by Eugène Ionesco
translated to Romanian by Vlad Russo and Vlad Zografi
director: Gábor Tompa
set design: Adrian Damian
costumes: Luiza Enescu
original music: Vasile Șirli
stage movement: Ferenc Sinkó
video design: Radu Daniel
set and costume design assistant: Dariana Pau
saxophone: Patricia Marchiș
stage manager: Doru Bodrea
lights technician: Jenel Moldovan, Andrei Mitran
sound technician: Marius Rusu
video: Vasile Crăciun
prompter: Alina Forna
Sun, silence, the green grass, birds chirping, the blue sky, children playing in the park, ideal conditions for a writer to find inspiration in their comfortable, intimate home... But things are never this simple. The world is not as it seems. A bomb doesn't make a war, just as a sparrow flying by doesn't mean spring is here. And yet? Bérenger, an idealist, an artist who loves life, people, light, suddenly discovers that he can fly - just as he can walk or breathe. In his naivety, he believes his family and everyone else can also fly, just like him, that they can understand, that they can "find the path, the forgotten path"; they only have to remember. But the artist is in fact the only air pedestrian, taking this solitary road, leaning into it gently, for momentum. A privileged position, which nonetheless causes pain and the curse of not being trusted. Because if beauty is accessible to everyone, the sublime and the grotesque are aesthetic experiences which trouble and frighten us. Just like the tragic choir did not believe in Cassandra's dark premonitions, the English people spending their Sunday in the park do not believe in Bérenger's apocalyptic visions, because truth is always an offence in the face of comfort, prudishness, superficiality, prejudice, and facile righteousness. But when "beyond hell... there is nothing", and hell is closing in on us, like the wind, our comfortable world deflates, like an artificial décor, replacing the gardens with the abyss, ice, and flames.
Gábor Tompa, together with his artistic team, transforms Ionesco's text in a musical score, playing both physically and vocally with the rhythm, the choral harmony, dissonance, and syncope, in poetic swings, oscillations, and leaps. The play is thus brought to the fore again, after being unjustly forgotten for so long, just like the characters - and, implicitly, we - have forgotten how to fly. Because who believes in poets anymore? And what are our ideals today? The intellectual's pain comes from the fact that the internal combustion of authentic creativity happens precisely when one's ideals are destroyed, when he is faced with the fear of death, of the abyss, of losing everything he loves. With his specific humor, Ionesco seems to ask us, even today, when the play is more relevant than ever, with Russian and Ukrainian bullets and rockets so close to us, with the planet soaked in blood and ecologically threatened: why do people keep pretending that they don't see anything, why don't they want to understand what is happening? The answer is not that different from the Biblical one: "they have eyes, but do not see, they have ears, but do not hear".
Haunted by the same existential dilemmas as Ionesco, Tompa is not dominated by the impossibility of finding a unique and definitive solution to the problems facing mankind, but is constantly searching for solutions, changing roles, adapting recipes and integrating new elements into the argumentative structure, so that the staging of Ionesco's texts have something in common, but also enough distinctive elements to be able to speak of an Ionescian universe a la Tompa. To stage A Stroll in the Air requires a great deal of maturity, an undertaking of intertextuality - Ionesco, more than ever, has put into the text enough interrogations to give it freedom and various directorial options - and a great deal of stage experience. The text was written in 1962, but it's timeless, because, after all, the absurd has nothing to do with time. And yet the time dimension becomes the key to deciphering the entire spectacular construct in Gábor Tompa's vision.
The forces of the oneiric begin to be activated much to the exasperation of those present at the "ascension". The exemplarity of flight paralyzes the hubbub of Englishmen stuck in ridiculous conveniences and austerities. The issue enters the vein of life as a dream, taken from the classic Calderón de la Barca. Man has always dreamed of flying. Icarus is just a pilgrim pioneer. The Ionescian linesc are a rather abstract essayistic configuration of debates about the contingent, timelessness, antiworld, the sublime, the harmony of spheres, the harmony of communication. And in the background there are simultaneously projected images of the movement of planets (a visual motif often encountered in Tompa's stagings), flying bridges, twinkling stars, a world of cosmic, terrestrial, universal miracles. [...] Radu Daniel's video projections become chilling, as does the filmed dialog, brought to the foreground, in which it is said that it is not friendship that rules the world, but hatred. Something the opposite of what Dostoevsky said Beauty will save the world. The group stage movement, directed by Ferenc Sinkó to the music of Vasile Șirli, accompanied by the collective cantabile murmur sometimes gives the impression of suspicious harmonization with the dominating parodic style. The colorful costumes of Luisa Enescu brighten the motley atmosphere of the ensemble. A carnivalesque, motley world.
Energy and emotion travel from one to another. It is about support, the strength of a troupe devoted to the director and the text. Their message is articulate, coherent and powerful. As is the design of set designers Adrian Damian and Luiza Enescu. The big stage of the National Theater in Cluj is like a picture painted by a naive painter, respecting some of Ionesco's stage directions. The wavey, terraced image in the text is traced by an inflatable tubular structure. In the unchanging English landscape, playful elements are also slightly infiltrated into the decor. Almost monochrome, the painting is colored by the costumes, in vivid colors, like precious fondants. I have not seen this Adrian Damian-Luiza Enescu scenographic tandem for a long time, so efficient and complementary, impeccably molded to the meaning of Tompa Gabor's ideas. It is a drawing hard to forget, as a visual emblem of this manifesto about art and humanity.
The set (Adrian Damian) is in astonishing agreement with the idea of flight, of possible levitation: huge, inflatable mattresses in a terracing that climbs towards the clouds. Blue sky, sun and the writer Bérenger, who discovers he can fly. [...] Tompa has chosen a rarely performed play, reinvigorating its now very topical message in a suggestive, exciting scenic formula, demonstrating an enviable stylistic versatility.
Eugène Ionesco was born on 26 November 1909, in Slatina, and died on 28 March 1994, in Paris. He is considered one of the most important playwrights of the 20th century, and his dramatic work is part of the movement defined by the essayist Martin Esslin as the "Theater of the Absurd", alongside European and American avant-garde figures such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee.
Although he is one of the most influential voices in post-war drama, his plays were initially met with reservations - and in some cases hostility - by some of the specialized public. In this respect, Ionesco's debate with the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan remains a landmark in theater history, revealing the playwright's position in relation to his own work and his sources of inspiration. Accused, in a 1958 article in The Observer, that his anti-realism uncovers an anti-reality position based on the impossibility of communication and the failure of language, the writer denounced Tynan's "leftist conformism" and asserted that his plays were, on the contrary, a plea for communication beyond the clichés of common language[1].
This thematic preoccupation of the author is particularly reflected in his early writings, such as The Bald Soprano, The Lesson or The Chairs, his short plays, often defined as "tragic farces", which demonstrate the alienation of contemporary man and the fracturing of consciousness under the pressure of social norms and empty forms.
The character of Bérenger first appears in The Killer, and subsequently becomes a recurring presence throughout a series that includes the texts Rhinoceros, Exit The King and A Stroll in the Air. Although, in Ionesco's style, he does not evolve from one play to the next and does not follow a linear biographical path, he is clearly an alter ego of the playwright, a tragic hero fighting for his own humanity in a broken and bruttish world.
Ionesco's late plays, such as Hunger and Thirst, Macbett or Oh, What A Bloody Circus speak of the oppressive function of Power, the inevitability of death, or the loneliness of man in society.
Eugène Ionesco was elected a member of the French Academy in 1970, and in 2009 the Romanian Academy named him a posthumous member. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
[1] See Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, translated by Ion Pop, Editura Humanitas, Bucharest, 2011
The playA Stroll in the Air was written in 1962 and premiered the same year in Düsseldorf, and was later staged in France in 1963 at the Odéon Theater in Paris. It is the last play in the so-called Bérenger series, following The Killer Without Cause, Rhinoceros and Exit the King. This time, the famous Ionescian protagonist becomes a playwright who has exhausted his creative resources and seeks to disconnect amid the idyllic landscape of rural England with his wife Joséphine and their daughter Marthe. Before long, however, his space is populated by stereotypical representatives of an equally stereotypical British society, who collectively ignore the imminence of a new war and their total disappearance, trivializing unthinkable horrors with monotonous speeches. When Bérenger (re)discovers flight and soars into another plane of existence, the mob disowns him, decrying his apocalyptic prophecies.
Written during the Cold War, the text is both a warning and an exasperated cry in the face of social indifference.
