studia universitatis babeş – bolyai dramatica teatru, film, media 2

THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE SPECTATOR (2)
not only a consistent reconsideration of the theatre directing practice and a
natural (re)connection with the “theatralisation” tradition, but also signaled
the birth of the new era of Romanian theatre.
After 1960, theatre life seems to be not only rich and vivid, but also -
paradoxically – in a continuous and strange expansion, if one has to compare
it with the conditions and general degradation of the social and economical life
in Romania. I wouldn’t dare to say theatre didn’t have to suffer so much from
the permanent harassment of censorship or economical restrictions (especially
after 1977). Even if censorship accidents occurred, theatre conserved a
healthy competition between Bucharest companies and the ones throughout
the rest of the country, between artists and their productions; but primarily, it
benefited from the constant recognition and support of theatre critics and
audiences (who, in the last decade before 1989, deprived of press, television,
foreign movies and even foreign books, used theatre as the last bastion of
spiritual resistance to dictatorship). That ensured Romanian theatrical
productions a strange uniquely prestigious position. Even if many prominent
stage directors had to exile in Western European countries and USA (as Liviu
Ciulei, Lucian Pintilie, Andrei Şerban or Lucian Giurchescu, among others)
in order to find a real freedom of expression and creation, others took their
places and continued their work.
Meanwhile, the “theatralisation”, even if the term itself was for a long
time forgotten, skipped from the theoretical/innovatory phase to a more or
less general (aesthetical and also academic) dissemination/absorption in
the theatre environment. Favored by the rising and shining star of stagedirecting
– seen as auteur work – after the ’60s, but also by the special
internal audience conditions, which tended to translate into a kind of
complicity between public and artists, in order to spiritually confront the
boundaries of censorship, the theatre performances become each day
more complex, or even baroque ( Popescu, 2001, Popescu 2005, Runcan
2001). On the other hand, theatre writing suffered from a slow but constant
decline of prestige, for more that twenty years, due to the strict control
exercised by the censorship and propaganda officers, but also to a sort of
self reclusion of stage writers into the literary ivory tour.
The consequences, in some good part completely unexpected, of
this evolution of the theatre aesthetics, could be clearly perceived only
sometime after 1989. One of them, and probably the most visible and
important, is the lack of interest (shared by both theatre institutions and
prominent stage-directors) for contemporary playwriting, either Romanian
or foreign. This “museum-like” character of the theatre’s repertoire was so
obvious up until the beginning of the new millennium (and partially still is),
that one could say the entire history of drama suddenly stopped in the
‘60th, on the benefit of ancient Greek classics, Shakespeare, Pirandello,
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