Several new plays of the Radu Stanca National Theatre
in Sibiu, presented these days in a short theatre season, have also been
included in the programme of the 24th Sibiu International Theatre
Festival.
Stage director Cristian Juncu, best known in Romania
mainly due to the contemporary plays he has worked on, is regarded as an expert
in Neil LaBute’s plays. Three of them, The Furies, Helter Skelter and
Happy Hour, were put together in the show Happy Holidays, staged at the
theatre in Sibiu. The three short plays question the concept of
faithfulness. Actress Ofelia Popii
features in two of them.
Ofelia Popii: The texts take hold of you. You feel them
really close. They have depth, but at the same time are somehow light. They’re
easy to perform. In the first story, my character is quite challenging in terms
of a different type of theatrical language that is used. I’m silent most of the
times, I just listen and react. Nevertheless, I must be very energetic,
present, attentive and even incisive throughout the play, until the end when I
have a monologue. The last part is quite different. It’s overwhelming, it’s
demanding, a contemporary Medea. So the whole play has been a challenge. I
think this is a very good play, very well thought, very well put together and
we, the actors, feel great performing it.
Stage director Eugen Jebeleanu lives in Paris and his
professional life unfolds both in Romania and France. When directing a show, he
focuses on analysing the individual’s identity in relation to society, to
himself and to the people around him. He helps minority voices be heard, the
stories of the people who are usually ignored. The play Families was staged
in Sibiu with theatre students and started from the idea of doing something
that speaks about actors.
Eugen Jebeleanu: I decided to write a play about them,
which I entitled Families. I wanted to look at the concept of family, to find
out what it means to them in today’s society, which its mechanisms are, and how
an individual’s identity is built in relation to this micro-society that is a
family. Hence, the multiple views. Of course, it was not my intention to come
up with solutions or to give verdicts. I only shed light on some questions,
some problems and realities of the present.
The premieres of the Sibiu National Theatre also
include a musical, The Rocky Horror Show, staged by Cosmin Chivu, head of the
Acting and Directing Department of Pace University in New York. The Rocky
Horror Show is a famous musical written by Richard O’Brien, which premiered in
1973 in London. A newly engaged couple on their way to their professor, reach
the home of a mad scientist, Dr. Frank N. Furter, an alien from the planet
Transsexual, Transylvania. For the cast, Cosmin Chivu did not choose
professional actors, but third-year and post-graduate students, who, he says,
are crazy enough to do new things and have extraordinary potential for
playing in a musical. Cosmin Chivu told us about the challenges of working on
the Rocky Horror Show.
Cosmin Chivu: Finding a middle way, finding a creative
solution, preserving the sophisticated elements of the show without getting
into what might be defined as prejudiced. I believe the story is very
interesting. This is a comedy. So I think the most important thing is to allow
the audience to laugh, to not take things very seriously. This was one of the
most important things we had to discover and put together during rehearsals. We
didn’t focus too much on how this would have been staged somewhere else, in the
US or in London, where this musical was created. We tried to give it a local
flavour, to bring it to our part of the world a little, without any compromise
and without questioning its artistic value in any way.
Gianina Carbunariu’s
Sprechen Sie Schweigen? (Do you speak Silence) is a show co-produced by the
Romanian and German sections of the Radu Stanca National Theatre within the
Human Trade Network. The project is made jointly with artists from Germany,
India and Burkina Faso, at the invitation of German director Clemens Bechtel.
Gianina Carbunariu has chosen the theme of labour outsourcing, inspired by a
protest put up by the Romanian workers at the Mall of Berlin – Mall of Shame, a
case given extensive media coverage in 2014. The authorities responded with
silence.
Gianina Carbunariu: This
mechanism of silence interested me very much. It’s all about the silence of the
workers, those who had to put up with situations like these and chose not to
speak about them because they knew they were not going to get help either from
the Romanian state or from the German one. On the other hand, it’s also about
this ear-splitting silence from both the Romanian and German authorities.
Furthermore, because I was working with this team from Sibiu, it was all very
personal because many of them had relatives working abroad. We also had these
two actors who came from Germany to Sibiu to play their parts in the show. And
thus the topic has been defined by this experience of our joint efforts,
Romanians, Germans, Hungarians. And this seems very important to me. It’s not a
show about outsourcing the workforce, it’s about the dreams we all have, about
what we owe to these people who risk their lives and health to work abroad.
There is a touching moment when an actress says, during the show: Mom took
care of old people in Germany to keep me and my brother in college. The fact
that I am on stage performing tonight is also thanks to her work.
Sprechen Sie Schweigen will be performed in Freiburg
in June.