace the overwhelming emotions from Uncle Vania? He replaces them with the gravity of the questions without answers and with the inability of the sister to communicate despite their effort, namely the great themes for which Andrei Șerban choose to do a performance after Bergman’s movie. Face to face with the faithful woman tormented by pain, the priest who gave her the first Communion touches the limits of faith, ending up by revolting against God. The scene interpreted by Bogdán Zsolt, of a Dostoevskian intensity, exactly accesses the emotionally-cognitive genetic resources of the spectator.

To say that the actresses from The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj act impeccably is as if one expressed truisms of the kind: during the day there is light and at night darkness. In Bergman’s footsteps the characters, recreate four aspects of femininity.

The most impressive character, Virgin Mary -like, is the servant that attends the dying woman with an overwhelming Christian devotion. Varga Csilla manages to reproduce the infinite nuances of goodness to perfection, unsettling the usual detached perception of the modern spectator. A universal mother, who loses her natural child (the flashbacks form the performance create genuine portraits of affection) and her young ailing friend, she represses her repulsion relating to the exaltations of the woman in agony, by undressing and drawing her to the warmth of her breast for alleviating her suffering. The scene with Pieta and the dignity from the final, when after years of abnegations the servant sees herself dismissed, are interpreted with irreproachable discretions and dosage.

Inevitably, the dying woman’s score requires a special expressivity from the actress Pethő Anikó, recruited from the entire pallet of physical pain, exaltation and hopelessness. Kató Emőke, the second sister, interprets brilliantly the cold, noble, beautiful and mean woman, a climax of glacial interior, where the magma of her being became frigid and any human impulse is instantly transformed into the fear of closeness. Within a perpetual cold war with her unfaithful husband, she is willing to intentionally harm herself in order to hurt him.

The last sister, attractive by definition, is a gift of femininity to the beautiful Kézdi Imola; kind-hearted, but inconsistent, with interior mood as light as a lighting, imponderable and as much perishable, she cannot fix herself within a pattern. Although so decorative, a woman to the tips of her nails, she is refused by her old lover, the Doctor, who is capable of discerning her scorn into the creases formed around her mouth and the emotional atrophy in the wrinkles from the tip of her nose. It can be easily understood, the attempt of the two, who came to assist their dying sister, to get near to him.

As much as one would decorticate a good staging, the subject never ends and the obvious sensation is that an avalanche of other things demands to be written. This is the case of Cries and Whispers, a serious production, grave, well cut, in cadence with a conscious and well checked directorial proposition and with incontestable interpretative performances.

[1] Two regrettable errors sneaked into the text posted on the site. Instead of the sentence: “Anyways, from the outset, the previously mentioned drawing of the actors’ artistic bibliography makes the spectators accomplices to the preceding experiences: Kézdi Imola interprets, tonight as well, Maria, like in Uncle Vania, and like in The Three Sisters; Varga Csilla interprets Anna, like in Uncle Vania…and so forth.” we must read:” “Anyways, from the outset, the previously mentioned drawing of the actors’ artistic bibliography makes the spectators accomplices to the preceding experiences: Kézdi Imola interprets, tonight as well, Maria, like in The Three Sisters (Mașa). Varga Csilla interprets a servant, like in Uncle Vania…and so forth.”