The performance, based on Max Blecher’s 1936 novel “Adventures in Immediate Irreality”, opened on Friday, 25 April 2025. Tudor Lucanu directs and signs the stage adaptation and scenography.
Woven in a poetic language rooted in surrealism, the performance encourages reflection on a particularly relevant theme in this day and age, the fragility of the self, using various media technology to create an uncannily familiar world, a space defined by change as a side effect of the fear of stagnation. The director extracts episodes from Blecher’s autobiographical prose and incorporates them into an installation of dreamlike photograms of everyday banality – reality as seen through the eyes of a young man who anticipates his imminent death, with lucidity and detachment.
The life of the protagonist absorbed in the contemplation of his own disappearance unravels in introspective vignettes, while disease and sexual pulsions fight for domination over his frail body. The actors Alexandra Tarce, Cecilia Lucanu-Donat, Cosmin Stănilă, Radu Dogaru and Matei Rotaru bring to life this inner world that we are allowed to take a peek at, before the conscience that animates it is obliterated. Tudor Lucanu’s imaginative scenography, Gábor Zsófia’s superb costumes and Radu Dogaru’s exquisite music magically construct, deconstruct and reconstruct a molten reality, helping to transpose on stage all the corporeal emotion infusing Blecher’s writings.
You can read more about the performance here
Born in Botoșani, Romania, in 1909, the writer Max Blecher was the protagonist of a short and tragic life story, being afflicted with a then incurable disease, which left its mark on his entire literary work. “Adventures in Immediate Irreality”, his debut novel, is considered an atypical masterpiece of Romanian literature, drawing comparisons with Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Robert Musil.
Cover photo: (c) Nicu Cherchiu
