"Alexandra Badea's performance "Exile" on the stage of the "Ion Caramitru" Hall of the National Theatre from Bucharest is a disturbing encounter with ourselves. With the Romanian in each one of us, fled from the factory sooner or later to promises from somewhere nearby or far away that we have made or that have been made to us. For several generations, deftly tied up in the spider's web that history has woven around them, in which another family has been caught, this time without the right of appeal, in plain sight. Lest it should escape before the broom of everyday life manages to gather it up on the jaws of oblivion from the less-walked nooks and crannies where it has tried to hide from the others, or has just deliberately taken shelter from the ravages of its own guilt before its passport to nowhere is printed."

Luciana Antofi, Blog - The Silent Escape from ourselves: "Exile" on the Main Stage of the National Theatre   

"Necessary and intentionally dramatic, the debate in Alexandra Badea's performance nevertheless succeeds in provoking, contradicting and leaving behind many questions, drawing the audience into an interactive game from the very beginning of the performance.

And if Exile ultimately leaves a deep trail of emotion in our souls, it is because the director has gathered around her an admirable team of actors who face the difficult task of playing characters with elliptical biographies and scattered lines in a cinematic mode, becoming convincing and imposing silhouettes to remember.

On the huge, almost deserted stage of the National Theatre, Alexandra Badea's performance Exile lives in a space designed by Cosmin Florea to suggest something of the fragmentary nature of the lives evoked and of today's society. A world lacking the coherence of a message for the present and even less for the future, with its back to the past that remains a crushing mystery, where no one looks for possible lines of continuity."

Doina Papp, Revista 22 - Exile, psychoanalytical reconstructions   

"The show Exile is a painful mirror, which gives some of the audience the emotion of meeting themselves, through the connections made with the characters' problems. But it can also perhaps produce discomfort, because it indicts the falsehood, the hypocrisy that has become second nature to some - in the name of survival. Saying what others want to hear, not stirring the pot, maintaining "peace and quiet" at all costs, even when it costs you, when it makes you die inside, burying what is most authentic in your spirit - these are choices that the show explicitly criticizes.

We define ourselves by contradicting others, we build ourselves by the risks we take, by the small (or, in the case of some, big) acts of courage we take, without which we are nothing, without which we can end up "walking past our own life", like one of the characters in Exile.

What hurts the most in these life stories is precisely this unfulfilled potential, to see people who could have been happy, fulfilled, leading a real life, but who instead experienced more emptiness, the absence of loved ones, disabilities and emotional blockages, unfulfillment and unhappiness. This whole reservoir of human loss is painful. For anyone who has ever wondered why people look so different on the street in Romania than in Western countries, for example, therein lies at least part of the answer."

Cristina Modreanu, Scena.ro - Exile at NTB: the story the Romanian society seen through three generations   

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu