Text taken from ancazaharia.ro / author: Anca Zaharia

After my move from Brașov to Oradea, I didn't regret anything, but I often said that I missed theater, so I started the project of familiarizing myself with this world in the city where my new home is. As you know if you've read me before and as you're finding out now if you haven't, I share what I like and I think others might like it or, on the contrary, cause change in those whom it can put, from the comfortable seat in the hall, in not-so-comfortable positions, with the potential to generate some reflections as a glimmer of hope for self-education and tolerance. 

Because it seems vital to me that we draw some conclusions that will make us at least a little more decent people, not just remain passive and giddy consumers of any cultural, artistic or entertainment product. If you want and can, or at least want to be able to, you have something useful to learn from Las Fierbinți (which Diana, my colleague from GOLAN Magazine, wrote about, here) and from some show with love islands or parent swaps. Okay, for this you need some skills that we don't really learn in the traditional educational environment, because God forbid the child interprets something according to his own mind and doesn't babble the eternal comments learned by heart from grandma's collection of comments.

"The Cage of Fools" (the play that established Jean Poiret as an author), which I saw on March 1, 2024 at the Regina Maria Theater in Oradea, can do exactly that: to tame and humanize in the viewer, through a digestible comedy to the extent that the viewer's life experience allows, a few figures towards whom we, as a society, have whole bundles of preconceptions that have not yet disappeared and which, let's not lie to ourselves, do not protect anything and no one except the hypocritical defenders of these stereotypes — exactly like the Dienlafoi couple on stage, about whom I will elaborate as I go along. Even though, as I observed in the schedule, director Daniel Vulcu states that he brought to the stage a comedy that "must be taken as such and not interpreted or viewed as an argument for or against something." 

But what else you need to know about me is that I believe that all art is political, so such a play therefore becomes a credible and coherent manifesto. In my eyes, of course.

"The Cage of Fools"

I admit, the beginning of the cabaret gave me terrible emotions. As open-minded as I like to think I am in matters that I don't mention so as not to shock my readers, I also resist the idea of musical, which I cannot and do not think I want to understand, I do not think it will ever become mine the tea cup in terms of performing arts. And meanwhile I look at those who are passionate about it as demigods musical. Coming back, the beginning of the cabaret panicked me enough to think I hadn't read the show description well when booking the ticket, but I relaxed when I understood what was happening and appreciated the travesty. challenging from a heteronormative point of view.

In short, Georges and Jeannot have been a couple for about 15 years: the former owns a golf club dear where Jeannot is the star, a melodramatic "actress". Because their son is getting married, the two must meet the girl's family, a totally different couple who stand out for their ultraconservatism and hypocrisy: he is a morally flexible politician when his wife is not around, she is the iron fist who reports everything to the elections and the impression left on voters and the press.

Pleasant and unexpected

From a certain point on, I became familiar with the characters enough to not be surprised by their gestures and lines, so Jeannot's reference to Erika Isac's phenomenal play was a balm for my feminist heart. The same goes for the parallel made to the hypocritical unfavorable interpretation that society makes of a child who has two fathers, even when the comparison is made with an alcoholic mother, for example, from a "traditional" relationship. If we get a little closer to logic and common sense, I think we realize that it is absurd to see masculinity as being determined by the number of fingers that make contact with the biscuit and closely linked to ferocity. 

I had heard of Richard Balint, of course, but I had never seen him in a show and I had doubts about whether to believe my partner who vouched for how good he was. catchy the actor makes absolutely every character his own. It was more than fascinating and gratifying to notice, in this way, the joy with which Richard Balint was Jeannot, taken to the point where I managed to quickly forget that I was a spectator: I had become part of their family, waiting in a corner for Jeannot to stop being so intense and sticky, and for George to find the courage to tell her why he doesn't want her around to meet the parents of the girl their son chose.

If you'll forgive my rant, I also want to note that during the play I was reminded of something I've believed for several years, something that was shocking the first time I realized it: that smotheringis not a characteristic specific only to heteronormative couples and that, gay or not, parents can be incredibly annoying and suffocating when they disconnect from the child's real needs, when they stubbornly insist that they "know better". Moreover, that there are consequences for everyone when the pressure to be who you are not arises: just as the forced "virilization" of Jeannot and the couple's space does not last in the long term - fitting into the feminine frequency is impossible, not being natural -, neither can the ultra-moral mask of the NOM couple (New Moral Order of the Dienlafoi family) remain untouched for too long.

We are who we are and we like who we like, after all, a "staged" conclusion that I am often ashamed to say when I think about how banal it is, but which I see as all the more necessary when I remember that I too have a history of homophobia "cured" only by books and films and shows that, putting me in some not exactly comfortable situations, confronted me with prejudices unfounded only in my own ignorance, taken over with devotion from my predecessors and which I am glad that at the moment I have not had the opportunity to pass on.

Răzvan Vicoveanu perfectly illustrated the conflicting ambivalence of the character Georges, Richard Balint conveyed to me the absolute joy of being the right and authentic man at the right time, Eugen Neag did an excellent job when he made Mercedes extremely disliked by me, George Dometi (whose poems you can read in GOLAN Magazine, here) provided a large part of the sincere laughter in the room, Ciprian Ciuciu remained the voice of the rational young man, restrained in the madness sparked by his annoying parents, and the cabaret moments only completed the believably complex landscape and relaxed the atmosphere in tense moments.

Impressions from the hall

Also for those who know me, I'm the one who is never the eyes, but always the ears to what's happening around me. I love to pick off the record impressions from the audience at the break or at the end, although I have never appreciated these impressions coming hot, during the show, in the form of a giggly repetition of almost every line on stage — the curse I have never escaped either in Brașov or here, the reason why I don't go to the cinema much anymore and which I hope, however, will not distance me from the theatre. It's ok, I take pills beforehand and somehow manage to stay calm, we don't have to educate ourselves as an audience about the show. But I still want to prick the guilty parties with the fact that, if it had been an immersive show, with the fate of the characters depending on the lines or actions of the spectators, I doubt that many people would have moved or that anyone would have meowed.

During the break, the ladies who kept saying, at every line of Iura's during the show, "He's Moldovan, that's how they are!" wanted to debate what they had understood up to that point and I won't go into detail here with the stories, I just want to say that they were very far from what the rest of us had seen. 

Unlike Brașov, which is familiar to me, here I didn't hear any phones ringing, but I saw those lights that light up on the back of some phones when they ring and create a club atmosphere, I felt vibrations in the chairs along the row, so much so that I thought for a moment that there was something immersive here and we were being given vibrating props to test, and in the end I saw too many screens lit up in scrolling disinterested, probably just out of habit, because their eyes were still on the stage.

Far from demonizing the Oradea audience for not meeting my "standards", with a strong emphasis on the previous quotation marks, I want to demonize the spectators who come to the theater without really wanting to be there and who end up behaving as such — whether they are from Brașov, Bucharest, Sibiu, Timișoara, Bacău or Oradea (I don't know if I've seen theater elsewhere, I admit that here I only wanted to brag about how much theater I've seen, so that you can explain why I "allow" the arrogance of demanding a little respect for the artistic act and for those around me, if it's relevant to anyone). 

As for the wisdom I gleaned from the audience, I would end with what the loud spectator who bothered me the most during the two and a half hours said at the end, a statement with which I agreed and which made me find within myself some resources for forgiveness: "You don't laugh at a stand-up show like this."

I want to end with the urge to (re)see The cage of fools in Oradea: a frothy mixture and glamour between traditional and progressive, a good reminder that there really is room under the disco ball for everyone, especially if we relate to ourselves and others with relaxation and curiosity, allowing ourselves to shine as much as we feel like, without invoking extremist theories when we don't like that some Jeannot or Mercedes shines brighter.