The Queen Marie Theater of Oradea
The play ‘The Pavilion by Justine del Corte, staged by Radu-Alexandru Nica at the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea.
Luana Pleşea, 22.03.2014, 14:14
A pavilion, with a pair of happy newlyweds under it, surrounded by relaxed and happy people… 10 years on from her wedding, Elisabeth wonders if happiness can be held in place and tries to replay the party. This is the premise for the play ‘The Pavilion’ by Justine del Corte, staged by Radu-Alexandru Nica at the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea. Justine del Corte is one of the most appreciated playwrights in Germany, and this text, written in 2012, was put on for the first time that same year by the most produced German playwright nowadays, Roland Schimmelphennig at the famous Burgtheater of Vienna.
Radu-Alexandru Nica told us what had attracted him to the text of the Mexican-born playwright, the second he staged in Romania: “I was very much attracted by the philosophical implications of the text. It’s OK to see a bit of philosophy in a show. It doesn’t seem to me at all untheater like for the characters to philosophize once in a while. The text has something Chekhovian about it, it also has a bit of Arthur Schnitzler, and this mixture, focusing on the contemporary world, seemed to me very attractive, having a lot to offer me as a director. It also has a lot to offer the actors. Most of the characters have very complex roles. There aren’t many secondary characters. It is a show with some ten main characters. The writer deals with the theme of happiness — how happiness can still be obtained. That interested me most as a human being. As a director, I was attracted to the idea of play within a play, which I carried farther than in the text — we turned the repeat of the wedding into a theater rendition of a real event. In this way, the play became more than a meditation on time, it became a meditation on the way in which theater may or not elude time.”
Director Radu-Alexandru Nica had his first job with the Iosif Vulcan troupe of the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea, which has an average age of below 40, made up of 15 actors. Radu-Alexandru Nica: “I discovered a troupe very eager to act in another type of theater than you encounter here generally. Lately, there have been a lot of musicals, there has been a commercial trend, and there is nothing wrong with that, because theater halls are full once again in Oradea. Now I believe the time has come to offer the audience texts of a different sort. I have the feeling that this text, even though difficult, is not easy humor, these are not easy themes, it is not so hard to swallow.”
The building of the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea also houses the Szigligeti Hungarian language theater, and is one of the most important heritage buildings in Oradea. The design was a product of the famous Fellner and Helmer firm of Vienna, and it was carried out in only 15 months, between July 1899 and October 1900. The exterior blends seamlessly the neoclassical style, dominating the façade, with neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque styles, while the interior finishes and decorations have a distinct Rococo style. For five years, ending in 2011, the building was under renovation. The Queen Marie troupe inaugurated the renovated building with the famous musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, which won two nominations for the Romanian Theaters Union Best Set Design and Best Supporting Actress awards.
Daniel Vulcu, director of the theater, said: “We want to follow this niche path, less trodden by other theaters in Romania, the musical, obviously not exclusively, but we want to be the mouthpieces of this genre, and we have the strength to do this right. According to our managerial strategy, every other year we stage a large-scale musical, and the rest of the time we do smaller scale musicals. I think we’ve managed to prove that we can achieve high performance in this genre, but we will never forget we are a drama theater, so we will be staging that kind of plays as well. We plan to work with top directors. The collaboration with Radu Nica bodes well for us. We worked with other leading directors too, such as Mihai Maniutiu, who proposed a musical version of a classic text, ‘Leonce and Lena’, without our asking him to do that.”
Oradea is a city with a little over 200,000 people, and the Queen Marie Theater manages to sell out every one of their 10 to 15 shows they do every month. Here is theater director Daniel Vulcu again: “We have about 15 shows that we keep rotating all the time. There is plenty of demand. We always get a bit scared as the Short Theater Festival gets close, we increased the number of days from seven to ten days. Last year we had about 50 shows, all best sellers. As a result, I believe there is a lot of potential in Oradea. We have an audience, people who love theater, and I may be so daring as saying that we’ve made theater fashionable. At the beauty salon, in banks, in hospitals, people talk about the theater, they ask each other about one show or another. They urge each other to go to the theater, and we actually have a regular audience. One very interesting phenomenon occurred, at the Short Theater Festival last year, when we had scheduled two shows performed by our troupe and two shows performed by troupes from Bucharest, and we were the ones who sold most of the tickets.”
Reaching its 20th edition this year, the Short Theater Festival organized by the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea is the only festival dedicated to one act plays in Romania, and one of the longest lived: its first edition was held in 1976.
