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A Theatrical Look into the Eclipse of the Sun

Usually, when you go to see a theatre performance, you have to get out from somewhere you are in or to move from one place the other and join a lot of other people whom often you don't know. It's the way of things. But that doesn't matter as much as the live experience of seeing, hearing what's going on stage. Any critique of theatre or a theatrical production can not avoid practicalities of this kind. Or the fact that the playwright has to "perform" when writing. That is to try and make others, those who read what you write, or hear what you say, witnesses, companions of a still missing experience, to share with them the whole content of what theatre means. The question remains whether this is possible to do at all when writing or talking about something that has already happened, something in real time history, attached to the facts of the here and now. To write such work, is it best to have been present at the events? Or to be detached? Either way, you really have to feel confident in your own capacity to evaluate; to maintain an awareness that the critical act of writing also judges, which is uncomfortable. Unless, of course, you refuse to consider the very act of criticism as an act of power. The power to assess, to possess.

What, then, is Beyond Theatre? In asking this, a manifold perspective opens up, and makes you question the very fundamentals of theatre as an art and its relation to our lives, life as it is lived in the real world, at present.

There are many texts where you can't find so easily what is "theatre" and what is "common context" or non-theatrical fact. .A civil war, for instance, is a tragic context in process at the time of its development: after a few months or years it is remembered with all its tragic consequences as "facts that happened", and later still the history book makes it available data and little more. The vivid memories of the participants, however, are not recorded. They remain forever in the minds and souls of men, women and children who suffered and who endured first-hand. It is this memory of suffering, this shadow, that goes on with us forever. Suffering and the memory of suffering is part of our humanity. Too often, we are inclined to consider suffering as evil, seldom admitting that there is something good in suffering. By nature, we incline to forget and erase from our memory things that affected us deeply.

It's rare nowadays that you hear someone described as being a good man or a bad man. These are qualities we don't consider as actual or perhaps we don't consider the words still having a force to mean something distinguishable any more. These terms, and the ideas they represent, seem as old-fashioned as those Medieval Moralities Plays where characters and symbols divided clearly mankind between Good or Evil/ Life and Death. We do, however, still use these words to raise our children. We also employ the philosophy that attaches to the words, preferring the terms so much in this context, that we are prepared to defend them against inconsistency. Everybody here who has children will be familiar with the dilemma of explaining, for example, that fire is bad when you put your hand into it but good when you want to cook, light the darkness or warm yourself. Asked about the sun, we must explain that without it life is impossible on Earth. The Sun is so distant and yet so close to our daily experience as human beings. How can we sum it up readily? Usually, we don't. We take it for granted. To Europeans, the word sun conjures mainly holidays: to people living in Africa, however, it means something completely different. They must live with a daily reality by way of suffering while we in Europe may take advantage of our more distant perspective of the same thing. For all that, the sun is a potential enemy. It threatens us in unexpected ways and only the suffering of our bodies reminds us that nothing is for granted, neither good nor bad. Not even the sun.

What, then, is Beyond Theatre? Is it the discovery of what Emil Cioran, the famous French-Romanian born philosopher called "the inconvenient fact of being born"? Or an over-prolonged process of witnessing the eclipse of true nature of human being, (such as happens under a punitive political system)?

Some of the theatre made by Silviu Purc_rete, for instance, is based on a vision of things both dreadfully simple and violently complicated. "I think," he said, "we're looking for the divine nature of human being all the time. I have tried to show in a concentrated manner and very openly, how much splendour and abjection lie in every human gesture. I even see splendour in horror. Ubu, for instance, (Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth), has a divine aspect as well as a glorifying side. To me, the final cannibalistic scene in Titus Andronicus seems an apotheosis of the piece, and I tried to show it that way. I felt the need to use Mozart there because the moment had to have splendour and horror".

Purc_rete's theatre in early '90s was not complex at all. It originated from a philosophy where Good and Evil are as distinct as a child might imagine them. Children are taught what can't or shouldn't be done because "it's bad", even if the explanations are not always clear. Wonder, joy, sorrow and violence are all present in the child's mind. These clear, strong notions of Good and Evil play a great part in Purc_rete's philosophy as a director. The particular mixture of them is what is entirely Romanian in his work. Ubu and Titus Andronicus are figures of humanism under assault. In his two productions of these works from 1991/1992, Purc_rete emphasised not just the imperfection of our world, but the atrocious social, political and historical ceremony by which ideological and political patterns have been imposed on the lives of ordinary people in Romania and, by extension, everywhere else. Purc_rete believes that "art, artistic activity in general, does not aim to make man perfect, but to preserve him in his miserable condition, his imperfect state. It's about glorifying the imperfection of man. This is, to some extent, how man gets closer to God".

Theatre has dealt for centuries basically with seeing and hearing. Seeing and hearing are the basi human apprehensions of the world. I can't believe my eyes/ my ears is common enough usage. To see and to hear are shown here as a matter of belief - something with which one may have momentary lack of imagination or accepting. An eclipse of the sun is also a question of what momentarily can't be seen. You have to believe that what's hidden will reveal itself again, that it will come back to where it was. The sun is both vital and immensely distant. We accept that. We trust it's true, but we don't believe in the ordinary run of things if we have not experienced the result of distance or vitality, such as an eclipse. Only an eclipse might give us a thrill, an emotion that leads to true knowing of our fragility. We're told it won't last too long. We're given special lenses to look: it's a performance. It's the only moment – seconds, minutes – when a all watching eyes look in one direction: upwards. Away from ourselves. Our consistent natural striving is to make sense of things, make sense of what we see and hear. Theatre, spectacle, is the promised land of all that. When confronted with only your own, personal experience, you realize that's still a lot to find out. Wider experiences, like watching an eclipse of the sun,. draw us away from the self and teach us how little we know and that something is missing without that wideness, that act of looking.

It's still difficult to overview what's going on now in Romanian theatre. Since 1990 a lot of politics, civic society issues, street confrontations, revelations and mainly questions have filled the daily agenda of almost every citizen, and the media. Mostly the media that was considered in early '90s as a national asset, being openly addressed by Romania's President on the subject of the catastrophic image of the country it presented daily to the outside world and even to ourselves! Catastrophe has a great deal of seduction, and reading in the paper is like watching in the theatre auditorium; it doesn't seem to directly involve you. You watch and feel release, perhaps, when it's finished. This kind of watching might be a clear description of building a civil society in post-communist countries. Tadeusz Buksi_ski from The Adam Mickiewicz University noticed as a characteristic of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that the process of building a civic society started around 1989 and went on thereafter with much critical interruption. After the former political opposition came into power, the business of building was mostly to do with dismantling the State. His assessment of Poland, for instance, pushed against this. "The building of democracy in Poland", he said, "must begin with the reconstruction of the State's competence and authority, and not with dismantling it".

Generally, the same process happened in Romania, too. The Arts have been subject to a considerable pressure for many years now and theatre, for instance, had and still has been presented with an unprecedented spectrum of diversity to react to by way of its raw material. For all that, theatre directors, those we might call the leaders of the artistic process, still seemed to go on with making their repertory choices as if the same censorships were still wholly in place. They appealed more and more to the classic works, looking, almost, for a cultural safety-belt and it was very rare that their work concentrated on the new situation or on the intimacy of the creative process. It seemed they were unprepared to look at subjects, themes, experiments that would indicate a new trend - a new set of circumstances - in their work. During these past few years I have been amazed by the large amount of residual ideology and given "mental patterns" from before 1989 that are still present in contemporary theatre productions and programmes, not only in the choice of plays but in the conventional and unchanged way of working with the actors. Obviously, one can't expect major change all of a sudden. Dragan Klaic (interviewed for my book on this very subject, Broken Mirrors) thinks about it this way. "The collapse of political and economic systems in several European countries has prompted conclusions that the socialism they represented was just a utopia, nothing else." It's easy enough to see what he means. Even when there is an attempt to reconsider the basics of Marxism and see whether the alteration it suffered through social and political pragmatism of the former communist countries did not eclipse the very essence of a utopian project, it became obvious that many who speak of Soviet or Romanian experiments as negative utopias, in a way this recalling Tomaso Campanella's classic work, The City of the Sun, from four hundred years ago, where soul and mind, life and death, good and evil are placed in geometric design to bring about the perfection of life on earth. What bearing all this has on the realities of present theatre in Romania, on life in present day Romania, however, is not so easy to assess.

What do I say, for instance, about a theatre production in Bucharest that opened the first independent theatre (Act Theatre) in Romania after 1989 with a stage adaptation of Campanella's work? When it happened, the first thought in my mind was a question. Did the director want to point to the negative utopia we all lived for decades? Or was it only a reminder for us to carry into the future for what rebuilding was to come? It was too early for that, perhaps. Though beautifully acted by Marcel Iures, I really couldn't help thinking past the show: wondering whether this signified an emblematic inauguration of the new theatre or something more personal, a statement on inner belief? Since Mihai M_niu_iu, the director, had also published a book called Exorcisms in which reflections on dictatorship as they applied to communist Romania, it seemed possible it might be both. The production's most impressive feat was its presentation of the narrative, the discourse of the protagonist telling his adventures into the promised land of perfection, the City of the Sun. As his disciple, a character dressed as a soviet factory worker, asked him to tell his story again and again, we heard something never-ending, a circular, looping story. This questioning, it seemed, was not inquiry but the thirst to believe that the things being told were true, a thirst for trust in a better way, even if the disciple couldn't actually see them.

In a country like Romania, theatre had to deal with hard censorship for half a century. When freedom has been mapped up according to an ideology and a political regime, the making of Art, of creating, became in itself a freedom: as it does to those imprisoned, we had to make a world to believe in that was not the one we actually inhabited. What you saw and what your heard in the old regime were never one and the same thing. Reality was reduced to fit into what was said about it. When the miners invaded Bucharest in June 1990 asked by the then President to "restore order", this in a capital where the headquarters of the Police was set on fire at midday with no one inside (!), many citizens believed what was said: they were told things were out of hand, that we deserved brutalising - the miners - to restore order. The images on TV, dreadful and with a huge power to influence, backed this up. Shown apparent mayhem, people craved order at any price. Eventually, of course, the whole business proved to be a provocation. What was meant to put an end to the protests in University Square asking the new authorities the truth about the events in December 1989, did not. When the turn-around happened, there, in the proximity of the area, director Andrei _erban was going on with rehearsals of The Ancient Trilogy (Medea, The Trojan Women and Electra) inside the huge, ugly building of The National Theatre. Outside, you couldn't believe your eyes: civilians were beating other civilians in the streets, but inside, the theatre rehearsals went on. At the opening we were witnesses of an unusual theatre performance: as watchers, we followed the Trilogy in ancient Greek and Latin mixed with Romanian, hearing a hybrid language of suffering. The voices of actors composed a special sound, an universe as to reveal what Eugenio Barba called "that part in ourselves that lives in exile". Afterwards, I could not put into words my confusion. What I had seen off-stage, what I had seen on-stage: what was real? The suffering in the street, the despair of the Trojan women? What I did see and hear were screams in both cases. What was I supposed to believe in? What, in the end, had greater truth? Greater meaning?