27-28 November, 7 pm
Merlin Theatre, Budapest
mady-baby.edu (Teatrul Mic, Bukarest)
with: Mădălina Ghiţescu, Răzvan Oprea, Rolando Matsangos
Scenography: Alina Herescu
Multimedia projections: Maria Drăghici, Tudor Petre
Movement: Carmen Coţofană
Written and Directed by: Gianina Cărbunariu
Duration: 2 hours (no interval)
Synopsis
The three characters, Madalina, Voicu and Bogdan are three young Romanians who decide to emigrate in Ireland and to try to survive in a country where their dreams seem to be easier to come true. Each of them has different levels of education and social background: Madalina is the youngest, she is 14 years old and she wants to become a “pop star”, Voicu is 25 and trying to make a living from different “business” and Bogdan is 23 and he is going to Ireland for a master in Visual Arts.
Bogdan and Mady meet each other for the first time in the plane that brings them from Bucharest to Dublin.
After two months since they arrived in Dublin, they meet again by accident, in a bizzare situation: she is a prostitute and he is the client. Bogdan is desperately looking for a subject for a movie he has to do as an exam and he convinces her to help him. The exam is really important for him, because it would be the first step in his attempts to find a job in Ireland. Voicu finds out about this and he would come with a proposition for Bogdan: to work together, the three of them, for a porno site. In exchange, Bogdan will be able to use some of the materials they shoot and to finish the movie for his exam.
The three of them start a living together, in fact, they re-create in Dublin a Romanian world, violent and tender. For a time, they seem to be good together, even if the nightmares from the childhood appear from time to time. And also the fear for the future in a foreign country. The atmosphere becomes more and more tensioned when Bogdan starts to escape from this “family” and build a future on his own.
The moment he finds a job in advertising, he will announce Madalina and Voicu that he won’t work and stay with them anymore. But the two of them will remind him he has done some promises and he should keep them. Madalina has a surprise for him - she got pregnant and she plans a great future for both of them: they would leave Voicu, they will move together, get married, have the kid and get the Irish citizenship. By the other hand, Voicu wants to keep Bogdan working for him. To this conflict, Voicu adds a new information: there is a new law in Ireland that says the new born kids don’t receive the Irish citizenship. The two men find an extreme solution for this extreme situation.
In the end, the two guys will live together in the new flat rented by Bogdan. Everything seems to be solved now: Bogdan didn’t become an artist, but he got a good job in advertising, Voicu has all the comfort he dreamt about. But the secret that keeps them together make the atmosphere more and more tensioned.
SHORT HISTORY - Teatrul Mic
In 1914, a new theatre had been born in Bucharest. This is named after the actress Maria Filotti and is situated in Sarindar Street. After the Second World War, the theatre became a state-funded institution and it is called, “Constantin Nottara” Film Actor’s Studio and afterwards Theatre for Youth and Children. In 1964, the theatre got its current name and become a member of the Little Theatres in Europe. Meanwhile, the name of the street has changed from Sarindar to Constantin Mille, but the actual venue, the same from 1914, became, due to its high-level artistic tradition, a favorite place for the Bucharest audience.
The theatre’s strengthen reputation is due to its artistic triumphs. Over the years, the repertoire included various plays from the universal to national dramaturgy, from the classics to moderns, from the great tragedies to the most successful comedies.
The Little Theatre is proud to be one of the most blessed scenes that launched great directors, with brilliant international careers, like: Liviu Ciulei, who debuted here; Radu Penciulescu, Crin Teodorescu, Catalina Buzoianu and Silviu Purcarete. All of them have worked on Little Theatre’s stage for years.
Many of Little Theatre’s celebrated successes – Richard II by William Shakespeare, Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson, The Tango by Slawomir Mrozeck, The Mad Woman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux, To Clothe the Nacked by Luigi Pirandello, The Master and Margarita by Mihail Bulgakov, Princess Ivona by Witold Gombrowicz and Richard III by William Shakespeare – were rewarded with national and international prizes.
The ’70s and ’90s brought new names in the national artistic directing that became long-established talents who went along the younger generation. The present repertoire challenges the masterpieces of the national and international dramaturgy (Don Juan by Moliere, La Piazzetta by Carlo Goldoni, A Lost Letter by I.L. Caragiale, The Maids by Jean Genet, As the mulberry tree leaf by D.R. Popescu) and tries to reinterpret them from a personal point of view. The passion of finding and using new theatrical language, based on diversity and expressivity; the never-ending process of actors’ perfection give the premises to a innovative “mise-en-scene” that might reborn new artistic personalities in a complex, valuable theatrical context.
Nowadays, the theatre functions as a public, state-funded institution, subsidized by the Bucharest City Hall and it has two halls situated in the capital’s centre: Little Theatre (301 seats) and Small Theatre (90 seats). The main stage is dedicated to the classical productions, which shows the greatest Romanian actors and directors; whereas the second stage’s repertoire is based on the contemporary plays and young creators’ theatre experiments. To sum up, the average number of productions varies between five and eight per theatrical season.
Remarks of the author
mady-baby.edu is the first version of the play developed during the Residency for International Playwrights at Royal Court Theatre in London 2004.
The actors and the choreographer that worked for the performance staged at Teatrul Foarte Mic in Bucharest are some of the people I’m constantly working with from the period of my studies in the University of Theatre from Bucharest. In the Romanian theatrical system it seems that there is a necessity to develop your own professional team. The director has no chance to survive by himself in his fight for defining a personal esthetic. You can change things only with people who believe in this change, who share the same ideas. The accent is on the themes we chose to develop, on different perspectives over conflicts in the Romanian society. As a director I’m trying to find the subjects that are provoking me, the team I’m working with and the audience. The performance is created in the same time with the scenario and the final draft was ready one week before the opening night.
For mady-baby.edu, two other artists were invited in the team, a visual artist and a multimedia artist. Both of them brought a different experience, very important for the way we decided to express the levels of the story, the esthetics of the entire performance. There are in the performance, apart from the original video pieces, three quotations from a Disney cartoon, “Gay Paris”. Their presence has a motivation that it’s very clear for the Romanian audience, but may be obscure for somebody else: during the communist times, the kids would have the right to see ten minutes of cartoons per week, and from ten minutes, the promo would be the same each time and it would last for 2 minutes (a cat hunting a mouse who knows that will be caught so he prepares himself to die very calmly, even with joy). Some times, scenes from the original scenario were replaced by video works, not in the sense of showing the scenes as a movie, but in the sense of expressing a content in a different language that re-creates the reality in a significant way. Theatre is not literature, but telling a story in movement, so the actors, the minimal stage design, the video work and the music are building the realist and poetical level of the story.
mady-baby.edu develops the “Romania theme” that was also present in the performance Stop the Tempo, where three young people discover their inner disagreement with a world that is moving too fast and they don’t understand its mechanism. The decision to “disconnect” Romania was a way to say that they don’t find their place in a world built by the generation of their parents. In mady-baby.edu, other three young guys decide to leave Romania and never come back. Their decision is also radical, even if the motivation is different for each one of them. Bogdan, Mădălina and Voicu are going to Dublin with different dreams - just the nightmares they hope to leave behind are the same.
The scenario of the performance develops in situations and characters conflicts that are specific to the Romanian context: the gap of communication between the intellectuals and the ordinary people, the lack of models, the political discourse that use the “national symbols” in a twisted way, the indifference regarding the young generation.
No matter how difficult is to build yourself an identity abroad, it seems a better option than struggling for your life at home. But what is it behind this myth of a “better life” and how far can you go in your fight for surviving?
The three characters with different levels of education and social background meet accidentally in Dublin and start to live together for a while, each of them connected on his own interest in the business, but also by the need to be together with someone who shares the same rage and nostalgia for the country and the past left behind, the fear for the future as immigrants in a foreign country. The conflict appears when one of them tries to escape from the small “family” and build an identity on his own. Nobody is innocent in this struggle, each of them trying to use the vulnerability of the other two in order to survive. Those two who will stay together in the end and get the Irish citizenship and the benefits of the civilized world will get connected through a strong and horrible compromise. The atmosphere in the new couple is a peaceful one, but it announces the violence that can burst at any moment.