The production highlights the balancing act that is forced on teachers in the countryside, sometimes for bureaucratic reasons (for example, to meet the funding criteria of a project), sometimes out of pity (knowing the precarious living conditions of the less eager pupils), at other times to reconcile educational visions that are contradictory, but each reasonable in its own way. Faithfully recreated, the atmosphere of the rural school as a port where various long arms meet (the education inspectorate, the town hall, local ‘barons’, life outside, with its problems and temptations) appears as an enclave that in fact reconstitutes Romanian society and its structural problems in the moment of late Europeanization. An interrogatory treatment that is not without bitter humour and a fair dose of conflict, the production gives shape to the reality that an individual’s destiny, for good or ill, is often determined by the power of a pen.