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The Jester

after A.P. Cehov

The Jester

after A.P. Cehov

Director:
Horaţiu Mălăele
Music:
George Marcu
Decor:
Nina Brumuşilă
Costumes:
Adriana Popa

Pause: No

Tickets

120 de lei

 

Private event hosted by the National Theatre of Bucharest. The organiser is exclusively liable for the quality and content of this event!

The actors are also conquering through the mastery of their performance, keeping the audience breathless with emotion. Seldom can one feel in a show the tense silence of the hall in which the audience closely listens to the cue, but also to the burst of spontaneous standing ovation, in order to reward certain episodes. The masters of this performance are Horaţiu Mălăele and Niculae Urs. In any role performed by Horaţiu Mălăele, one cannot help but admire him. But this time, he has outdone himself. He juggled skillfully the comic emphases with the dramatic ones, passing carelessly from laughter to the sadness of the tear and conceiving his character in complexity, the actor Vasili Vasilici Svetlovidov, miserable after 40 years of career. We also discover in this show the worth of another performer, a sensational actor, Niculae Urs, in the role of Vasili’s lifelong prompter. The relationship between the two is thoroughly studied, with memorable theatrical moments. For the creations of the two, the grade ten seems too low.


The show features a general filmic aspect, the scenes being constructed from images seemingly detached from famous paintings, through the functional and exceptional stage set of Nina Brumuşilă and the costumes of Adriana Popa. The costumes, painstakingly manufactured, have many significant accessories, for instance Nikita’s mittens, Vasili’s trousers, etc. And for the stage set image noticed by the audience through its impeccable visual aspect, the grade ten seems too low.
The Jester is a soulful theatrical event for any spectator, even for the one rarely entering the theatres. He shall not be able to forget it for a long time, he shall have a jolly good time, but he shall also be impressed, looking at actors and their lives differently. An illustrated history of theatre or a history of the styles of the art of the actor, always on that imperceptible edge (which Horaţiu Mălăele knows so well how to tackle) between tragedy and its parody, between comedy and its caricature, between genius and amateur. Because this Svetlovidov is in the performance of Mălăele such a great actor, as well as mediocre. Why? Because an innate delicacy prevents him from being self-assured and forces him to laugh at himself. He is the jester, the true actor, and his swan song is an air of the jester. But also an acting lesson because the Prompter, impersonated by Niculae Urs (whom Horaţiu Mălăele has attracted into a creative adventure of great coherence, in a picturesque, miserable and heartening representation of the difference between artist and layman), who knows by heart countless roles, warmed up by vodka and also attempting to perform. There are numerous theatre theories converging, excluding and completing each other in this instantaneous passage of Mălăele through the grand roles of universal theatre. Wonderful each, wonderful as partners one for another, Horaţiu Mălăele – in a lesser known hypostasis of artistic vulnerability - and Niculae Urs – performing a role of extreme delicacy and sensitivity – the Actor and the Prompter, Svetlovidov and Nikita Ivanîci look back either with anger, or with pride, or with melancholy.... little scenes are performed, theatrical gems, prompts are exchanged, lights, poetic and stylistic registers, people gossip, drink, sigh. Fragments, little scenes, passages through famous monologues. From performed roles or roles only dreamt of, desired. Special moments, directed and performed with the means of sensitivity, edifice on which, actually, the entire show is built. Between Shakespeare and Chekhov, between Lopahin and Lear, a route on which the jester in him does not leave Svetlovidov. At no time is the strange mixture from the start dissolved, between end of world and the beginning of another, of honest and total confession, where one can look inside, deep, into the smallest corner. Irony, self-irony, jokes, play, laughter mingled with tears, annoyance, artistic gestures, drunkard gestures, nostalgia, the devastating feeling of futility as artist and man, the illusion that without Svetlovidovi, the theatre is dying. It vanishes. An illusion however, without which the actor cannot climb on stage.

 

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu  

Vasili Vasilici Svetlovidov: Horaţiu Mălăele Nikita Ivanici: Nicolae Urs
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