“Cloud Tectonics” / “Tectonica Norilor”, German State Theatre, Timișoara
Jeremy Malies in Romania
2 February 2025
A red LED clock shows us the true duration of the action, but something is wrong. This 1995 play by José Rivera soon becomes a dance to the music of time; it plays with time, shifts time, moves time up and down a gearbox while the central character (Aníbal played by Marc Illich) interacts with Celestina, a heavily pregnant ethereal waif played by Silvia Török.
It’s “Brechty-Brecht” as Joan Littlewood would have said. Director László Bocsárdi quickly establishes the famed distancing effect; Török must appear to have been out in a storm so a stagehand empties a flagon of water over her!
The tone might be exaggerated, absurdist and non-naturalistic but you believe instantly in these characters who are joined by Aníbal’s brother, Nelson, played by Harold Weisz. He is a combat veteran returning from the Siege of Mostar which had taken place while Rivera was writing the play. The brothers are competitive in the same way as Martin McDonagh’s characters. Elsewhere, the style smacks of Ionesco or Joe Orton.
Later or perhaps at the beginning – I was confused as to time in a positive way – the backdrop is post-apocalyptic. Aníbal is a baggage handler at Los Angeles Airport but the feared “Big One” has come. The city has been rebuilt after the earthquake and has become the nation’s Capitol. So perhaps Nelson has fought in another Balkans War? It’s all of a piece and contributes to the sense of flux and cyclical history. There is added resonance in the fact that Los Angeles is indeed ravaged by a natural disaster now and relocating the Capitol would not be beyond Donald Trump.
Bocsárdi immediately creates a community of the night as Celestina shivers in front of Aníbal at a bus stop. The director then propels the characters through a narrative that manages to be frenetic and elegiac at the same time, such is his ability to shift mood and the technical armoury of the actors. Illich and Weisz both age in front of us doing their own makeup, again in real-time, at a mirror. (Makeup design by Ilici Bojița.)
Tempus fugit? Not quite; more subtle. This is an odd and haunting temporal landscape. Time stretches out, speeds up and implodes. I enjoyed the production so much that I should have welcomed yet more recurrence even at an interval-less two hours in which I had been concentrating on the English surtitles. The play is performed in German in a translation by Lucian Vărşăndan. The English surtitles are, of course, Rivera’s original. Unprepared as usual, I marvelled at their idiomatic tone until the penny dropped as if through treacle.
“Time and I don’t hang out together” says Celestina. Rivera is a discovery for me. There is much more to him than the award-nominated film The Motorcycle Diaries. His play Marisol (also apocalyptic) is the best known and has been compared to Genet. I should like to hang out more not just with Celestina but in this world created by László and his cast. Illich’s facility in making his voice age when he plays his older self may be the most haunting transformation I will see this year. There might be broad absurdist strokes here (at the close the set is taken into the roof using the vertical flies) but it’s a closely observed magical realism project full of wit and subtlety.
Our senses are assaulted (positively) in many ways here; notably from a clanking ominous sound design which indeed suggests – to quote Celestina again – that the stars are being scraped across the sky. “How can one night be two years?” asks Aníbal as he ponders having been in and out of a metaphysical realm. And the title? The characters are confounded by the natural world and accept that they will no more understand cloud tectonics than the architecture of the wind. I left moved, a little feverish (which I believe is the show’s intention) and guessing that this will be the highlight of my trip.
