Interview taken from LiterNet.ro

„"Things I Know to be True" by Andrew Bovell, directed by Vlad Bălan, opened the 2025-2026 season of the "Regina Maria" Oradea Theater and is also one of those few shows that takes the risk of touching on areas that theater usually avoids.

Text taken from The Republic of Criticism / author: Tudor-Costin Sicomas

I am starting to travel around the country more and more. And this often leads to moments of reverie, joy, and simply happiness. But also to moments of envy (positive, to be honest), because I am discovering or rediscovering cities, places much more beautiful and richer than our "dear" capital. Two of these cities that I have rediscovered lately are Cluj and now, Oradea. At least in the case of the latter, I was truly enchanted by the beauty of the central area through which I walked and which took my thoughts and soul directly to Baroque Vienna and that of the early 20th century. The elegance of the buildings that combine that charged style whose name comes from Portuguese and the Secession style give Oradea an air of a story that cannot help but envelop you and carry you back in time.

Interview taken from LiterNet.ro

Ramona Nemes: You return to the Regina Maria Theater after you have mounted Tartuffe in 2021. How do you feel you have evolved as a director since then and how do you now find the actors of the "Iosif Vulcan" Troupe a few years later?

Vlad Trifas (laughing): It's... quite complicated to talk about evolution mine. I just hope I didn't make a fool of myself, that's the only thing I wish for. I like to say about myself that I'm a seeker, a person who "explores" with the curiosity of a child. If we're going to talk about my evolution in one way or another, I can certainly say that the hole is bigger, I've started looking a little more, which I hope brings me a little more experience. But I'm just as curious, with just as many questions. I'm afraid of the moment when I answer all the questions, so from this point of view I think I'm the same, but with a greater baggage of experience.

The theater is often tempted to tame and adapt the classics, and the Regina Maria Theater, together with director Vlad Trifaș, takes on the courage to stage a Authentic Caragiale, which pulsates with the energy of the southern slum, where passions burst forth "fast forward", and the grotesque and humor naturally follow each other. For the Transylvanian audience, this incursion into the Caragiale universe acquires the force of a revelation: a lively, intense show, which refuses cosmeticization and brings to the surface both the fragility and the vitality of human typologies.

Text taken from LiterNet.ro

Razvan Rocas: „"Things I Know to be True" is a text that comes from a dramaturgy that is perhaps less explored in our country: Australian dramaturgy. How did you arrive at this text? What do you find most appealing from a directorial point of view?
Vlad Balan: I was familiar with Andrew Bovell's playwriting. I saw a show in Ploiești a few days ago, When will the rain stop?; it was directed by Radu Afrim. I also saw a dissertation performance based on this text and, somehow, it stuck in my mind. Initially, in our discussions with Vichi (Victoria Balint – interim manager of the Regina Maria Theatre), we had another plan; we had to make a dramatization based on a novel. It was a complicated situation with the rights and in the end I ended up making other proposals. I remembered this text and said to myself to read it – I only had the impression of the dissertation performance I had seen. I read it and I know that it struck me from the first moment, I sent it to him and said „This is what I think it is!”. It was a perfect fit: and Bobi Pricop said „Yes, I support it” immediately – he already knew the text. I had great support in this sense and it seemed appropriate to me also because I have the feeling that it is a fairly classic text, in terms of structure, at the story level. It's a text that deals with this generation gap and does so with great wisdom, without passing judgment. It seems to me that we live in a moment where we are polarizing in two directions – conservative and progressive. Usually, that's what I look for: texts that position themselves in the gray area.

Text taken from LiterNet.ro | author: Răzvan Rocaș

We live in a time when everything that happens around us seems to push us into polemics with those around us. We often discover that what we thought we knew about these people is, in fact, erroneous. In such moments, we need something that gives us the certainty that things or people dear to us will remain unchanged, as we remember them. These landmarks instill in us a necessary sense of security. It's just that it is precisely in the midst of them that the most brutal changes can occur, forcing us to make drastic decisions.

Text taken from Family Magazine | author: Alexandru Jurcan

The long-awaited premiere at the Regina Maria Theater in Oradea took place on April 5 and 6 this year, 2025. It is about Shakespeare's Richard III, translated by Horia Gârbea - stage version by Alexandra Felseghi and Andrei Măjeri, with inserts from Henry VI. Directed by: Andrei Măjeri, who last year received the Uniter for the show Cine la ucis pe tata. Ambitious director, who has never disappointed.

Text taken from The Dramatic West | author: Doru Mareș

Richard III Andrei Măjeri's work outlines the geography of a series of couples, in turn generated by the doublet demonism – fascination. Taking the Shakespearean text, the one in Horia Gârbea's translation from the monumental Volceanov edition, published by Tracus Arte, the stage version worked on by the director together with Alexandra Felseghi, with inserts from Henry VI, brings to the stage all generations, actors and characters, from Luca Bran, a 10-year-old kid with a measured aplomb of naturalness (in the role of Richmond), and Robert Balint, only five years older and in a triple role (the crown princes, in the mirror during the adolescent reactivity generated by the primacy to the throne, but also a page), to the undisputed stars of the "Regina Maria" Theater in Oradea, Ioana Dragoș Gajdó and Richard Balint (in four roles quickly changed and with exceptional individualization). The key to the story (which was once a turbulent and extremely violent period in England, when the Hundred Years' War ended with the fall of Constantinople at the other end of Europe, only to have the War of the Roses begin just two years later, for another 32 years), which ends two years before the end of the conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York, is one that goes beyond factual history, to unfold almost Faustically, through the Richard - Buckingham couple, created by Petre Ghimbășan and Răzvan Vicoveanu. The first, a fascinating demon, a kind of Mephisto for whom crimes are both mischief and substantial strategy at the same time, the second a Faust without a portfolio, whose only emotion is the fascination exercised by Richard, coupled unacknowledgedly, if not unconsciously, with certain interests of rank and wealth, of exercising power according to the model of the manipulative idol.

Text taken from reșița.ro | author: Marian Apostol

On June 27, 2025, at 6:00 PM, the Reșița audience was invited to laugh, be silent, listen and applaud. The Regina Maria Theater in Oradea honored the New Wave International Theater Festival with one of its best productions: "The Accusative Genre", a tragicomedy directed by Mimi Brănescu, which brought to the Reșița stage an explosion of unspoken truths, cruel humor and authentic emotion. A show that demonstrated that theater can be, at the same time, a mirror, a wound and a balm.

Text taken fromLiterNet.ro | author: Mihai Brezeanu

En folkefiende / An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen (1882). Ein Volksfeind / An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, version adapted by Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer and staged by the former at the Schaubühne, in Berlin, in 2012. Enemy of the People, the Ostermeier-Borchmeyer version, translated from English by Radu Iacoban and staged by him at the Regina Maria Theatre in Oradea in November 2024. The first title programmed within the 2025 edition of the Arad International New Theatre Festival.

Text taken from Family Magazine / author: Alexandru Jurcan

The following situation is becoming classic: children gone to other countries, sick single parents, benevolent neighbors, foreigners paid to take care of them... Here is an extremely current, hot, painful theme. Simona Mihuțiu, a renowned oncologist from Oradea, addressed such a problem in the play Speranța nu aucă nievești con elevatul.

Text taken from lucianantofi.wordpress.com / author: Luciana Antofi

Power.

A handful of sand for the wide and patient hourglass of the chess games of history that quickly pours another handful of sand on top, sometimes measuring the greatness of the pieces not so much by their importance as by their resistance on the game board at the bottom of the hourglass. This time of a blue fool.

And not just any kind of madman, but an excellently contrived one (Petre Ghimbășan, a sensational Richard III) and brilliantly handled by director Andrei Măjeri together with the "Iosif Vulcan" Troupe of the "Regina Maria" Theatre in Oradea, which holds in classical/contemporary theatrical chess, for more than two hours, the ten most important pieces of power (to which the director has very inspiredly reduced the crowded royal Shakespearean universe with all kinds of ranks and relationships at the Court and dispatched it in a superb neo-medieval-rock - some medieval costumes are reinterpreted contemporarily at the bottom, in black and white with elements of silver armor, British royal symbolism, accessorized with elements of sports equipment, prints and headphones (!) - essentialized and intelligible) for which he even temporarily invented new moves on the game board.

Text taken from LiterNet.ro / author: Mihai Brezeanu

Prologue

"Chronicle". With this word it begins Richard III staged by Andrei Măjeri at the Regina Maria Theater in Oradea (premiere April 5, 2025). Richard III by William Shakespeare, translated by Horia Gîrbea, with inserts from Henry VI by the same William Shakespeare. For greater precision, with insertions of Henry VI Part III, the text which, together with the first two parts of Henry VI and with Richard III, form the so-called Minor Tetralogy of Shakespeare. A set of 4 texts dedicated to the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485), fought between the House of Lancaster (the red rose) and the House of York (the white rose, so to speak).

Text taken from familymagazine.ro / author: Alexandru Jurcan

The premiere of the end of the year 2024 at the Regina Maria Theater in Oradea: Elif and the rain by Sami Ibrahim, directed by Alex Ianăși. A text about the condition of the always "illegal" immigrant, who is only worth as much as he can work, in a perfidious bureaucratic system. Elif is a woman who ends up in an economic dictatorship, preferring utopian tendencies that distance her from the fangs of reality. Her daughter, Lily, has a different perspective, beyond her mother's stories, managing to understand the cruel truth and their precarious condition, with a cynicism specific to her age.

Article taken from Contributors.ro / author: Mircea Morariu

I'll say it from the very beginning. Elif and the Rain from the Theater Queen Mary from Oradea, is far from a flawless show. Not everything we see on stage is perfectly valid and not absolutely original. There are obvious borrowings in the grammar of the staging both in terms of the directorial solutions related to the theme, the construction of the characters themselves (whose first appearances, with large, immense suitcases, cannot help but remind you of Silviu Purcărete's shows) and in terms of the sets and costumes, also from the same area. They are signed by Tania Gobejishvili. The frequent use of classic microphones, with stands, used to highlight dramatic situations or lines considered essential is not something very new either. The fashion, introduced into Romanian theater some time ago by Radu Afrim in his shows, has proliferated and is present in a consistent, perhaps even too consistent, number of productions.

Text taken from Contributors.ro / author: Mircea Morariu

In 2014, when in the offer of performances of an edition of the International Theatre Festival Interferences, organized by the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj-Napoca and its director, Tompa Gábor, the show with the play appeared An enemy of the people by Henrik Ibsen, the name of German director Thomas Ostermeier was not at all unknown to the Romanian public.

Something was also known about Nora, and about HamletThe latter came to us on the occasion of an edition of the Festival Shakespeare  created by Emil Boroghină at the National Theatre Marin Sorescu from Craiova. It was also known that Ostermeier was passionate about Ibsen's dramatic literature. Which he staged in its entirety and to which he dedicated substantial pages in his book Theater and fear which would also appear in Romanian in 2016, in the collection Yorick  of Bucharest publishing houses NemiraThe 2024 reissue of the book would be complemented by the appearance of two other books dedicated to the director from Schaubühne, one that also appeared at Nemira  (Thomas Ostermeier's Theater), the other (Backstage Ostermeier) at the Cultural Foundation Camil PetrescuAlso in 2024, Ostermeier staged on the stage of the National Theatre IL Caragiale the play show Hedda Gabler.

Text taken from LiterNet.ro

Razvan Rocas.: What's it like to be in the director's chair in a theater for the first time?
Tony Nica: Stressful, because you feel like you have more pressure on your shoulders than in college. College
it's something else... it's the environment where you have a safety net: you know you're there to learn, to give yourself
with your head against the wall. If something doesn't work, it's no problem; next semester you know what to do.
you have to work. It's a little different here.

Article taken from LiterNet.ro / author: Liviu Ornea

A couple mourns their four-year-old son who died in a stupid accident: the dog ran into the street, a young man tries to avoid it and kills the child who had run after the dog. No one is to blame. It happens. Fate. Eight months after the accident, the parents have not recovered. Each reacts differently. They become estranged. The wife almost cultivates her pain and refuses to communicate with her husband, her sister and mother, her friends who, even they, do not know how to react, she becomes aggressive, accuses everyone of not understanding her pain. The husband tries group therapy, rejected sine die by his wife and has a small affair. In the end, they decide to sell the house (the wife's idea). She tries, not to start all over again, but at least to learn to live again.