Silence as a Figural Event: Shakespeare in the Repertory of the National Radio Theatre
Silence as a Figural Event: Shakespeare in the Repertory of the National Radio Theatre

Summary/Abstract: The remarkable coherence of Shakespeare’s broadcast at the National Romanian Theater in successive crisis contexts, both moral and institutional, before and after the events in 1989, explains and participates – in a way that has to be deciphered and understood – at the symbolic re-capitalization of the public service and to the mutual consensus on the role, on the National Broadcast Radio Theatre’s mission in the process of de-ideologization and redefinition of the entire cultural system in the logic of the cultural market. The Shakespearian theatrical laboratory functions symbolically, logically, morally, as a high-accuracy magnifying glass. We will try to accredit the radio-drama as silence-generating polyphony. A silence full of life, amplified by the accelerated movement of signs and of a reflexive, active, intense, open intentionality… In other words, if the theatre is the art of interrogations, then the radio-drama was not during communism and it is not even now a bedtime story for listeners, because theatre listeners are not part of the cliché of the object-listener.Ask the substance and importance of Shakespeare’s plays and the volume of their radio mediation in the context of the period must be appreciated also from the perspective of the cultural production fields’ articulation. Paul Grigoriu, renowned director and former manager of the Romanian Radio Broadcast Society, considers that the radio’s offer, even in the toughest years of the totalitarian regime, “a refuge of the heart”, of certain authenticity, an uncontaminated part of Romanian culture, a kind of “cavern” or island, one could say, in which ideas and imagination have continued to prosper… For the great repertory of the NRT, totalizing more than 2000 titles, an accident-free transition has taken place, and without the noisy de-mythologizing that have affected other authors and the critical canon in general. Shakespeare’s work continues to represent a durable phenomenon, a center of diffusion if the great themes and interrogations, a model, principle, resource of social imagination, emblematic for the construction of reality and “our feeling of present”.

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