Meleg férfiak, rideg nők. Két vendégjáték a TNB színpadán

In the autumn of 2023, the National Theatre of Bucharest indeed seems a welcoming place to visitors from afar. It appears as a place capable of redefining its own role in the post-national condition by questioning concepts such as nation, people, democracy, and enemies, as well as the possibilities of theatre as a gathering place. For if the nation is a politically defined social unit, then the national theatre is inherently a political forum, a workshop for societal critique and experimentation. And if we consider the success of experimentation from the perspective of efficiency and effectiveness as per Schechner’s theory and Grotowski’s act of transgression, we can assert: the audience member loudly protesting the beauty of the murder of fascists in Catarina, or the viewer leaving their seat at the end of The History of Violence, or in other words, the audience member disturbed enough to deviate from their spectator identity and the self-regulation of the theatrical code defining it, is indeed the successful experiment itself.