THE LOVE OF TREE ORANGES

In "Love for Three Oranges", based on a story by Carlo Gozzi, the game of love, halfway between passion and sexual obsession, builds up a blissful, exciting, funny and graceful dream... We are confronted with a ceremony, a stylish and powerful celebration of theatre. The director's success consists in transforming a starless troupe in a star-troupe the show is the most fetching debut we've had in professional theatre of late.

Ludmila Patlanjoglu - Adevarul

The thrill in Nona Ciobanu's shows, what makes her gain a special place among our directors, is the purity of her discourse, the clarity of the feelings, the light shared by her characters. Among the so frequent disfigurement of the individual and social being, the shows of this young director become springs of warmth and humor.

Ilinca Florescu - Romania Libera

Nona Ciobanu is a young promising director, with a propensity for playfulness and fabulousness. Her mise-en-scene is a delectable and meanwhile subtle figment, very well visualized and clear-cut. This overflowing ingenuity is triggered by the way she defines space - the main source of the most spectacular forms and colors, nuanced and harmoniously mingled in a special and vigorous plasticity.

Marina Constantinescu - Romania Literara

Her approach to the text is a subtly modern one. Nona Ciobanu's view of Gozzi's tale is half spellbound, half ironic. The rhythm has the gradualness of a fairy tale, yet there are deliberate stumbles, which substantiate a contemporary attitude. The prevailing effort results in a mixture - half serious, half jocular, of symbolic connotations and ... therapeutic latencies. Fabulousness blends in, too, as a kind of reality deformed by dream - a subtle way of suggesting we're hallucinating.

Victor Scoradet - Contemporanul

An enchanting show, a somersault of images, light, fantasy, humor, which form a chain around the audience right away... What is new and remarkable in Nona Ciobanu's show? The vitality of thinking and the expressionism of the senses. The patterns and rules of Commedia dell'Arte are pushed back, beyond Gozzi and Goldoni. It's a 20th century Commedia dell'Arte, and Gozzi is our contemporary.

Irina Budeanu - Rampa

A very self-assertive show, "Love for Three Oranges" evinces an autonomous theatrical thinking in point of form and style - which recommends Nona Ciobanu as a director who makes good promises for the theatre of tomorrow. She is aware that in a genuine theatrical metaphor, meanings and the meanings underneath them merge with the lights, movement and set design. The hyper-sign thus defined by the director's vision is brought forth by the imagination that unifies these elements.

Mircea Morariu - Steaua

The dictatorship of the image implies a strong interior dynamism that in itself grants Nona Ciobanu's shows the bizarre surface of a river which is simultaneously whirling and still. Nona Ciobanu's approach to the text reminds one of the way in which adults come across their childhood dolls, more or less accidentally. Obviously, she feels the temptation to resume playing and succumbs to it willingly. Nonetheless both pleasure and living within the conventions imply abiding by the rules of the game; everything is different now. In exchange, an intelligent and detachedly entertained view appeared.

Ionela Lita – Contemporanul

In her interpretation of the text Nona Ciobanu reveals a relentless gusto for creating forms that structure a hierarchy of images, belonging in a world where the fabulous component sometimes verging on the grotesque abounds in sexual inflections. The show is not limited to a faithful transposition of the text but surpasses it, augments it with symbolic characters, drawing upon expressionistic or surrealistic sources and successfully avoiding the redundancy likely to be caused by the manifold components of the theatrical hyper-sign.

Dan Oprina - Contemporanul

Nona Ciobanu's debut is an exceptional one, free from awkwardness. While watching her show, one realizes that Romanian theatre isn't dead and that, after a transitory breakdown, it's slowly, but decisively, recovering, bringing new actors and new directors in the spotlight.

Anca Delia Comaneanu - Tineretul Liber

Love for Three Oranges"- an extraordinary show, in which a man makes love to a curtain.

Felicia Mihali - Evenimentul zilei