You have acted on some of the greatest stages of the world and you have been courted by great directors and big theatres. What keeps you in Craiova?
Well, I’ve had offers, even flattering ones. Tens of years ago, maestro Beligan proposed that I come to work at the National Theatre in Bucharest. But my family and my two children were here… You know, one only makes friends until he reaches a certain age. Times were hard back then, the children were growing up, they needed food that was more nourishing, and one could only find a bar of butter or a piece of meat through friends.
I have also had proposals from other theatres, but my roots were here. And if you try to move a tree when its roots are already deep into the ground, it withers. I was born in this region, somewhere near Calafat. Here is where I saw the daylight for the first time, here is where I got my first kiss from my girlfriend when I was 14 or 15 years old, and when I was a student at the normal school, it was with her that I made my first steps into life and we’ve lived together for almost 50 years. My cells needed this air; they needed this soil and everything I have touched for the first time in my first steps on the ground. I couldn’t have felt better in another place than how I felt then and I still do and I have felt for 40 years at the National Theatre in Craiova.
I worked for 8 months at the Playhouse theatre in Nottingham, where I played Caliban in „The tempest” in 85 performances, with worldwide tours.
I spent six months in France, where I played the Marquis de Sade, in an extraordinary show, and three months in Italy. I received proposals, but I simply couldn’t go. Regardless of how spoiled I was there, I felt so alone. Now I’m playing in „Faust” at the Radu Stanca Theatre in Sibiu. We have been invited with this play at the world’s greatest theatre festival in Edinburgh, with 12 performances in 20 days. I don’t regret having stayed in Craiova, it is others who regret me not going to them.
How deep are the roots you mentioned earlier?
I am among the ones who boast about their childhood. I lived my childhood in difficult times for the Romanian people. I was born in 1940, and in 1947 I went to school in 1st grade, and at home my mother spoiled me with thousands of poems. My mother is 90 years old and she still knows over 300 poems. I played wonderfully in our poverty, as Faust says: „What fullness in this poverty! In this small cell what bliss profound!” There was a light in our poverty, the light of the word that came from mother, the joy of the game and that of the field I walked on when the first turf of grass threads appeared. I used to run for kilometers to the tallest oak trees in our field, I knew all the vineyards, where the best grapes were and the ones which ripped earlier. The winter seasons were fabulous, with lots of snow, and no Easter holiday passed without me going to celebrate the Joimari1 and gathering eggs. And I recited beautifully. When the women heard me, they prepared their handkerchiefs with eggs three houses ahead of my arrival. „Listen, it’s Violeta’s boy, he’s coming with the Joimari.” When I was ten I used to go reaping and harvesting the corn crops, and I fell asleep on leaves; and I fed myself with grass, and soil, and sun, and with flowers… They’re all gathered in my cells and they pulsate now, in all my shoes. In Caliban, I stunned all of Japan, I played in 25 shows, and they came to me and they asked me: “Where does this turmoil come from?”
My childhood is the temple in which my soul has leavened and baked.
At first there were your mother’s poems… What else made you choose theatre?
My mom had the poems; my dad had the musical instruments. He was a self-taught peasant of rare handsomeness, but he passed away very young. He had three violins in the house. Not one, but three. I play the violin too. I attended the normal school and that is why the teacher had to learn to play the violin. I still have those three violins and I hope that one of my grandchildren will get attached to them. I also have flutes, a pipe and a guitar.
Afterwards the radio appeared, and the radio theatre. I listened with great joy to “The Idol and Upside-down John”; I knew the lines from “Sunset” and “The Red Passion” by heart. I sat near the megaphone which broadcasted the play and I could see everything that happened there. I discovered the way of intoning the lines and the resonance of the performance space. And the fact that I was a teacher also mattered. Let’s not forget that everything that happens in a classroom is a theatre show.
Questions are asked, answers are given, emotions are lived and tears are shed; the caresses you place on a child’s forehead are part of the fondness of the stage. Now I’ve just moved into a bigger classroom… where I have 400 or 600 or even 17 thousand students, like I did at the Atticus Theatre under the Acropolis. As a teacher, I once had a lesson, called “The pound and the penny” at the 3rd grade, and I was assisted by an old inspector who told me “Dear, you’re fantastic, you made a show, I saw what I didn’t think would ever happen in the Romanian school.” I was a teacher in Galiceica village, in Giubega commune. I didn’t become an actor by chance. I felt that I could do this and one day, although I was already married, I told my wife: “Look, I’m going to try.” “Go!” she said, “God be with you! I’ll be a teacher here for four years and I’ll wait for you.” And so it was. There were 900 candidates on 28 positions and I came in second in Bucharest. I was assigned in Craiova. And I’ve been here ever since, for 41 years. My wife came too, right away, as a teacher. My mom used to tell me: “If you do a thing, do it with life, with feeling, with joy.”
You talk about your mother’s advice. But what happened to your father?
My father died young, he was only 38. He caught a ruthless lung illness in 1950. We couldn’t get medicines and we were poor, we didn’t have money to buy so many doses of penicillin, and in six months… He got sick in winter when he went to the forest to chop wood, he caught a cold, and in August he rose up to the stars. It was an amazing moment when he told my mother the day he came to Craiova: „My dearest” – he called her in many ways, she was young and beautiful and seven years younger than him, she was 31 – „My dearest, I’m going to Craiova tomorrow to get an x-ray; if the doctors tell me there is no way out, I’ll buy my funeral shoes.” And I went with mom to a factory where they made sunflower seed oil. In the evening we were coming home with the oil bottles and we ran into a young man: “You should go home, your husband’s back”, he told mom. “He bought new shoes.” Mom groaned like they didn’t even do in ancient theatre, an inner roaring, like a stabbed animal. She knew what she had talked to dad. Three months later dad wore the new shoes.
So mom was left alone; she raised me and my sister and she did a good job. Even now, at 90, she still recites. She has a perfect diction. My mother could teach theatre at the university…
You have played in Romanian on great stages in the world. How does the foreign public feel the Romanian language in theatre?
Let me give you an example. I was once challenged by some British actors who had told me that Romanian isn’t a theatre language, which will attract your interest through simple pronunciation. And then I recited some amazing fragments from Jonah. I capitalized the vowels and consonants the best I could, as well as low waves and sharp waves, and when I finished, one of them was kneeling before me and telling me: “You are my master!” He came to Craiova to see me in all my performances. At a press conference in Singapore, at a festival where I presented Sorescu’s „Jonah”, in a recital for the Chinese public, the editor and reporters from TV said „Now, after watching Jonah, we have the feeling that we can speak Romanian.” Of course this requires a lot of involvement from the actors and complete focus, and a great attention for pronunciation, a thing which, unfortunately, many young artists lack nowadays. There are too many theatre institutes and you have people who enunciate carelessly, terrible. And what is amazing is that more and more people start thinking: „I am as good as the good ones”…
I won’t ask you which is your dearest role. However, I will ask you, which is the role you miss the most?
I think it’s my first one, the one I debuted with. Calderon de la Barca’s Don Juan. I remember I was wearing a beautiful cloak; I was shining on the stage, I think that’s why I miss it the most… And I miss that text because the others are still in me and I don’t miss them, for they are here.
I sort of forgot that one and I miss it. I could just see myself, dark, thin hair, with a small beard glued here, and I had a beautiful relationship with the lady who played The Phantom Lady. That is the one I miss, because I miss my youth.
What do you enjoy the most?
I can have the appropriate attitude in any situation. I have this satisfaction, nothing ever scares me. Perhaps death, because it ends this turmoil… For me it’s a delight to know how to have patience. Patience is not an ordeal, on the contrary. I know that at its end there are joys every time. Patience is a sort of conscious, assumed penitence and I consider myself to be very strong. It’s strange.
Just as penitence gives monks this joy, well, it can be the same for an actor. In heatre there are millions of situations when you can go into the wide world, scream, yell, shout… Fanus Neagu says in “Lady Dracula’s Lover” that the four magic words which synthesize all the wisdom of the world and which the world’s greatest philosophers found at a king’s command were “This too shall pass.”
Is theatre still the mirror of time?
It is. Of course it is, because the carbuncle of our times is present in many plays. The bare bottom as a virtue can be found in a play. The crime, dishonesty, the eroticism beyond the limits of common sense and good taste are found on the stage.
Is there anything that you can’t do on the stage?
I can defeat gravity. I don’t think there would be a situation the director would ask of me and I would not be able to solve it, including levitating. Defeating gravity and detach myself off the ground. I haven’t tried it, but never say never.
What is theatre for you?
Theatre? It’s like a garden where you make ikebana on a higher scale. Arranging souls, feelings, sorting conflicts, happiness, disappointment, fear, earthquakes; it’s a garden where you, as an actor, try to induce delight to everything through your emotions, an artistic strength.
What do you expect?
I expect God will give me still the same joy to love my children and my mother, and to disclose to myself that which I am still able to do, to produce and to think. What are those words like? „I wait for the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” The resurrection of the body is exactly what I expect…
Is there a line that haunts your thoughts?
It’s this one, Sorescu’s. “I used to spend almost all my time thinking about my wife. Now, as days pass, my wife goes darker in my mind and my mother brightens up, just like the wells with two buckets. One goes down and the other one up. Now the only one rising is mother. The comeback. And clearly do I see her. Perhaps this very moment she thinks about her mother too. (…) I believe that there is a moment in the world’s life when all people think about their mother. Even the dead. The daughter thinks of the mother, the mother of the mother, the grandmother of the mother, until it goes to just one mother. A huge one. How quiet the world must be then! If during that moment someone yelled <Help!> I think the whole world would have heard it. If I had an empty bottle I would write a note and launch it on the sea. <Mother>, I would write, <a great misery has fallen upon me. Rebirth me! > I didn’t do quite well in the first life. Who doesn’t live their life to their heart’s content? But maybe the second time. And if not the second time, maybe the third time. Or the fourth time. Maybe the tenth time. Just don’t get scared, mother, of this, and keep rebirthing me. We always miss something in life. That’s why we have to be born again and again.”
Which is the meeting that marked your life?
The one I had with my miracle, my wife. She’s with the stars now. Last year she had a tragic accident, after 50 years of marriage. She was home alone and she wanted to close a faucet; she fell over the sink and a shard sectioned all the blood vessels on her right arm. It was a matter of minutes. Neither I nor the children were home. But now I have what almost no one my age has, 350 love letters from her to me and from me to her. From the first letter which she numbered at 14-15 years old to my last letters, towards old age. 350 letters, stacked up nicely… And now I relive everything, I have 14 pages long letters, 16 pages. I used to call her my little Bucovina, my sweet Bucovina, she came from somewhere near Cernauti. I didn’t know how to pamper her… Now I dream of her, very much, very beautiful, and she isn’t upset at all about what happened, on the contrary, she asks me to forgive her, to not be upset. She phones me in my dreams and tells me “Come pick me up from school!”. This makes me believe that the end isn’t when we close our eyes shut, but we pass into another state, a much more beautiful one.
Written by Monica Andronescu
Translated by Iulia Vieru, MTTLC, 2nd year
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