There must be some onomastic to motivate the nicknames that the actor I am talking about turned into a sort of pet emblem, used by all (many, discreet, lasting) of his friends. In theatre, he is called... Țâcă, despite the fact he is a
venerable actor. For real, this is no joke! Unfortunately, contact with him was always limited to a straight admiration on my part, and a brotherly smile, on his, so I have no details on how the nickname came into being. It's probably coming from the student years and was kept intact. Most amusing is how Radu Afrim (one of the directors who substantially and constant have him do heavy jobs recent years) writes the name in the language of the internet users: TZAKA!
And us all fully enjoy the game of the absent diacritics. Otherwise, we are dealing with an actor that I can not in any way introduce into a standard theatrical formula, in any specific emploi. He is... atypical, and this precisely to the extent to which he is probably one of one of the most complex-complete-flexible theatre artists of his generation. Sometimes I think, enthusiastically, that such an actor can be asked to do nearly any kind of role: play even Juliet, for example, and hell manage it, in just a few minutes to convince you, in Flaubert's the penitent progeny, that Juliet is him.
(In fact, the quiz at the Last Judgement, it is possible that a judge specialized in theatre might ask: Who played Romeo in Piatra Neamt, under the direction of Purcarete in 1974? And not know... what a shame! Constantin Cojocaru, of course, and Juliet was Nina Zainescu! To the boiler ignorant spectator).
It is so hard to choose that I will begin with what the audience does not really know (or forgot). For example, with a performance in which he played as a guest (he has the generosity and discipline to take a project in any corner of the country where he feels hes offered something undone before) from Sfantu Gheorghe, the Andrei Mureșeanu company, at the time when Radu Macrinici was director. It was the premiere of Espinoza's Return, a more than free adaptation of a story by Borges, written by Macrinici and staged by a very talented actor-director, meanwhile released from duty - Bogdan Voicu. Țâcă play there the grumpy and fundamentalist father of a sectarian of family fled under the flood in a sort of a cave-cathedral. A character carefully gaining, imperceptibly, in winding tone and movement tricks a sort of a bronze grandeur, vindicatory and inept at the same time. Legally metaphysical. Not long after, Macrina ended up with his adaptation of Coelho's Alchemist directly on the large stage at the Odeon, with an exceptional distribution (directed by Anca Maria Colteanu). Here Marius Stanescu, the young initiated in the story, had Constantin Cojocaru for a partner, a real Alchemist: ethereal Wizard and a storyteller of meaningful tales, of the ones aiming at an Epiphany.
In 2002, I let myself (in frenzy) shocked by a staging of Alexandru Dabija with The Magpies at Odeon. (I think it is the only staging that tells me something, after a life of hating this play, an interwar dull and melo-comedy full of clichés, praised by the interwar literary historians, due to a drought, to the status of a masterpiece of Romanian realism). Beyond the director's extraordinary ability to read, in assort psychoanalytic dive, from the scratch this outdated text, giving it a completely unexpected grotesque-tragic force, my delight is due, directly, to the fabulous distributions, in which Constantin Cojocaru and Ionel Mihailescu play, in disguise, the two Duduleanu sisters ... smaller ones. Țâcă is here (and I talk in the present since the performance is still in the repertoire) a Zoe whose violent rapacity is taken to its last consequences, and the body and voice treatment employed by the actor turns this magpie into a sort of genuine English vitriol, burning the skin of each spectator forever.
I would go back to one of his first collaboration with Radu Afrim, on the Nottara stage, in Cheek to Cheek by Jonas Gardell (2005), where the role of Ragnar, the failed actor, in semi-disguise and desperate to the brink of suicide is turned by Constantin Cojocaru into crystalline vibration, in which the disgusting and the sublime, the loss of self and theatricality elusively mixed, on the edge. (I cant help noting here that, with him, Emilia Dobrin managed there a touching composition, thrilling my memory to the day).
Unfortunately, I only saw very few of the Afrimian staging during the past two-three years (from what I got... Attic in Paris With a Death-View by Matei Visniec, with Constantin Cojocaru playing Cioran in the international version was, this spring, an exceptionally successful in its wide European tour). I saw, however, another tournament of wonderful actors under the same direction in Joi.Megajoy, by Katalin Thuroczy, staged by Afrim again in my old home, at the Odeon.
Țîcă melts here into a grey old man (Istvan) at times fragile, like Chinese porcelain, at times denigrating, at times hysterically-fearful, but always hungry, a spot of colour, nevertheless a being with a deeply engraved biography, in the dizzying chorus of actresses gallantly disputing the interpretative hegemony in cameo- Ariets(Dorina Lazar, Rodica Mandache, Tatiana Iekel, Liana Marginanu, Irina Mazanitis, Janine Stavarache ...)
What consolidated with time in my mind is precisely the admiration that such a discreet being, full of humour, with no trace is vanity, can offer such spectacular, such paradoxical, such surprising, such deep encounters after all. I think that there's something playful, yet tough here, mixed with a desire and joy of being there, on stage, completely independent of any vanities. Oh... freedom. Coming from within, from the heart.
