Iulia Popovici (RO)
ACT Theatre: The Rise and Fall of the First Private Theatre in Romania
Officially founded in 1995, the ACT Theatre premiered its first production in September 1998: Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, directed by the well-known Mihai Măniuţiu, starring the very founder of the institution, the actor, famous in Romania, Marcel Iureş.
It was to be the first – and, in the end, almost the only – private theatre in Romania, with its very studio space, in the heart of Bucharest. In a landscape of big public theatres, with huge venues and immense stages, ACT Theatre offered to the city a whole different concept of performance: minimalist and with a small cast; based on very new texts (the German and British “brutalists” or contemporary Romanian playwrights); and, above all, a kind of performance that put the performers in the immediacy of the audience, hence “forcing” a type of acting very different to the main Romanian actors’ tradition.
For almost a decade, ACT Theatre marked the Romanian stage – and not only the independent one; ten years after its emergence, ACT Theatre decided to diversify its programming (including music, especially), it opened a tea-house and opted for a less controversial and more public-driven (and sponsor-driven) repertory. It is now quite a regular theatre among many other unconventional and public venues.
It is the intention of this paper to develop the reasons why and the impact that ACT Theatre had on the Romanian stage, the impact that finally led to its entering into the shadow.