THE CANTERBURY TALES

Does "all the world is a stage" sound familiar? This week, theater viewers going to Teatrul Mic (The Small Theater) will be able to explore the world of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales made tangible and palatable for the present-day public in a contemporary, vivid, visually alluring performance by Romanian theater director Nona Ciobanu, on October 7 and 10.

Ana Maria Iancu – Daily News

Classics reviewed

In adapting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Nona Ciobanu went straight to the playful heart of the matter – man’s need to tell and listen to stories.

The Mic Theatre’s production is a modern interpretation of few of Chaucer’s tales; a visual show with a lot of humor.

Steven Berkoff’s Shakespeare’s Villains was a fine showcase for that quality shared by effective villains and skilful actors: the ability to grab an audience’s attention and hold it.

The show constructed by Nona Ciobanu starting from The Canterbury Tales is a modern, sophisticated staging, but it also represents an attempt to recover that lost rapport – so much purer, livelier, merrier – that Chaucer-the-story-teller once had with his own public. Through the extraordinary energy deployed by the seven actors of the Mic Theatre, a world (then another and yet another world) is constructed and populated, in an inexhaustible show of the power to invent a cascade of things, never censuring the least joke that suggests itself to the imagination; consequently this show recalls precisely what narrative art used to be, once upon a time – something that was not to be kept in check, something oral and not very demure either, something meant to give pleasure.

Giving theatrical expression to Chaucer’s text, Nona Ciobanu has hit a point in the center of the playful heart of the subject – the human pleasure of tale telling and tale listening.

InfoBrit Magazine

A double theatrical event at the Romanian UK – RO Festival

The Canterbury Tales staged at the Mic Theatre is proof to its director’s virtuosity as well as to the no less obvious virtuosity of its light designer, Iulian Baltatescu and – last but not least – obviously, to the virtuosity of its seven actors: Claudiu Istodor, Mihaela Radescu, Liliana Pana, Vitalie Bantas, Radu Zetu, Bogdan Talasman and Ada Simonica. Five stories in which the actors’ parts are shifted in everybody’s view and the attention of the audience is thus kept alert through the burlesque edge and the natural charm of the expression, through the actors’ performance and through the live expression of the bodies and the costumes; meanwhile, all is presented in an extremely stylized manner, yet retaining the setting of the past age or ages – and worlds – epitomized by Chaucer’s thought and characters, before Shakespeare, in the classical manner corresponding to the standards of the remoter times of the 14th century. Each new story is introduced via the… ‘birth’ of an immense egg, by the mediation of one of the characters.

All that follows is a celebratory romance of life and death, a kind of happy dance – no matter if the ending be near or just an amorous encounter. The profuse overflow of the director’s imagination is nevertheless kept in check and projected onto a spider’s web that is shown forth by the play of lights looming in the background between the episodes. The actors’ movement and bodily expression are outstanding, and one can see their gusto in acting at every point.

….The charm of spiritual youth is passed forth and communicated from the stage to the audience’s seats, alongside with the passage from an actual medieval literary work to a modern, imaginatively autonomous theatrical creation of an artist such as Nona Ciobanu – who is also the author of the Chaucerian texts’ general adaptation and of their adaptation for the stage. All the others’ performances come naturally after, in a show endowed with substantiality while also enhanced by glamorous stage-effects.

Nicolae Prelipceanu - Romania Libera

Canterbury Tales at the Mic Theatre – An Excellent Show by Nona Ciobanu

At the beginning of the 90s, director Nona Ciobanu started out in the field of theatrical art with a self-possessed voice that already had a mature profile. Counted among the “ the hopeful young people of the stage” she was actually someone you could take for granted. The prizes awarded at the time testified to the fact that an original talent had appeared, a young director capable of giving substance in acting to the poetry inherent in any theatrical text. In the tales bequeathed by the 14th century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer, director Nona Ciobanu found suitable material: the distance in time is not a barrier for detecting similarities.

…She derives the dramatic substance of her tales from a sense of the ambiguities inherent in the human soul. The merry group on the stage has fun discovering every time the egg or point from which is spun the tale about some people of mark or, on the contrary, some ordinary people – who are all of them bent on making their wishes come true. Soon, these stories will turn seven centuries old, yet our own stage radiates with the mirth and melancholy of today: the theatrical world throws a firm bridge over the marble slabs of the Canterbury Cathedral and the grey sidewalk of the Sarindar Street where the Mic Theatre opens its doors in Bucharest.

Magdalena Boiangiu

Old Tales

Nona Ciobanu is a director who can tell tales on the stage thoroughly, i.e. beautifully and coherently. For she can construct plain modules, readily combinable and easy to dismantle, she can release the initiatic spirit underlying the pilgrimage and – something that has interested me a lot and which I enjoyed a lot, she can bring back so many of the things hidden behind the final performance of this particular team of actors brought over by Nona Ciobanu to her own point of view: Liliana Pana, Ada Simonica, Mihaela Radescu, Radu Zetu, Bogdan Talasman, Claudiu Istodor and Vitalie Bantas. One essential element in this show is – the real and virtual – scenery designed by Iulian Baltatescu. Plain, unsophisticated metal structures can be moved over the stage very easily and fast, schematizing setting props – a bed, a throne, a dungeon a.s.o – compose and recompose a multitude of spaces to accompany us on our pilgrimage. A plain clothes pilgrimage, with neutral costumes to match the clothes of the monk-pilgrims, all based on beige and sand-colour tinges, with curtains made of elastic strips capable of giving substance or a volumetric logic to the stage or functioning as symbolic accessories to the costumes, while maintaining the unsophisticated, primary atmosphere of any initiatic scene or sequence of gestures. The projections used, efficiently but attentively balanced, augment the fabulous, the mysterious, the unexpected dimensions of the shown facts, bringing forth their vital power and their emergence from the entrails of life and from the deep layers of meaning. Nona Ciobanu selects some tales, some significant and repetitive kernels, others that move the situations and relations in different cultural spaces, representing narrative threads and initiatic scenario motivations which actually project and transpose while also revealing a basically similar human universe, eternal and unchanging in essence. The scene fills with market people, emperors and empresses , salesmen, witches, Muslim knights, Thebans, kings or queens, as the case may be, all meant to agree with various places and subjects; yet this scene is free from terrible demonstrations, from ostentatious feats, or from any precious signs – and it brings instead story-tellers to the fore. Seven story-tellers, seven actors, seven voices that take turns setting the tone of a certain happening, giving birth to the egg of fantasy – from whose embryo emerge the tales; they act about eight characters each all through the show, eight completely different characters during the staging. Clad in long gowns, with generous hoods, the seven are the protagonists of the pilgrimage in its diversity, revealing what makes us resemble each other or differ from each other as adventure goes, as danger goes, in point of versatility, honour, lying, loving, betrayal, belief, sin, rightfulness and morals. I have felt real joy to meet again with these actors rendered so fresh, so ready for the stage experience, also ready to wipe the dust off the screen, to get rid of inertia and the acting recipes.

Marina Constantinescu - ROMANIA LITERARA

Pligrimage to the Fairy-Tale World

The season at the Mic Theatre in Sarindar Street opens with Canterbury Tales, directed by Nona Ciobanu, one member of the wonderful generation of directors that appeared after December 1989 in Romania. The inclination of this talented director towards the fabulous has been illustrated in the course of time by the staging of another two plays pertaining to the same field, The Love of the Three Oranges by Carlo Gozzi and

As You Like It, by Shakespeare. The first episode through which Nona Ciobanu has manifested her international presence so far was her participation to the Edinburgh Theatre Festival where she competed with Never-Ending Youth, Everlasting Life. The director’s repertoire includes Melissa by Nikos Kazanthakis, The Dogs’ Waltz by Leonid Andreev,

The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge and The Future Is A Pulp Story by Vlad Zografi.

The composition of the show integrates harmoniously the director’s script with the musical arrangement by Cristian Tarnovetchi and with the scenery designed by Iulian Baltatescu, an old-time collaborator of Nona Ciobanu’s, member of the Toaca Foundation. One is pleasantly surprised – during the five adapted stories – by the performing gusto and richly creative energy of the seven actors and pilgrims who enact the ways of knowing one’s fellow-man: Claudiu Istodor, Radu Zetu, Ada Simonica, Liliana Pana, Bogdan Talasman and Vitalie Bantas.

Razvan Tanase - The Careers Magazine

Nona Ciobanu’s stage reading selects a number of the tales that make up the vast literary work of the above-mentioned title authored by Sir Geoffrey Chaucer (1342 or 1343 – 1400), “the founding father of English Literature” who fashioned in this text what some people have called the fresco of the British Isles society as it appeared in Chaucer’s time – since the narrative frame of the story (with 30 pilgrims on their way to the great Abbey of Canterbury biding their time on the long journey with tales told in turn about witty, suspenseful happenings, or about bleaker events, with exemplary endings) allows Chaucer to set in motion characters of varying ages, pertaining to various ranks, callings and trades galore.

The director has managed to link the episodes she has selected so as to form a network of theatrical “happenings” whose coherence is granted by a scenically purified, efficient image – obtained with the help of just a few metal railing structures to which are tied some elastic ribbons, all of which circumscribe in action the various topics of the plot (the scenery, light design and projections are due to Iulian Baltatescu), further underlined by some very expressive music (arranged by Cristian Tarnovetschi), but especially crayoned thanks to the actors’ play which is lively, basically relaxed and free, precise while also being flexible. Irrespective of their ages or status as stars of the Romanian stage, Claudiu Istodor, Mihaela Radescu, Liliana Pana, Vitalie Bantas, Radu Zetu, Bogdan Talasman and Ada Simonica deploy their resources with visible gusto, building up together an amusing show, ever so pleasant except for the very few lengthy moments of the second part and the actually futile actualizations of the second part that one tends to resent slightly, but just like a pebble that pinches you in the shoe’s heel. This show functions not just as Nona Ciobanu’s comeback at the Mic Theatre (where she also directed some eight years ago, if I am not mistaken, a very interesting Shakespearean Twelfth Night) but it also works as Nona Ciobanu’s return to her favourite professional instruments – the simple and direct stage language, centered on the actor as the instrument of team acting – which is something that alone can bring a fresh, fragrant air capable to renew the reclusive atmosphere in the ivory tower of the theatrical trade.

Alice Georgescu - THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPER

Canterbury Tales, a modern, spectacular reading of a great classical text signed Geoffrey Chaucer!

The Romanian Chronicle – September 24th, 2004

This show has something magical in it. During the show, every minute makes you feel surrounded by friends and each tale brings you back to the feelings of your home and hearth. So you end up feeling at home in the world and within yourself.

You will have the opportunity to (re)discover some wonderful artists (as walking and talking tales), a modern sound track and an inspiring combination of emotion and exquisite professionalism – all fitted in an outstanding close-knit theatrical and fine art conception. A performance that cancels finale parts and consequently decrees that the destinty of the human kind has the form of a never-ending story. A story told with optimism, comic detachment and vital irony. One hour and three quarters’ time of your lives, give or take one second, that you won’t live to regret for a single moment!

Razvana Nita - Port.Ro

Back to the Present

With this new premiere, Canterbury Tales, the director seems to me to return to one of her favourite themes: the initiatic path broken by narrating, by fairy-tales in a world where the palpable reality is just one of several possible, many-sided aspects of the world. A group of pilgrims – people of today or people of the past whose pilgrimage may start in as many ways, or moments as there are unknown horizons written within the cocoon borne along by everyone – a group which is ready to stand under the sign of a search oriented by the discovery of value, of meaningfulness; hence the incantation “….to Canterbury may God accompany us, and may our search be worthy of reward” which is repeated for every new beginning imperatively requested by the light filling the stage…

Crenguta Manea - ARHITEXT DESIGN Magazine

On the path of light