A Noir Afrim in the Butchers Tower. Spooky...

Those in for a detective novel like the truest of the true, such as an Agatha Christie's for instance, with a slightly gothic atmosphere where you don't know for sure whether the criminal hand is human or if not somehow coming out of a fresh tomb, like “Carries”'s famous hand in the homonymous film, will be more than delighted with Radu Afrim's new show staged at Theatre 74 in Târgu Mureș, “Sparrow on the Roof”, on a text by Adam Rapp, because in holds all the ingredients of a first class detective story, that is one piece psycho criminal (Cristian Bojan), one piece of a body which was quite some piece during her life, a helpless heroine haunted by ghosts (cute and “sexed-up” Claudia Ardelean, “imported“ from Sfântu Gheorghe), desired to be saved by  a professional door manufacturer, specialised mainly on front doors, and not very experienced on back doors, and who, if needed, can also do quite a job as a plumber or locksmith (Nicu Mihoc's apparitions delicious like a chocolate cake), an amateur detective from the Missing Objects and Persons Bureau, armed with a gun and with sex appeal (a great Theo Marton in the inconvenient role of a good boy), a nosy and bigot neighbour excited only at the thought of the imminent apocalypse (Cristina Toma doing a great job) and her “unique” son, Ricky the Grand (Cătălin Mîndru coming as a great surprise), a retarded muzzled by hormones and working as a fake trail to deceive the detective spirit of the audience.

foto: Radu Afrim

foto: Radu Afrim

I don't know how you feel about it, but as I am a great fan of detective movies I sat comfortably in my seat and started watching the play passionately like it were a Hitchcock film. Because just like with old Alfred, that detective plot was seriously spiced up, like a strongly alcohol punch, with fine English humour, cynical and dark like a coal. The action, whose plans reveal themselves one after the other, like the leaves on an onion, or a stripper, is focused on a girl (the helpless heroine I mentioned already) who used to have a sister who disappeared in the mist. The sexy boy from the Missing Objects Bureau is looking for her in vain, as she is nowhere to find. (And if Coca Bloos would have starred in this performance she might have used the line from the film “Occident”: “Sure, since to men, a woman is an object.”) It soon becomes clear to roughly everyone that the woman they're looking for in vain is actually dead. Only that, since she had lead an immoral life, the “unfortunate” does not find peace after her violent death. So that the dead twin begins to inhabit her living sister, who develops a pathology dear to Hollywood directors and called multiple personality. Lila (the helpless heroine, by her name) starts to speak dirty, although she is a good waiter in everyday life who wouldn't even say “go to hell”, starts smoking and singing like a “dirty chanteuse”, and even starts collecting men whom she washes of their male filth with the water she collects especially for this in a basin and whom she asks in that hoarse and commanding voice to take off the cloth and dig in, exactly like her late sister, who was a professional whore. Her mischance is that her collection of dirty males also includes the psycho criminal who, apart from killing people whose bones, to the last, including the small ones on the hands, he takes as a trophy, also gets the honour of having the Romanian version of the play being called after him: “Hoțul de oase” (“Bones Thief”).

foto: Radu Afrim

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Although he doesn't get any line but only some mysterious passing along “the frame”, which anyway you can't tell whether are for real or only happening in the misty mind of the haunted, we cannot but acknowledge to his worth. If there were no bone thief there would have been no story. The waiter's lodging, placed exactly bellow the roof all characters will have to go up to soon, as the flood is near, is visited by all the collection of human oddities and not only, as we also get a biped monster rat, playing pranks and mocking the traps placed everywhere by the nosy neighbour. This is a fantasy character, played with added humour by Cristina Toma, and written more by Afrim than Rapp.

foto: Radu Afrim

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This old lady dressed like a housewife sprang from Afrim's Transylvanian nationalism and is therefore called Missis Mureșan (with the “m“ from your “mother's”). She is a Romanian “implant” among the foreign characters (just like Todoruț from “First You're Born”) who makes “an English tart called somlói that you have to eat to the last bit”. She is the wife of the late Mureșan who played the ball on the playground, “mammy's sweetest bygone”. Missis Mureșan is a fervent catholic and her only joy in life is that she's going to be there for the Apocalypse. In a sort of a mystical-erotic vision, she foretells death and eternal pain to all sinners. She has this whole theory about who and how will be saved.

foto: Radu Afrim

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According to Missis Mureșan's claims, God composed a tune for our lives and that sometimes goes out of key, but those who won't stand against it and don't complain with the quality of the song they're given to sing, that is to say those who won't play the music critics with the divine composition will be saved, while the hen-pecks won't. Mind you, there's no place in Heaven for critics, ironically threatens Afrim the critical working class with the eternal fire of the Netherworld. So if God sometimes screws up with symphonies, it seems that opposition instead does very well. “Satan's Clarinet” plays a very luring little seductive jazz just like Chet Baker's music, on the musical score of this detective story, about the crimes of the bones thief, his mischievous spoliation, and about the Apocalypse. With Chet Baker and Afrim the end of the world no longer looks so “nasty”