I jumped when I saw it on the publisher’s website do not worry that Octavian Sayu wrote a book called The art of being a spectator (Bucharest, 2022).

I instantly thought back to almost 40 years ago, when I was a student, and another ten or fifteen years later, when there was a book with a similar title on my to-read and, of course, must-quote list. It is about IT‘école du spectateur. The book, which together with Lire le théâtrewith Basic terms of theatrical analysis (the publishing house also published the volume in Romanian European Institute in Iasi), all have the signature of the famous, holy Anna Ubersfeld Dictionnaire du Théâtre Patrice Pavis, Jauss’ or Wolfgang Iser’s waiting horizon studies could not be missing in any serious doctoral dissertation bibliography.

Anne Ubersfeld, whom I knew as a historian of the French theater of the 17th century (we find her under the name of Anne Ubersfeld as one of the main participants in the implementation of the good Histoire littéraire de la France, even if marked by Marxism) rallied to a tendency to find and establish a set of desirable scientific tools/concepts by which commentary on a theatrical performance could be taken out of the zone of, shall we say, impressionism. Her efforts and the efforts of her colleagues created a sensation in the university environment, I read her and quoted her religiously, I followed her, but once the vogue for semiotics passed, and even pragmatics is not doing very well today, it turned out that the long-term consequences of such research minimal They have, if they still have, an exact value island.

So I was afraid that Octavian Sayu might make a mistake and become a belated Robinson Crusoe in theater research. That is, he may have put in his new book not very dry, confusing theories and theoretical concepts, but all kinds of norms, rules, conditions, the fulfillment of which should be considered mandatory, so that you can consider yourself a good, or at least acceptable, theater visitor .

Thank God, none of that. Of course, Octavian Sayu, known as a famous academic, is a recognized specialist in the drama of Beckett and Ionesco, as well as in everything that encompasses the concept today performances, has a significant amount of reading and theoretical knowledge. Which he addresses in a low-key and unostentatious way, when he also writes about the magic of the theater (with or without that defining red and gold of which George Banu wrote so beautifully), and about the individuality of the audience and the community of individuality that it brings with it. representation itself (let me remind you that it was intuited back in 1937 by Camil Petrescu in Aesthetic regime of the theater), as well as the fact that there are not only several categories of audience, but also viewers of different quality, which determines not only the uniqueness of each performance, but also its quality. Read the entire article and leave comments on Contributors.ro