Exclusive INTERVIEW Silviu Purcărete, director: “In communism, a kind of self-censorship worked: you tried to find a compromise by which you could say what you wanted”

Hidden behind the well-interpreted lines and carefully crafted props, the messages of the theater performances often went unnoticed by the communists – but not all were willing to compromise, and for that they paid a heavy price.

Silviu Purcărete must be written in a whisper. In the 50 years since he has been a director and acting (he graduated from the Directing section of the IATC in 1974), it seems that he has covered the entire world map – layer by layer, every show, regardless of the edge of the world where he was applauded, it enveloped country after country. From England to Russia, from Portugal to Japan, and everything in between, he enjoyed his creations, becoming part of his show: piece by piece, the world became a stage, and Purcărete, an Atlas. Like Pygmalion or Geppetto, Purcărete created plays from imaginary realities and brought them to life through performances that make you honored to be contemporary with them.

In October, Silviu Purcărete (74 years old) returned for a week to Craiova, where the National celebrated his 50 years of activity. There were seven full days: newer performances (such as “The Bitter Lexicon”, which premiered this summer at the “Odeon” Theater in Bucharest) and older ones (such as “The Tale of the One-Eyed Princess”, which premiered in Sibiu in 2018 ), screening of the film “Somewhere at Palilula”, meetings with personalities from the cultural world with whom the celebrant worked, making-of documentaries, debates. And also then, the great director spoke to “Weekend Adevărul” about the choices: from the one of the faculty to the one of not doubting the ephemeral trends of society. Purcărete also said that everyday problems cannot be solved through theater, but that the performances should “warm up the blood in the brain and in the heart a little”.

“Weekend Adevărul”: Since we are on the anniversary watch, I would like to go back a little to the beginning. When and why did you decide to follow the path of Directing?

Silviu Purcărete: It was a teenage decision. I was a student at a fine arts high school and like any young person you think about what you want to do next. Most of my colleagues went to all kinds of artistic fields – they wanted to become architects, plastic artists, many went to the theater.

Why did you choose the theater and not the big screen?

Now, even actors can become directors if given the chance. In principle, there is no prohibition to practice in both fields. In my time, this was even a habit: Lucian Pintilie was, initially, a theater director, Liviu Ciulei was at the beginning in the theater, and they had absolutely remarkable results in cinematography. During the period when I was a student, i.e. the end of the 60s – the beginning of the 70s, there was a great flourishing of theater and directing in Romania. There was an extremely important pleiad of directors more in theater than in film. So, of course, I found the theater more interesting.

So we could say it was a fad and you followed the trend…

Not necessarily, but art cinema was more difficult and there were more hurdles you had to go through to get something done. Theater was a richer artistic field. I could say that, on the contrary, it was fashionable to make films – I guess, to get to Hollywood, that was the ultimate dream.

The compromise of telling things by name

You mentioned caudine forks in the artistic field. In the 50 years of your career, you caught two currents, two templates in which art had to align more or less: communist censorship and what is now, coming from across the Ocean, known as political correctness. To what extent did you have to deal with communist censorship?

Communist censorship was well established—not just censorship itself, but life itself. A totalitarian society is regulated in such a way that the limits of freedom are almost nil, they are difficult to cross. So there were all kinds of forms of avoidance, of circumvention. First, a kind of self-censorship was operating. You didn’t wait to fight a commission, to fight a battle that was lost from the start. You were trying to find a way, a compromise through which you could also say something of what you wanted. Few artists were extremely aggressive and who fought face-to-face, harshly, with censorship, but who, in general, lost – either they disappeared or the luckiest ones went abroad, like Lucian Pintilie. One of the great political-cultural moments was linked to a show of his, in the years ’72-’73: “The Reviewer”, by Gogol. It was an artistically exceptional show that was banned after three performances. Following this ban, Liviu Ciulei, then the director of the “Bulandra” Theatre, was dismissed, and Lucian Pintilie was forbidden to work in Romania, for which he went to France. That moment, everything that happened in the theater world, but with echoes in other cultural fields as well, was the beginning of a very dark period. The theater was in a way more protected because it interested quite a few people. A film could be seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers. First of all, he was immediately seen by Ceaușescu and his wife, to express his opinion, but they did not go to the theater. At the theater there was a group of people seeing a show, so it was less controlled.

Even so, less controlled, you still had this self-censorship…

Of course, because otherwise you couldn’t do anything. It was a certain way of working, with secret, symbolic languages, you tried to express things not in a direct way.

With a dash of overzealousness

And now there is this current of political correctness, which people in the artistic world have to check off.

This current is more of a fashion, an impulse. For hundreds of years, all younger generations have at one point or another had a ‘left’ side. Of course, it starts from premises that are as correct and true as possible, from the observation of many injustices, many injustices, many distortions of the world, and the decision to resolve these issues in two or three weeks immediately appears. It was the same with the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Now, this fashion is already on the duke and it is already in the field where it works rather caricaturally. It will give rise to a lot of comedy. It’s not something that really matters.

So you were never afraid that someone would revolt and say that with your shows you were hurting a certain minority group, for example?

Nor do I doubt that there might be such a thing, which would be particularly amusing. I have encountered many situations like this, and not in Romania, but in more civilized places. Things started much longer in this direction, and not in America, but in Canada. 30 years ago I was there, even with a performance of the theater in Craiova, and then the problem of “black face” appeared. I had a character who was a Moor and who had a black mask, because that’s what the Moor was. We went innocently with the show there. It was a huge scandal and they said they would stop the show if they couldn’t find a solution. And I found: I made a blue mask – yellow was not good because it was the yellow race, red was not good. You can see how much we enjoyed this story. They were very satisfied and happy that they had righted a great injustice, a wrong ideological direction.

Now, to prevent such situations, do you think twice about a particular symbol, a replica?

No, nevermind, that’s not the case. It doesn’t work here, maybe in America, in England, but it’s already on the downward slope. The wave reached us late. In the West it reached extreme abuses and heights of ridicule that they themselves began to notice. Some of them feel the need for conflict and therefore exaggerate. Anyway, this problem doesn’t matter, and with us the late tide, the tsunami has broken, they are the last ones left – the dirtiest and most ridiculous, it’s true.

“It would be good for the theater to warm the blood a little”

Caragiale said that “I write about this reality because I don’t know another”. You do not stage this reality, the present, but other realities, some past, and give them a magical aura. What role does history play in your shows, given that many shows today deal with current issues?

I consider several old texts, not to say classics. And the current issues brought into the shows represent a current, a natural tendency to refer strictly to direct social issues that need to be discussed. These things have never interested me. I don’t think I have the means or the faith to solve them through theater. I’ve always been interested in classical literature, the ancient worlds – and through that interest, I create a certain distance through which you can reflect and find truths that are valid in today’s worlds. I’m not interested in the day-to-day aspect of immediate life because I don’t know how. My reality is completely different. I believe that we live now, in a way, as we lived 2,000 years ago. I’m interested in those things in humanity today that would have been interesting 2,000 years ago, and not issues related to the level of pensions, the relations between bosses and subordinates or the family crises generated by the departure of adults abroad. Even in Homer’s time there were the same problems: when they went to Troy for ten years, tragedies happened behind them. So you can discover things that were valid for man back then, but that still apply today.

What would you like the viewer to be left with after leaving the theater? Want to generate questions or answers?

That’s his problem. The answers are difficult to generate, the answers are given by everyone, alone. It is more interesting to create questions, to create creative anxieties, emotions. And for the theater it would be good to do that, to warm the blood in the brain and in the heart a little.

The danger of being eternal

What were the challenges of the young director and what are those of the old director?

I don’t know how much it was related to age, but it was definitely related to social status, which you can’t have when you’re young and have fewer doors open to you. Otherwise, I managed to work in important theaters, I was lucky to find the right people to work with quite quickly. And now, there are only the challenges of senescence and more and more time is compressed and becomes the most precious matter.

Where do you place “Faust” in your half-century career?

It’s one of the shows that I love, but I don’t think it’s the most important, the most artistically successful. But “Faust” became a phenomenon that I did not expect, I did not think that it would have this extreme and dangerous longevity – it is already 17 years old. I don’t know how long it can last and how logical it is. I don’t know how good it is for a theater show to live so long. However, it is related to the time in which it is created. The Russians had this ambition to hold the more successful shows for decades. Like at the opera: there are old mounts that are being restored.

At first you saw Ștefan Iordache and Gheorghe Dinića as protagonists, is that right? How did you end up playing Ofelia Popii, who plays an extraordinary role?

Yes, that’s what I originally wanted, but it wasn’t possible. And I knew Ofelia Popii, she is an actress that I clearly knew had exceptional qualities. It was a risk, a gamble, but it was a long-term gain.