Every culture possesses in its classical zone, icy cold peaks to which pilgrimages are undertaken, and burning hot sources, permanently connected with present-day circumstances by all manners of bridges and channels. For Romania, A Lost Letter, a comedy of manners by Ion Luca Caragiale—a playwright and prose writer, a basic author due to the conception and means through which he asserts the specific national, comic spirit—is a burninghot source of this kind.

The life of this play is a somewhat odd phenomenon; acted almost permanently, it draws full houses—from schoolchildren to pensioners, who listen to a text they know by heart, whisper the spoken-cues beforehand, looking forward to the sallies of humour, watching for the punches, fully enjoying some nuance of the interpretation, as only music fans weigh the virtuosity of an instrumentalist. In their turn, the actors deal with it as with a great score, and its tackling is a foolhardy attempt and a certificate of maturity.

The fact that a play written at the end of the last century, in the solid traditional manner of a realistic satire, can give birth to and keep up so strong a theatrical myth, is in itself exceptional. It is not in any case justified by the subject, by the originality of the plot: in the thick of elections which absorb the public life in a little provincial town, a love letter sent by the prefect to his mistress—the wife of his best friend—is found, then stolen and negotiated like a political weapon; the lady's husband is an influential person locally, far older than she, an honest-minded cuckold with all the advantages resulting from a cunning credulity and a sort of idyllic boorishness. Then follow threats, arguments, a ludicrous muddle leading inevitably to a compromise: but the usual bourgeois electoral farce has an unexpected dénouement: the headquarters of the party oblige them to elect as deputy a contemptible, almost senile non-entity, but who in his turn wishing to secure the electoral mandate, had commited the same kind of blackmail with another compromising letter. What had seemed only an innocent vaudeville imbroglio revealed its character of complex artistic radiography. Constructed perfectly, the comedy combines picturesque, amusing episodes connected with the trajec-tory of the troublesome letter, until it reaches the woman it was addressed to, with an image of the social and human existence, achieved with extraordinary vigour. A Lost Letter is endowed with a miraculous power of syn-thesis and expression; every word, every scene is an image of the world it depicts, a blend of vulgarity and pathos, of good-naturedness and abjection, of upstartism and demagogy, from which the ridiculous and at the same time terribly real personages take shape, so full of vitality, so concentrated that they have lost their character of fiction and have become human prototypes. And their spoken cues have penetrated into current speech, having become set phrases. The extraordinary amusing character of the text is unfortunately difficult to translate, but for the Romanian spectator it has lost none of its evocatory resonances. The special pungency of the language, both vulgar and affected, the penetration of the rudiments of journalistic cant, high-sounding and empty, the borrowing of bookish "mannerly" elements, mark the beginning of a modern concern for the language. As nothing has become old fashioned in this work, A Lost Letter is the supreme masterpiece of Romanian dramaturgy.

A letter of such cultural importance was bound to be given a performance worthy of it. Since 1948, on the academic-type stage of the I. L. Caragiale National Theatre of Bucharest, numerous generations have made their apprenticeship as spectators repeatedly watching the staging, now classical too, directed by Sica Alexandrescu, today the doyen of Romanian stage managers. His performance is a concert in which, at every stand there is a reputed soloist purposing to give to every retort the expressiveness of an aria of bravery. The cast of great actors—with few exceptions the same as 20 years ago—have polished to perfection every nuance, every intention, lending the structure of the performance the transparence of crystal. In the minds of audiences, the characters have identified themselves so perfectly with the appearance, gestures, and inflections of the voices of actors Alexandra Giugaru, Costache Antoniu, Radu Beligan, Ion Fintesteanu, Marcel Anghelescu—the illustrious gallery of People's Artists, which younger actors (Carmen Stanescu, Dem Radulescu) have joined, fitting in perfectly—that for a time, it seemed daring that any other scenic image could be suggested.

And now this daring idea has become one of the events of the 1971-1972 season: at the Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra Theatre, Liviu Ciulei (an accomplished artist, stage manager, scenographer, actor, one of the creators to whom the Romanian theatre owes, essentially, its explosion of modern thinking) has achieved, with a perfectly faithful observance of the text, a new version.

While in the "classical" staging, the entire mise en scéne is subordinated to the speech, setting off its quintessential function, the new staging attempts to drill deeper into the life strata deposited in the play. The scenographer's and stage manager's vision go deep into the environment; it brings into relief the relations between the personages, it portrays them carefully, noting their habits, with regard to the theatrical process itself. The actors of the cast (a team of brilliant comedians, at the height of their creative force: Toma Caragiu, Octavian Cotescu, Petre Gheorghiu, Rodica Tapalaga, Dem Radulescu, Stefan Banica) are of the age of the personages they act. The stage manager requires their behaviour to be exact and varied—he makes them react properly and vividly to the situation, to their partners' cues. The scenography too has freed itself from tradition and gained genuineness: the prefect's dwelling, for example, is filled with a jumble of ill-matched things of lamentable provincial elegance, in inevitable bad taste. The setting off of the implicit truth of the play and the force of revelation of the performance succeeds in transfiguring a well-known thing into a surprise. The spectator does not feel he is hearing the personages speak, but that he sees them live. The lovely adulterous lady who risked being compromised by the publication of the letter is no longer so ethereal and helpless, she struggles with the energy of a lioness to escape danger. She obliges both her husband and her lover to act in her interest and she actually succeeds in managing all the affairs of the district, which she had always known how to influence. The two rivals for the seat of deputy in the Chamber join the electoral struggle with might and main; they unscrupulously use any means that can serve their interests—lies, blackmail, forgery; the public meeting at the townhall where each of them state their "political programme," uttering solemn nonsense and pretending to be patriotic, is a real arena. The personage whose duty is to solve the conflict, the half-witted deputy the government wanted elected, is interpreted by Liviu Ciulei as a reject of the cosmopolitan aristocracy, with a vacant look quite incapable of grasping the elementary facts of a situation, but at the same time dreadfully cunning, and giving himself the airs and arrogance of an influential politician, snobbish and contemptuous. Through the personages the play is lent its original vitality. The brilliant verbal cover, with its piercing effects is not dealt with for itself, it does not disguise the conflict, on the contrary, it brings out its acuity. The finale of the performance, the popular demonstration when the elections come to an end, with the traditional get-togethers and speeches delivered on such occasions, is the climax of the new interpretation; the stage managing organized a huge banquet on the stage: bitters and snacks are served and traditional dishes whose strong flavour floods the house, glasses are clinked while a brass band plays deafeningly; the people hug one another, in a sham atmosphere of fraternization.

It is a metaphor of rare suggestive force of bourgeois petty politics, with its whole train of demagogy, inconstancy, profittering, with unassimilated West-European influences and rudimentary Machiavellisms. The comical frenzy is thus paired with a sarcastic projection, bitter and lacking illusions.

Keen theatre-goers have got a new interest now: they go from one performance to the other, they analyse, compare, form their preferences, agree or not with the new vision, find it hard to give up some well-known familiar image, choose one nuance from one performance, another from the other. And they are captivated by the vigorous acting of Toma Caragiu, Octavian Cotescu, Petre Gheorghiu, by the vivid images of the mise en scène, by the acidly ugly scenery of the new staging; sometimes they are faithful to the traditional interpretation, to the classical portraits, to their unshakeable perfection. This friendly artistic contest occasioned by the dramatist's anniversary will bring increased renewing force to the Romanian theatre and to the power of discernment and taste of audiences.

The two performances are a homage to the classical values, productive for modern culture, a living culture in perpetual motion.