translated by Alistair Ian Blyth,
Routledge, 2020
In Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare, visionary modernist
theatre director Aureliu Manea analyses the theatrical possibilities of
Shakespeare. Through nineteen Shakespeare plays, Manea sketches the
intellectual parameters, the visual languages, and the emotional worlds
of imagined stage interpretations of each; these nineteen short essays
are appended by his essay ‘Confessions,’ an autobiographical meditation
on the nature of theatre and the rôle of the director.
Aureliu Manea (1945-2014) made his debut as a director with a production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
at the Sibiu Theatre, which stunned Romania’s theatrical world with the
originality of its staging, and the press hailed him as a unique new
talent. Throughout his career, he created a large number of theatre and
opera productions, as well as puppet shows, creating a repertoire of
both Romanian and foreign plays, some of which had never before been
performed in Romania, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Manea is considered a Romanian director who revolutionised and reformulated theatre.
Macbeth, directed by Aureliu Manea, Ploiești Theatre, Romania, 1976
