Text author: Silvia Dumitrache
Taken from observatorcultural.ro

Avalanche, the dystopia of Tuncer Cücenoğlu, the most famous contemporary Turkish playwright, professor of drama at MSM (Müjdat Gezen Art Center) in Istanbul, is one of those stories that haunts you long after the curtain falls. I saw a production for the first time after Avalanche in 2012, at the TNB, directed by Radu Afrim, an unforgettable show through the force transmitted, in discrepancy with its entire poetic, diaphanous universe, one of the most terrible messages: that we ourselves create our prisons, and the most feared guards become our own fears. I was happy to see in this year's FNT selection a new staging of this play, directed by Petru Vutcărău, a production of the "Regina Maria" Theater in Oradea, because this text, with great scenic potential, is a nuanced metaphor both for the contemporary world, which has not escaped the danger of totalitarianisms, and for something, perhaps, even more fearful: the inner monsters, which make us close ourselves in a world of preconceptions and superstitions, a world of fear.

With an action set in a village in Anatolia, at the foot of the mountains, where people have built their rules of living around an idea with ancient, almost mythical roots, namely that, during certain times of the year, when there is a risk of an avalanche, any noise, no matter how small, could cause a catastrophe, Avalanche is a parable about freedom and morality, about what is permitted in the name of preserving tradition. The villagers have established a set of rules, which everyone must respect with sanctity, including the periods when young people can marry and have sexual relations, so that children are born only in those months when there is no risk of an avalanche. The myth functions here as an immutable law, transforming, in fact, into a kind of executioner that kills both the freedom of choice and the possibility of bringing any critical argument. As in Lord of the Flies by Golding, the tradition starts from a fear, which ends up being inscribed in the genetic code, and prey to it, fighting, paradoxically, for the preservation of life, people end up fighting against it, bringing to the surface the dark side of the subconscious: cruelty, lack of empathy, even the willingness to kill – is it right or moral to kill the innocent to theoretically save other lives?

Petru Vutcărău's show perfectly captures this atmosphere of terror in which people permanently live, under the appearance of a peaceful life, and the method he resorts to is simple, but of great effect: all the actors say their lines in a whisper, and the lavaliers they wear near their heads provide an echo effect, so that, until the final scene, the tension is permanently maintained without other artifices, these voices being sufficient, which are heard as if from a cavern, one that is apparently beautiful, white, pure, but in which the greatest horrors take place – the horrors of the chained subconscious. The show leaves you breathless all the time, it is constructed cinematically, somewhere between a classic thriller and the strangeness of a Dogville von Trier. To the effect of the whispered utterance, a series of other elements are added, which complete the atmosphere of a claustrophobic universe: the decor (signed by Ianis Vasilatos), predominantly white, with all the classical load of meanings, may initially suggest a peaceful, dreamlike world, but, so as not to forget that we are, in fact, in the nightmarish projection created by a tradition that kills, the scene is crossed, like a bloody premonition, in several key moments of the action, by the character of the girl who had been killed decades ago, because, like the Young Woman of the present, her time had come before her time, in the very forbidden period. The Young Man and the Young Woman, delicately interpreted by Consuela Egyed and Ciprian Ciucu, are the symbol of freedom and reason, which fights against a meaningless tradition. Petre Ghimbășan and Corina Cernea add color and a subtle touch of dark humor to the characters of the Old Man and the Old Woman, both products of a world that reminds us of the hardships of our society, still tributary to a totalitarian system, in which people do not challenge the rules, no matter how absurd they may be. Both are, in fact, victims of a system that they have allowed, perhaps unwittingly, to crush them. If at first the Old Woman is the typical mother-in-law, when she realizes that her daughter-in-law is awaiting the merciless sentence given by a council of elders that resembles more like a firing squad, she becomes human, but deciding to accept fate, on the principle of "such is the law". The Old Man, on the other hand, is a character who has a more important role than it may seem: considered crazy, having lost his mind in his youth, when he denounced his brother, after the latter allegedly confessed that he was possessed by an uncontrollable need to scream, the Old Man, like the wise Shakespearean madman, understood the absurdity of the world he lives in and now tries to incite rebellion, to denounce the true guilt, namely the psychological abuse that those in power have always committed.

Since in this world the idea of community matters the most, the characters do not have individualized names either, but are, as in expressionist theater, generic: The Young Man, The Old Man, etc. The Oradea Theater troupe is very homogeneous, it is clear how finely all the actors in the team have internalized the roles and how well they have managed to build this terrifying world, transmitting, through their well-calibrated acting, without falling into too coarse strokes – and here is the merit of the director who took the story into a zone of well-tempered tension –, the anguish and the inability to be free. You come out of this spectacle of oppressive silence with the desire to shout your freedom, to be grateful that you can cry, speak, scream when you want. And above all, you reevaluate the importance of reason in a society that seems to be (still) on the knife edge of the absurd.