Ion Luca Caragiale, the Mentor of the Romanian Theatre

Abstract

In the world of theatre, what we see is the result of an existing vision, which is the outcome of two willpowers that mingle into a singular understanding of two complex personalities of two strong characters, but in the same time, full of sensibility: the playwright and the actor. The most important and representative in Romanian drama is Ion Luca Caragiale, prolific not only as a playwright, novelist, pamphleteer, but also head of theatre, political commentator, and journalist.

A brilliant theoretician of theatre, he characterized his state of mind and his way to look at things, in a very special way. For him, theatre was a constructive art, with its roots in the real inter human conflicts that occur and manifest themselves through the characters and their passions, considering that people are the work elements that give life to the conflict on stage. He also regarded the human soul as a mirror capable of rendering the conscience, not only the looks.

In his plays, Caragiale uses both the close-up plan, in which the character appears exactly as he is, but also the remote plan, in which we can see only the beautiful part of the character, creating a singular image that is both accurate and beautiful. All his ideas concerning theatre and the literary drama issues, his analysis on the vision and the creating process of an actor, hold their value even today and represent a landmark in today’s world of theatre.