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Director Radu Afrim offers the audience a "Rehearsal for a Better World"
The "I.L. Caragiale" National Theatre from Bucharest announces the premiere of Rehearsal for a Better World, a dramatization by Mihai Radu and Ionuț Sociu based on the novel of the same name by Mihai Radu, on March 18 and 19, 2023, at 7.30 pm, at the "Ion Caramitru" Hall.
Constantly in the public eye, director Radu Afrim returns in the stages of NTB with a new challenge, this time opting for a dramatization of a novel that has aroused a wave of interest immediately after its publication in 2022, Mihai Radu's novel entitled "Rehearsal for a Better World".
Attracted by the apparently non-dramatic literature, in which he sees "a huge scenic potential", Radu Afrim reconfirms this option and explains: "Certainly, I adopt the atmosphere of the prose/poems that I move into theatre. The spectators often discover it first in my performances, then they run to the book. It's a possible path. (...) I'm very interested in the writing. I feel its vibe." (Quoted from an interview by Ana Maria Sandu and Marius Chivu, Dilema Veche, no. 985/2023)
A well-known satire journalist (his collaborations with the weekly newspaper "Cațavencii" and the TV show "Starea nației" are well known), Mihai Radu is also in his novels the same sarcasm and lucidity professional we find in his press articles. His latest novel, Rehearsal for a Better World, published by Polirom in July 2022, is the novel of a crisis. A generalized crisis, "a Matryoshka of crises", as the author declared in an interview, which are felt on a moral, political, ecological and civilizational level. A story about an ordinary Romanian family, set in today's Bucharest, but so defining for the entire Western civilization of the moment. The novel offers playful, but also dense and psychological material for "a show about many separations: the separation between spouses and lovers, between parents and children, between one generation and another, the separation from the past, from hopes, and, why not, the separation even from the future." All this with an overdose of contemporary humor.
A story about each of us, which Radu Afrim brings to the stage in his own style, always surprising, reeking of "problems of the soul in its journey through the visible world". In his new show Radu Afrim focuses on life as seen by the young author Mihai Radu as a playground"... where there is death, sexuality, the nostalgia of adolescence and youth, hopes... in a play that is sometimes candid and naive, sometimes cruel and frightening".
"Sitting at the table with Radu Afrim and the actors, each of us grabbing dialogues, descriptions, monologues from the novel... trying them on as if trying on clothes in a boutique, I lived this fantastic experience: to see how your words turn into gestures, looks, laughter, tears. You feel like a god, but a god that pisses himself in fear: "F..k, what if the world doesn't turn out the way I want it to?", says Mihai Radu about the birth of this show that you will be able to see on the NTB's Ion Caramitru Hall stage.
We invite you to follow the tnb.ro website in order to purchase your tickets for the following performances, scheduled to take place in the "Ion Caramitru" Hall of NTB, on April 8, 12 and 21, 2023, at 7.30 pm.
Tickets can be purchased at the NTB Box Office and online at tnb.ro.
Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu
