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Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 2007

Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory is a valuable contribution to the growing canon of work on non-Anglo-American Shakespeare productions. This study of Shakespeare’s “Romanian configuration” adds an important piece to the picture of Shakespeare performance and reception in Eastern Europe, past and present. The book is rich in details about productions of the plays, especially those from the late seventies onward, and rewards the reader with a fascinating description of the ways political agendas work within a nation’s cultural identity.

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu, Associate Professor of English at the University Ovidius Constanta, is a native Romanian who writes with first-hand knowledge of the politics and theater performances at the book’s core. Not only has she seen many of the productions discussed, but she is also skilled at reading between the lines of decades of censor-circumscribed reviews. Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory is organized around the plays’ genres: history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. Chapters 1 and 2 provide an overview of “global Shakespeare” and a brief history of Romanian translations of the works. Chapter 3 focuses on the history plays, especially productions of Richard II and Richard III in the 1960s and the Henriad in the 1970s. Chapter 4, “Romanian Metamorphoses: Comedies,” further illustrates a range of production styles and political readers over the last five decades. Chapter 5 discusses “Shakespeare, Communism, and After: Tragedies,” while Chapter 6 examines the production history of a single tragedy, Hamlet, the most frequently produced Shakespeare play. Finally, chapter 7 addresses the romances with an emphasis on recent productions.

Shakespeare’s works have been a traditional part of Eastern European theater since the early nineteenth century. The pattern in Romania described by Matei-Chesnoiu is both typical and yet unique to her own country. To start, she is faced with a history of shifting borders and changing names for “the area of Southeastern Europe where Romania lies”; Eastern Europe and Romania “are not necessarily geographic places but, instead, are sites or areas set aside for some precise purpose, and more specifically sites of European cultural memory conserved for the study of Shakespeare.” However, her “site” focuses on the three provinces of Wallachia, Moldova, and Transylvania, now part of unified Romania, a country more than twice the size of Hungry and with double the population. Although many of the performances discusses were presented at Bucharest theaters, smaller regional theaters also play an important role in this cultural history.

According to Matei-Chesnoiu, in nineteenth-century Romania Shakespeare was seen foremost as a way for the area to link itself culturally with the more dominant European nations. Accessing Shakespeare’s “cultural authority,” especially during the revolutionary year 1848, was to be a means of “facilitating the country’s exit from the status of a marginalized Balkan elsewhere”—a status the area had had even in Shakespeare’s time—and was to help integrate the country and its people into “the European family of nations.” Shakespeare, seen originally as a prototype of British culture, became an important factor in the “shaping of a national theatrical selfhood” that was “intimately related” to the reception of Shakespeare by other European nations. Like those nations, Romania began to absorb Shakespeare into its own culture through “appropriation, assimilation, and transformation” of his language in translation. The most popular plays for translation and for performances in the 1800s were the four major tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The approach was tradition and “addressed the [plays’] complex philosophical issues … in a particularly orthodox mode.”

However, as Matei-Chesnoiu charts in her first chapter, “Mapping Shakespeare’s Globe in a Global World” the main result was that Shakespeare, “initially appropriated and gradually localized in Romanian theatre,” became internalized. By the twentieth century, Shakespeare in Romania would become a “paradigm of cultural evolution and the theatrical maturity of the nation.”

The “early hard Communist period (1945-1960)” saw the occupying Russian powers using Shakespeare as a way of “elevating their own accreditation.” In the decades of Communist rule between 1970 and 1990, however, Shakespeare was “transparently put to ideological uses,” but this time it was by Romanian directors at regional and central theatres increasingly committed to undermining the regime. Tragedies, histories, and comedies all offered commentaries on power and leadership, and became sites of subversion. Matei-Chesnoiu suggests that these two decades of Shakespeare productions helped induce the “psychological mood that led to the 1989 political displacement of autocracy” and the removal of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

With the end of the Communist regime in 1990 Romanian directors reexamined and revised their approaches to Shakespeare’s plays. “In an intensifying self-reflexive enthusiasm, directors paraphrased previous theatrical styles…and devised their own translations and adaptations of the plays.” Currently emphasis is placed on the physical elements of the production rather than the verbal. Many of the most recent productions have been what Matei-Chesnoiu terms “Shaksploitation” for theatrical purposes, where the works are used primarily as a “touchstone of histrionic activity.”

Not surprisingly, the single Shakespeare play that best illustrates these decades of changes is Hamlet. Chapter 3, “Staging Revenge and Power: Masks of Romanian Hamlets,” charts the play’s performance history in Romania, starting with its canonical role in the nineteenth century and its political transformations in the twentieth. Most significantly, during the 1970s and 1980s it was used as a “masked political attempt” to undermine the totalitarian domination. But, in the nineties it “became once more a theatrical passport through which a smaller culture intended to bring its tribute to the larger world cultural heritage.” As in the nineteenth century Romanian Theater turned to Shakespeare as a way out of cultural marginalization, but with a major difference: Shakespeare in Romania had become Romanian Shakespeare with its own unique, deeply absorbed culture memory. Directors were not trying to prove that Romanian, like to her Europeans, could perform Shakespeare; instead they were demonstrating at home and at international theatre festivals what a performance of Romanian Shakespeare could encompass.

Shakespeare. The productions of comedies discussed in chapter 4 again are organized by the political patterns that marked subsequent decades. In the Stalinist 1950s the few Shakespeare plays produced in Romanian theatres were mainly in Bucharest and were light, romantic comedies done in an attempt to “avoid political readings from the Communist censorship.” In the sixties productions of comedies increased and “the common key of enacting festive fantasies” helped compensate for the grim post-Stalinist years. However, some directors, like the then young Liviu Ciulei, were beginning to explore the comedies’ “darker edges.” His production of the frequently-performed As You Like It seemed festive, had sets and costumes that were extravagant and accurate Elizabethan designs, but on stage there were also harlequins and a grotesquely masked “audience,” which undercut the “cheerful ambiance of light comedy.” Twelfth Night,, sometimes translated as King’s Night, also received a wide range of productions in different cities, including Iasi and Bacau. The play spirit of early Communist energy” as Crin Teodorescu’s production in Iasi did. It could also allow for a thoughtful, even meditative attitude” as Vlad Mugur’s production in Bacau did with its reminder of “the chill of everyday reality.”

In the 1970s and 1980s there were major changes in acting styles, stage sets, and costumes that often were part of subtle political sabotage. There were also fewer comedies. However, As You Like It remained a popular favorite, but, here again, the styles were widely different for each production, many of them suggesting subversive readings. Much darker, more dismal and threatening were the rarer, but significant presentations of Measure for Measure, a play seen as particularly useful as a way to speak about dictatorship. For example, Mihai Lungeanu’s 1982 production, in the small town of Pitesti, presented a corrupt Duke who could “easily be identified with the Communist president Ceausescu.”

In her final chapter Matei-Chesnoiu uses productions of the romance plays to further illustrate the continuing role of Shakespeare in Romanian theater. These were among the last of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated into Romanian, appearing first in the 1940s. Pericles was not available in translation until the publication of a scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works in nine volumes between 1988 and 1995. The Tempest had, of course, lent itself to the veiled political protests of the 1980s and is a good example of what had become the prevalent use of Shakespeare. Discussing noted director Liviu Ciule’s prize-winning production at the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest in 1979 and its revival in 1983, Matei-Chesnoiu explains the subversive power of this production. It “sustained the message of Renaissance appreciation of reason, civility, and urbane re3genration” during the “Ceausescu regime, where the laws of reason had no connection with everyday life, and where fear, treachery, and aggressiveness were the prevalent psychological modes.”

In Ciulei’s production Prospero’s fictitious island was the refuge for “deviant members of humanity.” Intellectuals could feel like Ariel “caught in the pine clove of Marxist ideology”; Miranda wondered at a brave new world because she had not yet seen its ugliness; Caliban “looked like the upstart Communist Party leader…limited in his obtuse aggressiveness…pursuing h is selfish ends”; and Prospero “was pathetic in his tolerant approach toward the faults of his fellow beings.” The moral insecurities of individuals during those times were captured in the play. “This production had a clear, mundane message, with political reverberations addresses to this contemptible end of the Communist period.”

Today, fifteen years later, Matei-Chesnoiu is still excited by the sensitive and innovative productions of Shakespeare. Romanian directors, freed from working in and often against a dictatorial regime, now use the plays to deal with a different set of anxieties. For instance, in the 1995 “radically innovative” production of Pericles at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest which “admitted no boundaries to the geographic and ethical space on stage,” director Alexandru Hausvater “played on the intervention of the everyday irrational situations in the workings of individual destiny” in a “multifaceted cosmic scenario.” Here Gower was a tyrannical commander who “ordered actions and emotions according to his own hallucinatory games of evil.” Actors and audience were forced to obey his whims. Audience members were further destabilized by a bombardment of gratingly intense noise. Matei-Chesnoiu feels that the director’s deliberate attempts to distance the audience were counter productive and his innovations amounted to too many liberties. She gives another example of the trend toward audience alienation, a 1997 multi-language production of The Tempest at the National Theater Bucharest with gender-blind casting, and the shipwrecked politicians dressed in modern suits. Matei-Chesnoiu writes that director Karin Beier’s concept of the new Europe dominated the production and overpowered Shakespeare’s play. Although she is concerned that Shakespeare’s plays are being drowned by such heavily conceptual productions, her point remains that these productions are part of a continuing Romanian dialogue with Shakespeare. That discourse includes numerous Shakespeare productions annually, as well as hosting international Shakespeare conferences, and an international Shakespeare Festival every two years.

One always wishes for more illustrations, but here the five black and white pictures are carefully chosen to give a sense of the range of productions: two Richard IIIs (1964 and 1976), two Twelfth Nights (1984 and 1991) and a Hamlet (2001). My only other wish is that the book had an annotated list of theaters and directors.

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu describes her Romania as a “liminal space at the cultural margin of Europe,” but her book places Romanian Shakespeare in the world of global Shakespeare. The story she tells follows the trajectory of Shakespeare in Eastern Europe. Her perspective as someone who lived through some of the most significant changes gives added weight to this carefully researched and beautifully written book.

Patricia Lennox, The Shakespeare Newsletter

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