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Romania Looks Back in Anger
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10381 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,449 Words |
| Author
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Claudia Woolgar
Claudia Woolgar is a free-lance theater critic and arts
journalist based in London. |
Nicolae Ceausescu was shot three years ago last December. Milk lines still form in Bucharest on a daily basis. Gasoline prices can increase by 200 percent in one week. The local currency--the lei--is still nonconvertible. "Democratic" elections recently returned Ion Iliescu to power amid allegations of fraud. Romania is still angry, and its theater expresses that in a voice booming loud and clear from its stages.
The I.L. Caragiale Festival, Romania's annual national theater festival, encompasses the best productions from around the country. The 1992 festival last November in Bucharest was firm proof that one must go to Romania to find the most exciting theater of anything currently taking place in eastern Europe. The images presented on stage are enchanting as well as harrowing, and in comparison with the previous year's festival feels boldly anarchic as they embrace the spontaneity denied under the censorship of Ceausescu's regime. And the themes are those of anger over the past and sadness that all Romanians suffered.
Romanians working in the theater today have one word of praise for Ceausescu--they congratulate him on his lack of interest in the theater. The National Theater in Bucharest may have been redesigned at Ceausescu's request to house an enormous private box for him and his family, but he was seen in the theater only twice. Well done, Ceausescu.
The result was that politics could be seen on the stage during his lifetime, but it was buried deeply beneath images that could have been interpreted as supporting the government. It was the people who knew what was really meant. This showed immense courage on the part of those involved in the theater when one considers that the power and terror of Ceausescu's regime was so absolute that, unlike in other east European countries, there was no subversive underground theater prior to the 1989 "revolution."
The first performance of the 1992 festival was Andrei Serban's production of The Cherry Orchard. Serban enjoys an international reputation and has worked much of his life in exile. He is highly respected, too, in Romania, although he has yet to direct a new production there, sending instead "old" productions from the seventies. Romanians are impatient to see him direct a new work in his native country, but they nevertheless warmly receive his work.
Serban's production of The Cherry Orchard was aesthetically beautiful, each act carefully crafted in color and atmosphere, but it lacks
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