Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021
In the pretentiously Francophone Bucharest of the late nineteenth century, Ion Luca Caragiale’s plays were met with harsh criticism for their alleged sexual innuendos and outrageous immorality—what one might nowadays call subversion. Caragiale, whose reputation has now grown into that of an unparalleled classic and a quintessential influence on a host of Romanian/international avant-garde luminaries, was in fact of mixed Balkan heritages. He spent his later years as an émigré in Berlin, thus proving himself an ambivalent maverick and avant-la-lettre transnational.
Almost 150 years on, Romanian drama boastfully continues this legacy of subversiveness, diversity, and transnationalism. In that respect, the best possible illustration of such variation is the recent anthology, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly. From the very introduction, Komporaly pertinently places contemporary Romanian theatre at the crossroads of the culture’s emergence from communism thirty years ago, and situates its ever increasing representation of minorities—particularly Roma—in a global context. The very rich and nuanced landscape that Komporaly aptly charts is further complicated by the dualism of state-funded (more traditional) and independent (more avant-garde) theaters, as well as formal genre-related features—both text-based and experiment/performance-informed. The picture is then rendered even murkier by companies specializing in minority drama and/or being run by representatives of minorities striving to gain state-funded status.
While informed therefore by a knowledgeable historical and cultural perspective, the anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity by illustrating the common grounds of “burning concerns rooted in Romanian realities” and the experiments “push[ing] the boundaries of the genre.” And indeed, unconventional approaches are featured from the very opening play: a stage adaptation by Mihaela Panainte of Noble Prize winner Herta Müller’s short story collection, Lowlands (thus forging a connection to the German minority in Romania). Panainte’s staging of Müller’s fiction rivetingly captures the latter’s poetic fragmentariness through what Komporaly rightly calls textual modularity—just as the translator herself lithely renders that same combination of poetry and alert colloquialism alongside a more ponderous social grayness and a haunting sense of death’s ubiquity.
Komporaly manages, in fact, a shrewd and multilayered gradation as she moves from the Noble laureate to the most (internationally) famous playwright in the anthology, Matéi Visniec, while also following an implicit historical timeline (from the post-war Soviet occupation to Ceaușescu’s rule and into the present day). Visniec’s The Spectator Sentenced to Death is the subsequent contribution, redolent—among others—of Kafka, Pirandello, and particularly Ionesco, an iconic long-standing influence that only gets mentioned here once in a contributors’ bio, but is still implicitly present in the editor’s reference to absurdist styles or experiments in Visniec and a significant portion of contemporary Romanian drama. The internationally celebrated play sounds 100% Visniec in spite of, if not thanks to, such commonalities, following an aberrant scenario to its last logical consequences in a way that also manages to be incredibly realistic. In the narrative, the spectators of a theatrical performance are accused of . . . being spectators in a trial—in which the witnesses are none other than the theater’s usher and cloakroom attendant. The author himself is at a certain point dragged onstage gagged, with a cloth hood over his head, and accused in his turn of writing a “long waffle” that scripts everybody’s behavior . . .
Visniec’s second play featured in the anthology, The Man Who Had His Inner Evil Removed, marks an abrupt transition from allegories on totalitarianism (strewn with explicit references to Ceaușescu’s regime) to the tale of a globalized consumerist world, imprinted by cynical sensationalist journalism and political correctness towards . . . rats. Komporaly proves again to be a brilliant editor, as she selects for Visniec’s second contribution a play that presents at least two salient advantages. On the one hand, it epitomizes some of Visniec’s most outstanding stylistic trademarks: logically implacable absurdity, tantalizingly prolonged ambiguity, lyrical introspective trips, and mordant satire. On the other, the work problematizes the deep, if improbable and inapparent, similarities between totalitarianism and western democracies—particularly in terms of media culture—with regards to the methods of surveillance and manipulation at times voluntarily embraced by the citizens (e.g., the rat voices in our brains, a motif not entirely remote from another drama-originating widely used political metaphor, “rhinocerization”).
György Dragomán’s Passport, a brilliant satire of communism—in a more realist style than Visniec’s, albeit with a similarly masterful fusion of tragicomedy and horror—offers a captivating Hungarian account of rhinocerization and the way it can indelibly scar the most intimate relationships and feelings. Yet, such dramas and traumas (happening irrespective of the political order) are only voiced in full by the apex of the collection—the concluding contribution Sexodrom, from the Roma theater Giuvlipen’s collective. A powerful mix of candid confessional narratives, polemical exchanges, and, for the most part, profane Bollywood-like lyrics sang by multiple assertive female and transgender voices, the compelling sequence fearlessly exposes gender discrimination, sexual violence, and racism. The barrage of rhymes, whose stunning translation benefited from Asymptote past contributor Diana Manole’s advice, ends with a diatribe targeting the epitomes of a “history of white culture and civilization,” seen as “a history of rape and abuse.” International stars, such as the incalculably influential religious historian and fiction writer Mircea Eliade and disconsolate essayist E. M. Cioran are not spared either, the former being quoted on his legitimization of staring at a prostitute’s body, and the latter being exposed as a juvenile Nazi.
Jozefina Komporaly has done a remarkable job on the very difficult assignment she gave herself; the collection under discussion does cover an impressive range of formal approaches and political concerns, while amounting to an excellent sample of the manifold and transnational diversity of Romanian theatre’s diasporic voices and underrepresented communities. An erudite drama studies scholar, excellent translator (into British English), and polyglot (two of the contributions to the anthology were translated from the Hungarian), she is most likely the only editor and translator who could ever successfully embark on such a project.
Perhaps future instalments will feature some of the fascinating contemporary Romanian plays and theatrical productions described in the introduction as being profoundly experimental, immersive, and/or even non-text-based as well. Unlikely to shy away from this challenge, this editor has already given us a preview of such evolutions—represented in this collection by András Visky’s international or Hungarian(-Romanian) dramaturgical combinatorics of gender and political/historical abuse. It would be equally interesting to see how voices coming from, and/or speaking to, other Romania-relevant marginalized communities or loci—such as the Republic of Moldova and eastern Ukraine, or the dialectal minorities spread across the Balkans—relate (or not) to the intriguingly fecund theme of the collection: (theatrical) Romania in/as transnational contexts. Until then, the present anthology is not only a literary, cultural, and critical tour de force, but also a collection in which every single piece—every single page really—represents an exquisite instance of playwriting in splendid English translation. Bulky as can be, Plays from Romania. Dramaturgies of Subversion is indeed an irresistible, must-have page-turner.
MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu) is a poet, academic, and performer, and Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. He has released books, lectured, or performed poetry in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. His alias is the name of the intermedia cross-artform band he founded in 2001—with which he has won numerous national and international awards, including a 2006 Adelaide Festival mention from the press, the 2008 Gold Disc in Romania, and a selection for the CROWD Omnibus Tour in 2016. MARGENTO also represents an international coalition of writers, artists, and computer scientists working on the #GraphPoem project, listed as the institute performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Canada) annually since 2019.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: