Întreaga lume e livada noastră. Memoria unui spectacol-document

Abstract

In theatre, the collective memory is contradictory, since every witness remembers that which has personally impressed him or her the most. The spectator-as-witness will evoke the inner upheaval that the performance, with all its energy, has created; the actor-as-witness will make reference to the turmoil of the whole artistic process when constructing the character he or she has impersonated, whereas the director-as-witness will recount the complexity of the staging of the whole show. But the flawed memory of those of us still present in today’s theatre cannot activate the artistic truth of performances created in times gone by unless we resort to the impersonal witness of the documented performance. To this effect, we have chosen the Romanian National Television recording of “The Cherry Orchard”, directed by the consummate Gyorgy Harag, a performance which is regarded as a landmark of the Romanian theatre in the last sixty years. The memory of those that have directly shaped us as future actors makes it compulsory for us to also rememorate the itinerary of our professional development, the realization of the mutual effort that went into it, the incredible human relationship between teacher and student, master and disciple. The first one is that of bringing to the foreground the monumental artistic value of the 1985 production of “The Cherry Orchard”, directed by Gyorgy Harag, still so relevant to today’s theatre audience through its themes of the uprooted individual, the new man. The pervasive feeling of living in an uprooted world finds its perfect epitome in Trofimov’s words: “The whole of Russia is our orchard”.