Liviu Ciulei and The Last Ones: Between Personal Trauma, Psychodrama, and Collective Drama

Authors

  • Anca Hațiegan Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Liviu Ciulei, The Last Ones, Gorky, Psychodrama, Moreno, socialist realism, communism, theatre, Romania

Abstract

This paper focuses on an early role in the theatrical career of the actor, director, and scenographer Liviu Ciulei (1923-2011), created on the stage of the theatre gifted to him by his father, the civil engineer Liviu Ciulley, in 1946. The role in question is Pyotr from the play The Last Ones by Russian playwright Maxim Gorky, which premiered at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest on the 16th of March 1948. My point is that Liviu Ciulei was drawn to this play by a psychodramatic impulse, finding in it issues related to his father who, like the protagonist in Gorky’s play, had embroiled his family in a major scandal when his son was only thirteen years old. The season in which the play premiered was marked by the increasing interference of communist authorities in art, so the intense psychodramatic process through which Liviu Ciulei consciously or unconsciously worked through his early adolescent trauma intertwined with the collective drama represented by the imposition of the Soviet-enforced communist regime in Romania at the end of World War II.

Author Biography

Anca Hațiegan, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

ANCA HAȚIEGAN, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, specialising in the history of Romanian theatre. She is the author of Cărțile omului dublu (2010), about the everyday theatricality of society under the constant surveillance of the communist period and how this was reflected in the novels of the time, and Dimineața actrițelor (2019), about the earliest Romanian actresses. Another book of hers, Ciulei și spectrul Tatălui. O psihobiografie (Ciulei and the Spectrum of the Father: A Psychobiography) dedicated to the Romanian-born actor, director, and scenographer Liviu Ciulei, is to be released in autumn 2024. She also contributed to numerous collective volumes published in Romania.

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Published

2024-07-27

How to Cite

Hațiegan, A. (2024). Liviu Ciulei and The Last Ones: Between Personal Trauma, Psychodrama, and Collective Drama. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica, 69(1), 77–97. Retrieved from https://dramatica.ro/index.php/j/article/view/304