‘The idea of this book was born somewhat naturally, at the suggestion of some friends, while I was working on the corrections and final editing of the third volume of Teatru în diorame. Discursul criticii teatrale în comunism [Theatre in dioramas: The discourse of theatrical criticism in communism]. They had noticed that, in various ways, in the case of each stage investigated in the project of the trilogy, the last chapter dealt with the way in which, decades later, reviews and thematic syntheses provide information not only about how the production looked, or about the significance intended by those who staged it, but also about the atmosphere, the way in which the production was received, and about the manner in which it was inscribed on the national and international map of the theatrical movement of the period. Sometimes, these chapters aroused their interest so much that they urged me, more than once, to start a separate line of research aimed at recovering, as far as possible, some ‘productions in words’ that might thus be recovered for the readers of today, be they theatre professionals, scholars, students, or just theatre-lovers of all generations. The studies collected in this volume are intended to be more than simply micro-anthologies of theatre reviews: without any pretensions of being exhaustive, they aim to recompose not just the productions as such, but also the climate in which they appeared, repositioning them, where appropriate, in relation to the canon of theatrical aesthetics that had taken shape before 1989 or pointing to the budding of new directions.’ – Miruna Runcan

Guest: Miruna Runcan – writer, theatre critic and professor in the Faculty of Theatre and Film of Babeș-Bolyai University. She is a member of the International Association of Theatre Critics and the International Federation of Theatre Researchers.