Text taken from LiterNet.ro | author: Mihai Brezeanu

Petre Ghimbășan steps onto the stage, coming towards the audience. He walks around the empty frame/skeleton of the house that will keep shrinking throughout the show (scenography: Andreea Săndulescu) and looks at the spectators. Some don't even notice him. The lights in the hall are still on, the stage spotlights (lighting design: Cristian Niculescu) haven't entered their role yet. In fact, Petre Ghimbășan hasn't entered his role yet either. Only in a few moments will he gradually become Vania.

Or will Vania receive something of Ghimbășan's style? A sweater with colorful stripes in shades of gray, a polytechnic shirt collar, a pair of brown pants, a pair of shoes like that. And the face, that perfectly unclassifiable face, a mix of Charlie Chaplin, a father aged before his time and blasé in some city of late communism or atrocious capitalism and a fundamentally gentle and good man. (Re)discovered by Andrei Măjeri in his Richard III from Oradea in 2025, Ghimbășan (56 years old) is the kind of actor-revelation around whom a show can be built. I mean, a world!

The house is set in a sea of white. What, at first, seems to be snow in a winter or salt in a mine gradually reveals itself to be clouds in a sky. After so many directors have wondered how Vania and his people from their time, at the end of the 19th century, look at us, Cristian Ban imagined his Uncle Vania (premiere May 2026 at the Regina Maria Oradea Theater, Iosif Vulcan Troupe, based on the text translated by Raluca Rădulescu) somewhere above us. Cristian Ban, the most Chekhovian of our active directors, is, at almost 42 years old, only at the first staging of the texts of the great doctor in people and theater. It is clear that it is difficult to meet yourself! Even on stage. Especially on stage?

In the end, the significantly reduced skeleton of the house hosts Vania, Sonia (Anda Tămășanu) and the nurse (Corina Cernea), and the one who looks on from outside the set is Astrov (Răzvan Vicoveanu). Somehow, they are the poles of Chekhov's world by Ban: Vania and Astrov, the only ones who love without being ridiculous. Ghimbașan and Vicoveanu are the actors to whom the director gives the time and chance to plunge into the depths, into the folds of their own selves. For the others, there is mainly a need for humor and absurdity. With the implicit dose of empathy and warmth with which Ban treats all his characters.

Richard Balint's Serebriakov is, of course, the ridiculous boss, especially on the basis of a wide braid, bringing a runaway folkist (anyone) singing for a penny and a pint to any gathering. And yet, love? Watching Astrov talking with lust about forests, about the future, about people, Denisa Vlad's eyes seem to glimpse something of that feeling sung by poets and minstrels, but it's all so vague, so long ago, so unknown, that it almost doesn't exist. Andreea Săndulescu's floor lamp with a wide puff, illuminated by Cristian Niculescu, could be a nest of madness, but, in the end, it's nothing more than a source of flakes that provoke coughing and laughter.

As is his custom, Cristian Ban transforms a character in the show into a storyteller. Pavel Sîrghi and Teleghin cut out the acts and sound-marked (ah, a radio!) the entrances and exits of the other characters. In addition, some of the house members ask him for sound backgrounds for certain special moments. The humor is overflowing, the sadness, too. Sîrghi is a second Charlot of the stage, next to Ghimbașan.

It's not just Teleghin who is cut from an Ionesco play. Dressed in a vast gray woolen crocheted suit, Corina Cernea's nurse looks like a polar bear stranded on the ice floe of history. Her brief interventions, based on linden tea and raspberry tea, have a repetitive quality that denies any hope.

With a look and a costume (Andreea Săndulescu did a great job on the clothing level) reminiscent of that America with the trailer park & fast food from their indie cinema, Andei Tămășanu's Sonia is a more out of place than Denisa Vlad's Elena Andreevna, who seems to walk and look like an alien whose GPS has broken. A wonderful complicity is created between the two women, born from the inability to truly get close to the man who attracts them. Their attempts, both clumsy and touching, have the dose of caricature with which Cristian Ban endows almost every major element of his show.

But there are also caricatures that receive flesh, blood and vitality. That chorus of Feelings coordinated by Serebrennikov is not repeated until it is emptied of meaning, but until it is filled with emotion. They all sing for / about Vania, just as all of us, the spectators, may have met to listen to the story of Vania – Ghimbășan’s life told by himself in a hundred minutes (a hundred minutes of expectations, pauses, hopes and so on). It is possible that all we see outside the man in the sweater who is watching is his memory, his imagination, his loneliness. His and, perhaps, Astrov’s. The two faces of the defeated man.

The Oradea premiere evokes alcohol, but does not stage it. The characters drink somewhere far away and (do not) make love under the lamppost that hides their faces. Dolls in a theater closed long ago, brought back to life for a moment / a hundred minutes by the one who experienced his failure among them and never stopped loving them for a second.