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

Horaţiu Mălăele’s art has no boundaries: self-conquest, introspection, the lesson of Balkan spirituality, all melt in the troubling melting pot bearing the mark of the Romanian soul and dream.

Horaţiu Mălăele has the calling of the dream, he builds an intense world, challenging and exciting.

One cannot help loving Mălăele when his metamorphoses on stage communicate simple truths. The show „The Cafe”, adaptation of the play „Wally’s Cafe” by Sam Bobrik & Ron Clark, captures the story of an American family in three temporal sequences: a complex of states, attitudes and mentalities, but also an open fissure of the soul.

The show starts on a duplicitous note, within the boundaries of a lyrical cynicism; the actor and his masks detach themselves from the classical convention out of the desire to transform the dramatic message into an accessible story, about „a bleeding slice of life”.

The comedic ebullition in which the boundary between laughter and crying glides, the dramaticism and delicacy of human hypostases which we discover in the wonderful performance of the three exceptional actors generates an empathetic chain.

From the very start, we are attracted into the trap of time: Louise (Dana Dogaru)  and Wally Murdock (Horaţiu Mălăele) are seen at the ages of 30, 50 and 70. Young Janet, (Emilia Popescu), winner of the Miss Vegetables contest, from Ohio, at a timeless midnight, enters their lives and offers them an absurd, hilarious, suggestive representation for a provincial woman with Hollywood aspirations.

The characters fail in their attempt of detaching from the pace of a life dominated by the desert. „Life is a deadly, sexually transmitted disease” declares Wally in the first act and then enters the trap of powerlessness.

Humble, anonymous existences, under the sign of sand, a café in the heart of the desert, here are the landmarks of a disintegrating world, which shall rescue itself through love.

„Against all formalistic shows, in the conceptual sense of the word, promoted excessively and inexplicably by the new theatrical nomenclature, «The Café» represents in the first place the victory of the art of the actor and, at the same time, it confirms an ancient theatrical law according to which the direction and text of a show must live at the same level. There may be a conflicting relationship or friendship between them, provided they exist at the same level. Otherwise, things can get off track. I have approached this text anxiously. As in a giant mirror, the window of death, as Borges names it, clearer than anything, I have discovered my ambitions and weaknesses, blessings and adversities, my life, yours, ours and all in one place, overthrown in the life of this imaginary family– a vivid and frightening mirror of our earthly passage. The endurance of the show on the theatrical market represents to me the truth of the above-mentioned and of a common emotion”. Horațiu Mălăele

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu