stage manager: Doru Bodrea
lights technician: Mădălina Mânzat, Andrei Mitran
sound technician: Vasile Crăciun
The world of Max Blecher's autobiographical prose was shaped under the pressure of the certainty of premature death, following an implacable diagnostic. In his writings, illness is manifested as an inner assault on the self and mediates the narrator's perception of the world or of daily occurrences. The sense of one's own identity is therefore suspended in a diffuse reality, continuously deconstructing itself. In Adventures in Immediate Unreality, a staging of Blecher's first novel, director Tudor Lucanu explores, through visual and performing means, the fight with the instability of conscience and memory, which the hero tries to encompass in a fixed picture, but is instead condemned to an eternal and nightmarish reconfiguration. At first sight appearing to trace the contours of a place of inner peace, the set of this dissolving life then turns in an extension of constant turmoil. The people populating the character's intimate history creep through to his imprecise reality, increasing the stupor that the man keeps living like in an endless lucid dream. Thus, juggling surreal images and themes, the director transcribes in dramatic language the intensely poetic experience of losing the self.
"My intention for Adventures in Immediate Unreality was a performance on the spectrum of living statues, having as a starting point the main theme of Max Blecher's novel, the Panopticon. The action of moving through life events is seen from the perspective of an ‘endless contemplation of panoramic storefront windows', where wax statues become characters trapped in a reality so subjugated by the banal, that it becomes unreal."
In order to truly appreciate Tudor Lucanu's work, a fairly solid education in surrealism is required, as the alterations made to the original text, although relatively easy to spot for a discerning reader, nevertheless require considerable exercises in fantastical logic. However, the changes are not random at all, but contribute to highlighting certain primary scenes with symbolic significance in the novel.
Even for those unfamiliar with Blecher's work or life, watching the show guarantees a journey through a powerful, carefully defined visual universe, enhanced by an equally meticulous soundscape. Everything is intentional, starting with the positioning of the audience in the small hall: they are not only in front of the stage, but also on the sides, surrounding the protagonist, enclosing him in his unstable world and accentuating the feeling of claustrophobia for both him and the audience.
After this fixation in immediate reality, everything jumps into a dreamlike, delirious unreality. Moreover, 80% of the actors' performance is pantomimic. Fantasies drawn from the mind of a young man in the throes of an identity crisis who questions his interaction with the outside world of beings and objects around him. The director presents us with the individual and his inner life. Nothing more, nothing less. The world is a panopticon (remembered), a "wheel of fortune" in which the confused hero alerts the game with the wax figures in his collection. He encourages them to take part in his existential experience. A hallucinatory, traumatic, dreamlike game.
An ambitious show, sliding towards the nightmarish. Dreamlike, illogical, surreal. Noteworthy are the coordination of the entire cast, the exceptional endurance of the actors (Radu Dogaru, Cecilia Lucanu-Donat, Matei Rotaru, Cosmin Stănilă, Alexandra Tarce) in challenging roles, and the unusual integration of the set design into the show.
Source: The National Museum of Romanian Literature
Max Blecher was born in the autumn of 1909, in his maternal grandparents' house in Botoșani. According to biographer Doris Mironescu, his date of birth was September 17 (or 30 in the new style), although other sources indicate the 8th. [2] The future writer spent his entire childhood and adolescence in Roman, at that time a relatively prosperous commercial town with a significant Jewish minority, among whom his father, Lazăr Blecher, held an important position as the owner of a glassware and ceramics shop. As the only son in the family, followed only by girls, Max had a happy and stable childhood, which was not reflected in his autobiographical prose, written later, already under the influence of a painful illness. [3]
Family testimonies and documents from the time paint a picture of an outstanding student, a precocious hope and pride of the local community. An avid reader, he showed an aptitude for literature from a very young age, trying his hand at adolescent verse and poetry. However, both his correspondence and his actual work betray a deep, often stunned exasperation in the face of provincial apathy and complacency, which was later transferred into an aesthetic of ugliness, fully embraced by the author. It was precisely this experience of marginal life in the provinces that led Blecher, at the age of 19, to leave for Paris to study medicine (some sources, unconfirmed by documents, indicate Rouen as the city of his student years[4]). There, however, after a very short period, the symptoms of bone tuberculosis appeared, which would cut short his life before he reached the age of 30 and which could explain, in retrospect, the chronic pain he had endured for much of his adolescence.
Thus, in 1928, Blecher began a decade of agony, spent largely in sanatoriums in France and Switzerland. He lived for three years in Berck-sur-mer, a small resort on the Atlantic coast, and his experiences there formed the basis for his novel Scarred Hearts. During this period, he made his debut with short stories in Bilete de papagal (Parrot Tickets), Tudor Arghezi's publication. It was also then that he met the surrealist poet Pierre Minet, a colleague of his generation and suffering, with a milder form of the same disease, who had a great influence on Blecher's literary destiny. In early 1932, however, the latter left the clinic in Berck for one located in the Swiss Alps, in Leysin, where he remained for more than a year before returning home in 1933.
In Romania, he underwent a year of treatment in Techirghiol, where he befriended, among others, the painter Lucia Dem. Bălăcescu. It was also then that the author began his romance with a young married woman, Maria Ghiolu, whose memoir-like novel, Serenada zadarnică (Futile Serenade), published in the 1970s, paints a broad portrait of Blecher. In fact, the two remained close until the writer's death, as evidenced in the pages of Mihail Sebastian's Journal. Moreover, some of the young man's poems, collected in the volume Corp transparent (Transparent Body), as well as the dedication on the first page, are addressed to this impossible love.
In the last part of his life, the writer, tormented by illness and confined to bed, wrote the novels Adventures in Immediate Irreality, Scarred Hearts, and The Illuminated Den—the latter, in fact a sanatorium diary, being published posthumously. In Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, the sexual and existential initiation of a pubescent protagonist is surrealistically set in a provincial town, where everyday elements, in their absolute banality, freeze and even suppress the sense of reality. This is less a novel dedicated to illness and suffering, although their presence imposes itself as a distorting filter.
Max Blecher spent his last years in a house on the outskirts of Roman and died at the age of almost 29, after a decade of torment, which prompted Mihail Sebastian to note in his diary: "Atrocious suffering. Everything becomes absurdly useless in the face of such great pain."[5]
[1] Doris Mironescu, The Life of M. Blecher. Against Biography, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2018. [2] For example, Marieva Ionescu, "A Player 'Until the Last Chips,'" preface to Scarred Hearts, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2017. [3] See Doris Mironescu, idem. [4] Idem, pp. 81-82. [5] Mihail Sebastian, Diary. 1935-1944, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002.
