Our latest play is about insecurity
This season the Tamási Áron Theater offers a varied repertoire. After a Hungarian grotesque drama and a “wrecked opera” this time we present “Love and Other Crimes”, a unique stage adaptation of Stefan Arsenijević’s Serbian film of the same title. The play is directed by Theodor-Cristian Popescu, and this is his first work in Sepsiszentgyörgy. The premier of the play is on Wednesday, March 9, from 7 p.m., in the Great Hall of the theater.
Neither the director nor the prose company of the theater in Sepsiszentgyörgy have had a performance based on a film before. This time they invented the stage version of the screenplay written by Stefan Arsenijević–Srđjan Koljević–Bojan Vuletić. The story takes place in the Serbian capital, in the hopeless underworld of which Anica longs for a new life, but before leaving Belgrade, she decides to close the seamless threads of her life so far. As it turns out, she’s surrounded by a lot of weird people: a lifelong mafia leader, a suicidal teenage girl, pitiful gangsters, old ladies who had once seen better days, and a determined young man with a romantic spirit who turns out to have tender feelings for her. The play presents the events of a single day, and the director Stefan Arsenijević will be present at the premiere.
The director Theodor-Cristian Popescu tried to shift the focus of the plot to internal events due to the limited possibilities of the stage. He admits that the images also play an important role in the performance, but they carry a different kind of drama than the images in the film. By his account they looked for shades in the acting that aren’t quite stage-like, so we can definitely talk about an experimental performance. One of the basic themes of the story is the male-female relationship, where the director says, it is sometimes very difficult to know ourselves. The other central question is the particular existential uncertainty we all grapple with at times when we try to make sense of our everyday lives. Usually we desire more than what we can achieve, the will is stronger than the possibilities, but the deeper we dive into the causes of our inherited unhappiness, the more difficult it is for us to understand how the soul works. Are we really able to control our lives? Can we control our desires? Is it in our power to change the things that hurt us? Are we happier if we push our boundaries or if we accept our destiny?
Theodor-Cristian Popescu, a native of Turda, graduated from theater directing in Bucharest in 1994, then continued studying directing in Montana and received his doctorate from the University of the Arts in Târgu Mureş. His professional career is extremely diverse: he has worked as a director at the theaters in Cluj-Napoca and Târgu Mureş, as a teacher at the University of Theater Târgu Mureș, Bucharest and Montana, as well as at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the National Theater School of Canada. He has established and operated two independent theater companies in Bucharest and Montreal, and is currently teaching directing at the University of the Arts in Târgu Mureş.
The direct collaborators of the director: Mihai Păcurar (set and video concept), Andrei Raicu (music and sound design), Cristian Niculescu (lighting designer), Edit V. Bartha (supervisor), Mária Magdolna (help) and Krisztián Kiliti , the director of our previous production, Életigen, who worked as a playwright this time. Students of the drama department of the Sándor Plugor Art High School in Sepsiszentgyörgy will also take part in the performance. After the presentation, Love and other crimes will be shown again on March 11 and 12. Tickets will be available at the Central Ticket Office and on the Biletmaster.ro website.
