The other Caragiale at the "Ion Luca Caragiale" National Theatre.

Belonging to the most important dynasty of Romanian literary history, Mateiu, the illegitimate son of Ion Luca Caragiale, is the author of a unique novel in Romanian literature, whose appearance provoked and still provokes great passions today. A survey carried out at the end of the last century by the magazine Observator Cultural placed the novel Gallants of the Old Court in first place in the top of today's critics' favorites.

A strange and unique piece of writing, on the borderline between lyrical and narrative prose, unclassifiable in any literary genre, which has been labelled in turn as a gothic novel, a baroque novel, decadent, aestheticizing, "the least earthly of our epic works" (Perpessicius), Gallants of the Old Court has given rise, since its publication, to an uninterrupted cult among thos supporting Mateiu Caragiale, the most passionate of whom knew the entire text by heart.

The novel portrays the twilight nobility of Bucharest, as Șerban Cioculescu put it, a decadent world of aristocrats and scum, of scholars and louts. The characters belong to the depraved bohemian world, with customs borrowed from the Phanariots, and are paradoxical in their behavior, because extreme vices are combined with the refinement of a world "turned upside down". No wonder that in this corrupt environment of dark and mysterious slums, the fate of the characters is lightning-fast, as they disappear "under the seal of secrecy" as quickly as they appeared.

The cult of Mateiu and the Gallants..., far from being only a pleasure of literature lovers and literary critics at the end of the last century, remain constants of 21st century postmodernity.

In his first collaboration with the "I.L. Caragiale" National Theatre, director Dragoș Galgoțiu does not propose a performance in the name of the father (Ion Luca), but of the son (Mateiu), whose baroque, sophisticated aesthetic, full of hidden secrets and mysteries, attracts him.

Author of the dramatic scenario, Galgoțiu stages not only an illustration of the text, but a descent into the artificial paradises of dreams, history and memory, but also one into the undergrounds of Bucharest, with their night customs of the early 20th century. The set (Dragoș Galgoțiu) and costumes (Lia Manțoc) are conceived as a meditation on the passage of time, evoking a bygone world, a mixture of splendor and decay.

A performance like a story within a story, as Galgoțiu's Gallants recall histories, and their distorted memories give birth to other subjective histories, memory being both an act of imagination and an opportunity to reinvent.  A performance that, like the novel, brings to the stage "the life that is dreamed" and "the life that is lived", a strange mixture of spirituality and materiality that gives a special charm to Bucharest at the crossroads of East and West.

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu 

Photo Florin Ghioca