Every time I get ready to start reading the newly published book signed by the French theater actor of Romanian origin, George Banu, I experience a feeling I had only in the long-gone days of my student days in Cluj. When in the classes of such teachers as Ion Vlad, Maria Vode-Kapusan, Rodika Bakonski, Doina Kurtikepeanu, maybe others, I also thought that I had become, in a strange way, much smarter than I really was, but I reproached myself that I could not to intuitively understand the essence and meaning of some of the things they said, which turned out to be surprisingly simple. Obviously stuff from my own neighborhood. There was indeed something useful in this ambiguity, and now that I have reached the age of old age, I am glad that from time to time, thanks to certain books, I am able to relive it. Shortthe recently self-confessed works of George Banu have, among other things, the effect of Proust’s Madeleine for me.

It was like that while reading the book Damaged itemspublished at the beginning of the summer in the Romanian translation of Cinderella Lupe by the Bucharest publishing house do not worry, a volume made possible by the photographs of Michaela Marin and Dragos Spiteru. This is about a book dedicated to their numerous, often unsuspected advantages drivers of memoryas the author calls them, objects that came into being by who knows what chance, and not due to the inexorable passage of time celestial objects, afflicted objects. In fact, George Banu makes a distinction in the content of the book between wound, as a result of an accident, and erosion, as a result of the passage of time.

Some call these subjects careless, disrespectful junkobjects that the professor feverishly searches for in antique shops or at fairs, incurring costs that even the new owner sometimes finds impossible to acquire, in much the same way that Sylvester Bonnard, the alter ego of Anatole France, sought. old books and manuscripts on the benches of the Buchy residents, they won the right to shelter in the house on the street. Rivoli, 18. They have become part of the family that lives there, they have found their place surrounded by countless Jesuses, they have their place in gift house and they also mean something of what the same George Banu once called, that is, in another book, Personal Paris.

And so, displaying all this on the computer screen, I remember what happened a long time ago. Reading Etudes on romance Jean-Pierre Richard, in which there is a separate section realist Balzac. A chapter in which the critic of poetry and depth divides the characters Human comedy in three categories including a Collector. This also includes a theater expert.

Only George Banu is a collector of supreme essence. He collects not in order to collect, but in order to save and then, why not?, to save yourself. The reason for the nocturnal partnership with either paintings or Jesus scattered around the house returns in several pages of the new book of the theater scholar. Separate or not from the cross. The wounds of these, at first glance, simple objects enter into a dialogue with the wounds of the owner, and in their company he gives voice, without words, to new monologues of impossibility. They became sharper, fiercer in the days, months, and years of the pandemic. Sometimes self-confessed monologues about depression.

During all these years of increased suffering, George Bana, and of course not only him, was taken away, forbidden, deprived of the right to go to the theater. Surrounded, as he himself says, by “severed heads, lonely hands, as in a coroner’s jug”, these objects, to which he offered the “right of asylum”, show in their specific form his gratitude. Unexpectedly, they give the owner a chance for new thoughts about the theater. Their accidental wound reminds George Bana of Peter Brook, Andriy Sherban, Rada Penchulescu, Tadeusz Kantor, Iryna Petrescu, Opera of three parallels. Who knows what other game. Next I quote a whole fragment ( Damaged items use the specific formula a fragment, to which Roland Barthes, a favorite critic of Georges Banu, dedicated one of his last essays), to which I attach particular importance: “Let us distinguish between broken and cracked– two different poses trauma. Let’s distinguish scratch and wound, as between abrasion and violation. We distinguish the works it hurts and work partial. Because what is a play, if not an unfinished work, which is waiting for a temporary completion because of the staging, because of what excites the passenger until the late return? The broken integrity of the work, if it is not restored – sometimes, unfortunately – thus survives, irreparable.No one comes to complete it, and it remains permanently inseparable from the scar of the wound.” An accident in the theater – miracle, elsewhere in the book, George Banu – can it not be compared somehow to a wound?

A wound scar may be associated with a history of wounds. Become so many wounds of memory. With sometimes unwanted accounts in the neglect or indifference of the present. In saying this, I refer to a small passage which mentions the sad fate of some paintings of King Ferdinand and Queen Elizabeth. It’s about the wounds of history, which obviously hurt painfully to this day, in that impressive fragment in which George Banu recalls an episode from his youth, when an officer of Darkness aggressively forced his father, a theater scholar, to hand over a scroll, which was considered until then to exist not necessarily anonymously , but secretly. A clear indicator of the fact that for the people of communist power, every house was unique the scene under surveillance. Hence the obsessive reading of Shakespeare in the Eastern European theater through the grid proposed by Jan Cott. And he mentioned in the book. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro