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Catharsis in Bucharest
| Article
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19278 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
1,825 Words |
| Author
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John Elsom
John Elsom is a contributing editor to The World & I. |
A remarkable example of the potency of the theater's still mysterious powers and of how ancient myths can seem as topical as tonight's newscast was recently witnessed in a production of Andrei Serban's Classical Trilogy in Romania. This production had evolved over seventeen years, in two continents on opposite sides of the Cold War, until it reached its maturity at the right place and time, as if this were its destiny.
Romanian-born, New York-based director Andrei Serban was invited by the new government in Bucharest to take over the Romanian National Theater, a dismal company under the Ceausescu regime.
When Serban arrived to take up his duties, the mood of optimism had already started to change. Against a background of mourning, hardships, and political disorder the production eventually did take place. It did not seem to be an appropriate moment for a theater performance, but it may have been the best time for the Classical Trilogy to reveal its strengths. Serban brought together three plays based on Greek legends: Medea, The Trojan Woman and Electra. In their original versions, the stories were not directly linked. Serban, however, bound them into a cycle that can be summarized as the origins of a great war, its culmination, and its final purgation.
Show business
Serban did not attempt to present them as one narrative but rather as three stages in a period of social turmoil. His texts were taken from two Greek dramatists, Sophocles and Euripides, and a Roman, Seneca; and he used the ancient languages, knowing that few members of the audience would understand what was being said. If this sounds contrary to common sense and the principles of show-business, Serban would probably not disagree. He was making an appeal to an older use of drama, one that, till recently, could be only found in church. The spectator brings his or her own reasons for wanting to mourn or be exulted; and thus supplies the stories to fit the ritual.
We live in a rationalist age where the prospect of sitting or standing for five hours in a theater, sometimes being pushed around by "soldiers" or "priests," listening to people speaking in a language that we do not understand, is not one which immediately appeals. But the Classical Trilogy at the National Theater absorbed the tensions in Romania today; and transformed them not into a false optimism but into a spiritual reconciliation with life. It was a production that spoke to the whole of Eastern Europe in
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