Happy birthday! Today is International Theatre Day, it is your day, dear theatre people, actors, directors, set designers, theatre critics, playwrights, composers, choreographers, technicians and all those seen and unseen who keep this phenomenon called Theatre alive.

Although times are becoming increasingly uncertain, we still have this privilege to express ourselves through theater, to live theater, to be through culture. Although the lexicon seems to change almost every month, our theater must remain like a vertical column, a structure of a body of which we are all part, producers of shows.

We must not believe what some leaders try to teach us, that an aggressor is, in fact, the aggressor and vice versa. That would mean that we can distort the meaning of facts and events to our liking. I refuse to believe or imagine that Jarry's Ubu is an angel, or that Shakespeare's Richard is a benefactor... or that Macbeth could be a savior? Never!

I have said that we are privileged through theatre and I believe this strongly as I look around. There are people in the world, our fellow human beings, who have been living in the terror of war and dictatorship for years… terror that has become normal in some parts of our world. Dictators act like messiahs, but they cannot be and never will be, unless we act as silent witnesses.

I invite you to hold up a mirror to the world, I invite you not to turn into spectators when extremes, regardless of color, become louder and louder. We cannot and must not forget the lived histories, the "spectacles" of the world that have turned us, the people, into executioners.

I invite you to maintain our lucidity, empathetic reflection, and ethical strength to act through theater. In these pulverized times, theater remains the most powerful form of solidarity against repeated violence.

"Forgetting seems like betrayal to us. Forgetting is the ultimate cowardice", these lines by Victor Eftimiu make me believe that we must shout to the world with our shows. Forgetting is what human nature knows how to do best, from the moment we open our eyes until we close them. Maybe out of a spirit of preservation and survival!?! But, if I think about de Musset's words, "forgetting is the old cure for human misery", I don't feel like living like this, I don't feel like forgetting or pretending to forget... I feel like telling the world...

This world could be very beautiful, even with us in it. Let's join our creative forces, let's try to live together through Theater!

Close your eyes, dream, let the Theater speak and don't forget!

1128 days and nights of war in Ukraine.

Dragoș Buhaghiar, set designer
President of UNITER