The Choice

Synopsis

Written in 1960, in Versoix (Switzerland), the play "Choice" is the parable through which Their Majesties King Michael I and Queen Anne translate the feelings of a world in adrift. In the midst of the Cold War, the world has lost its compass, and our "evaporated country" (Emil Cioran) groans under the Soviet flag and receives orders from the Red Kremlin. An apathetic West abandoned - for who knows how long - countries that were once part of the Free World. The "Great Soviet Zone surrounded by barbed wire", as Solzhenitsyn called it, would disintegrate only in 1989...

This closed world, but also the violent changes at the end of a world conflagration, are questioned and exemplified by the characters of the show "Choice" – Man, Bitter, Ease, Friend, Singer, living ideas and engrossing principles of a noble or depraved humanity.

The fight between Good and Evil is waged with masks and with the cunning typical of the characters that emerge from Iago's mantle: Bitter and Ease are the faces of the same medal, a corrupt one that shows human venality in a double effigy. One speaks in the name of... violent Leninism, the other in the name of pleasure, of a hedonism that dispenses with ideology. Faced with an essential choice, what will Man opt for? For love and charity, as Queen Ana revealed to us in a witness book of the history of the Royal House, of Romania itself.

The show directed by Alexandru Boureanu and Raluca Păun is all the more current as the human conscience is again acutely questioned in these days when the same belligerent state in eastern Romania is waging a war aimed at a new world order.

What will humanity choose?