by DRPopescu
Absolute premiere

Artistic direction and scenography: Sergiu Savin
Assistant director: Eugen Harizomenov and STEFAN Farkas
Decorative painting: Maria Minchevici
Premiere date: July 8, 1987

A thematic continuation of the plays "The Balcony", "Skakespeare's Bird" and "Like the Mulberry Leaf in Heaven", "Sleeping on a Snake" is a drama of conscience that raises the same questions about the need for truth in interpersonal relationships. The development of the conflict is passionate, including murders, attempted murders, adultery, and consuming loves, but the emphasis is not on the epic, but on the ethical.

Ilarie, a former revolutionary and hydroelectric power plant builder, has abandoned his ambitions and ideals, taking refuge in a world of torpidity, guilt, and perverted values. He is married to the much younger Ella, who has an illicit love affair with Tavi. Re-enacting the mythical triangle Agamemnon-Clytemnestra-Aegisthus, the young people plot and carry out the murder of their old husband. However, as Ion Cocora (Tribuna, September 24, 1987) notes, the crime cannot be entirely justified by the passion of adulterous love, but is favored by an existential climate degraded in all its levels. However, beyond the omnipresent guilt, the unpredictable trajectories, the deformations and aberrations, through love, the two access a state of grace that allows them to see and speak the truth.

As in any polysemantic creation, the subject of the play is the "base of access to the symbolic plane" (Marian Popescu, in the program of the show). The equivocation is introduced from the beginning, through the three subtitles of the play ("The bed of fire", "The man who brings snow", "On this green seashore"), which testify to both its poetic valences and polemical intentions. The biblical allusion is not missing from the title either, referring to the existential condition of man after the loss of paradise. "To sleep on a snake can mean living in guilt and unconsciousness, outside moral laws, to be in ethical disorder, in imbalance, to deviate from the elementary obligations imposed by the norms of behavior, to cheat one's existence, degrading it into lies, compromises and cowardice." (Marian Popescu, in the program of the show).

Distribution:

Hilarie:  Eugen Tugulea
Anton:  Ion Abrudan
Georgette:  Alla Tautu
Darcopol:  Ion Tomorrow
Ella:  Cristina Schiopu
Thank you:  Marcel Segărceanu
Trays:  Petre Panait
Capisizu:  Laurian Jivan

Technical director: Elena Varlam
Prompter: Iuliana Chelu
Lighting: Vasile Blejan, Iosif Balogh
Musical illustration and sound design: Marius Munteanu