The Arsonists

„BIEDERMANN … ”– directorial notes

There are stage plays that at times become more “contemporaneous” than at the moment they were written. Maybe this is due to the respective playwrights (for having let the plays open for ulterior events), but surely history is at fault also. BIEDERMANN AND THE ARSONISTS is one of those plays.

The extremist attempts (whichever courthouse judges these crimes against humanity???) made Max Frisch’s text become an extremely actual play. I must confess that, as director, I’m not interested in the immediate actuality, I rather believe in performances relating to a continual actuality.
And I’m not interested in the immediate actuality because theatre never or nowhere has it solved social or political problems (this is a known fact!, left or right activists cannot fake it, they couldn’t make us believe the contrary even if they’d organise 7 round tables, 8 square ones and 13 intelligent festivals about popular contemporary topics, those to be worn in the summer-autumn season or winter-spring trends). I think theatre works towards other areas. In our case, if the extremists, the ones that the play is about, would come to the theatre (God forbid!), their purposes would be different from becoming better persons. Does anyone believe that an extremist would come to the theatre, see the performance and, as a consequence, quit being a terrorist? Let’s be serious (in the sense Radu Cosaşu means when he says that life shouldn’t be viewed as tragic, but as serious).

The performance aims to be a radiography of the “dialogue” between extremism, as an inhuman criminal act, on the one hand, and on the other hand, tolerating the inhuman, which is an equally criminal act. Evil and the compromises of accepting evil. Criminal attempts and the hypocrisy (including the “political correctness” hypocrisy) that accepts them. Extremism and cowardice. Extremism and stupidity (in matters of spirituality, stupidity is a sin). The fault of hypocrisy, of cowardice as its accomplice and of resourceful stupidity, their consequences… physical and spiritual. Gavriil Pinte, director