Programmer’s Journal (2)

By Cristina Modreanu

This Journal regarding the programming of the Romanian National Theatre Festival and published by Art Act Magazine will keep you informed about the programmer’s theatrical adventures – and not only, because it will also keep track of the city/theatre/and way of traveling (the last being an implicit comment on the country we are talking about) – besides, of course, the productions I will write about. I hope the Programmer’s Journal will keep alive everybody’s interest in Romanian theatre and its most important event: Romanian National Theatre Festival (www.fnt.ro).



Ode to the silence

The place. ”Toma Caragiu” Theatre in Ploiesti. A stage where almost all the ”big” names of Romanian theatre have worked in the last few years, under Lucian Sabados’s management. Before the opening of the new production a book is launched – the play called „Beautiful” by Jon Fosse, translated by Carmen Vioreanu. She refuses to come to the mike and talk. Carmen Vioreanu is the guardian angel of all the translations from nordic languages and she also directed some readings from nordic new plays. If there were any statues to build for something like that she would have deserved one for sure.

The travel. The bus leaves Bucharest almost empty – there are some actors and some students, but just a few theatre critics. It’s Friday and it seems the entire population of the Capitale drains out to the Prahova Valley the favourite week-end destination of the nation. It takes forever to get out of the town. Haven’t they heard that Romania is full of beautiful spots waiting to be discovered? These days beautiful means crowded for too many people.

The production. Astonishing. New Romanian movies have conquered the world in the last years with their minimalist aesthetics, a hyperrealism reduces to its essence, with no moralizing intention. Theater didn’t necessarily follow that trend but there is a team – director Vlad Massaci and set-designer Andu Dumitrescu – that was always on this road towards minimal theatrical expression. They touched its very heart with their new production based on the play „Beautiful” by Jon Fosse. An ordinary family and its relationships with people around it becomes the subject of an examination operated with few words by a playwright that loves silence. One can say that Fosse „writes” with silence, he organizes it in cues, he controlls its duration and intensity and the few words used by him are merely punctuation signs in these strange, diluted phrases.

The invisible lace of tensions built between the characters is extremely precious and very easy to tear up, so it is only the director’s skill that can bring this texture under our enchanted eyes, making each spectator feel its soft touch. Everything is backed up by a minimal set-design with an intelligent idea: some sponge letters placed on a platform that moves all the time write on the whole stage the ”big” word – FRU-MOS (Beautiful). And it’s also backed up by five actors who bravely jumped into the silence learning to swim in it like they would have done it among the fiords in Fosse’s story. Two mikes hang above their heads trying to capture not only the words they say but also their breathing when they remain silent.