„I believe that theatre is something that, beyond craftsmanship and sweat, needs to be made with plenty of joy.”
Foto: Mihaela Marin
To celebrate Silviu Purcărete’s 50 years of work for the theatre, in 2024, the Vis-a-Vis Cultural Association initiated a grand scale project dedicated to the theatre maker: “Silviu Purcărete – 50 Years of Theatre“, a photography exhibition, curated by Adriana Moca, and a showcase website dedicated to the director. Both events were made possible through the support of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund – AFCN. We invite you hereby to discover or revisit a protean personality and the performances imagined by the „poet theatremaker”, as George Banu called him.
Purcărete directs without taking refuge in anonymity, but neither does he narcissistically, conspicuously impose himself. Resistant to excess, he instils his melancholy as a sceptical artist who finds a palliative in the communicative delight of theatre, somewhere beyond existence. A kind of theatre in which I recognize the peaceful and melancholic spirit of a great essayist of our times, of my youth, Roland Barthes. Just like Barthes, Purcărete cultivates a very nuanced look over the real, as he, too, repudiates intensely emphasized contrasts. If one wrote Le plaisir du texte, the other signs a similar profession of faith throughout his career, which could be defined as The Delight of Theatre. Purcărete’s theatre disorganizes genres and adopts the malleability of an oneiric wanderer about the nightmares or errancies of our times. These are the origins of his uniqueness.
George Banu
Silviu Purcărete envisions aesthetic spaces and impish emotional geographies, sprinkling fine humour even on the most cruel and tragic texts. He is a creator of hypnotic – though not unreal – realms. In his performances, he creates impressive galleries of paintings, juxtapositions of shadows and lights. A master of the chiaroscuro and a painter of the destinies from the classical texts he (re)visits with passion and curiosity, Purcărete appears to be a collector of beauty.
This showcase website, as well as the travelling photographic exhibition and other events related to this long and generative life in theatre are, beyond a simple back-up for the imagery of the theatre and opera performances from these 50 years, an opportunity to rediscover the joy of theatre and the spirited generosity of the director Silviu Purcărete. It is a reverence and an expression of gratitude for such a personality, distinguished with countless important awards. A mandatory admiration practice.Adriana Moca

EVENTS
“Silviu Purcărete – 50 Years in Theatre“- a photography exhibition
The photography exhibition “Silviu Purcărete – 50 Years in Theatre” opened on Saturday, May 18, 2024, at the “Constantin Brâncuși” Center of the Craiova Art Museum, as a unique collection of images from theatre and opera performances selected out of the director’s personal archive and authored by Silviu Purcărete himself and by Mihaela Marin, Dragoș Buhagiar, Helmut Stürmer, Sean Hudson, Patrick Fabre, Dorian Delureanu, Pierre Borasci, Simon Anannd (Royal Shakespeare Company), Thilo Beu, Rareș Zaharia, Adi Bulboacă, Alex Condurache, Eöri-Szabó Zsolt, Peter Uhan, Petru Cojocaru, Iulian Ursachi, Nicu Cherciu, Aki Tanaka, Aoi Itoh and others.
Adriana Moca, initiator of the “Silviu Purcărete – 50 Years in Theatre” project and curator of the exhibition, has been part of the artistic team of the “Marin Sorescu” National Theater in Craiova and of the casts of Silviu Purcărete’s performances for nine years and continued to follow his directing activity, documenting it through reviews and articles ever since.
”Photography is a trigger of memory. Its spatio-temporal content activates affective paths that defeat time and revive sequences of the past. They organize our lives in folders containing images. Adriana Moca had the salutary idea of bringing together 50 years of theatre that Silviu Purcărete is now celebrating in a photography exhibition. It’s been half a century since the director started endowing this world with his visions. Structurally, theatre is about looking, and this artist’s directorial rhetoric fundamentally relies on the technique of fragmenting into frames as a way of creation. A hedonism of the visual – this could be the succinct definition of Silviu Purcărete’s aesthetic universe.”
Oltița Cîntec – A Visual Anthology
Suplimentul de cultură, 28 mai 2024
Itinerary of the exhibition
2024:
May 18 – opening at the Constantin Brâncuși Center, within the Craiova Art Museum, during the International Shakespeare Theatre Festival
September 26 – opening at the Braunstein Palace in Iași, within the International Theatre Festival for Young Audiences FITPTI
2025:
January – Cluj Art Museum, Banffy Palace
March – Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest


The photographic album “Silviu Purcărete. Infinite Metamorphoses”
“Silviu Purcărete. Infinite Metamorphoses” has been launched within the exhibition “Silviu Purcărete – 50 Years in Theatre” in Craiova. Conceived by Mihaela Marin, a renowned photographer who has been following the artistic activity of important theatre directors for many years, the album contains 270 images from 22 performances directed by Silviu Purcărete in Romania as well as abroad, including “Waiting for Godot”, “Faust”, “Lulu”, “Metamorphoses”, “A Tempest”, “Macbett”, “Exit the King”, “Lohengrin”, “Aleko and Francesca da Rimini”, “Antonin Artaud. The Cenci Family”, ” Gertrude”.
The bilingual volume includes an essay by Sebastian Vlad Popa, titled “Lucid Bodies – What I Learn from Silviu Purcărete’s Theatre”.
The album is a project of the Vis-a-Vis Cultural Association with the support of a patron who wished to remain anonymous.
”The team of producers is linked to the artist who inspired the album through the long-lasting threads of aesthetic consonances. It is, thus, a look from the inside of a universe that convinced, through the power of fantasy, that the author belongs to the category of memorable artists. Mihaela Marin is gifted with sharp eyes, accurate sense and intuition, functioning as an excellent mediator between Silviu Purcărete’s art and us, the viewers, inviting connoisseurs of his work to mentally and emotionally reconstruct seen performances. The photographic image has this quality of being an animator of memory. For those who are not yet familiar with Purcărete’s stylistics, seeing the beauty of the moments captured will be an enchantment of the eyes.”
Oltița Cîntec – How We Can Overcome the Fragility of Theatre
Suplimentul de cultură, 17 June 2024




The Director Silviu Purcărete
Silviu Purcărete (born April 5, 1950, Bucharest) graduated in 1974 from the Bucharest Institute of Theatre and Cinematographic Art, where he studied theatre directing, under the guidance of Valeriu Moisescu, an admirable professional and mentor. His graduation staging was based on “Diary of a Madman” by Gogol while his debut at the Youth Theatre in Piatra Neamț was with a version of “Romeo and Juliet”. In 1975 he began to collaborate with the Dramatic Theater in Constanța, then with the Mic Theater in Bucharest, the Puppet Theatres in Bucharest and Brașov. He was invited to work in Timișoara and Beer-Sheva. In 1985, Gheorghe Goange Marinescu asked him to stage his exceptional ensemble of amateur actors at the Popular Theater in Râmnicu Vâlcea. In 1989, Emil Boroghină, manager of the National Theatre Craiova, offered him a generous space and time to work, in a propitious artistic atmosphere, which functioned as a revealing substance of Silviu Purcărete’s creative force. He then became the director of the L.S. Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest (1992) and, subsequently, the director of the National Drama Centre in Limoges, France (1996).
With his productions at the National Theatre in Craiova began an international career that continues today, his stagings for the theatre, opera, puppet theatre and his films participated in and were awarded at prestigious festivals in Avignon, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bath, Brussels, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glyndebourg, Gdansk, Melbourne, Montreal, Milan, Naples, Parma, Sarajevo, Sao-Paolo, Tokyo, Vienna, Varna and many more.
In 2002 he founded his own company in France. Since 2003, Silviu Purcărete has been a personal member of the Union of European Theatres.
Awards and Distinctions
Critics’ Award and Hamada Foundation Award
for Artistic Excellence for “Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth”, Edinburgh International Theatre Festival, 1991
Best Director
Best Set Design and Best Female Debut for “Titus Andronicus”, UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union), 1992
Grand Prize
and Trophy of the City of Bucharest, Award for Best Director, for Best Set Design, for Best Male Performance, Best Female Performance and Special Jury Prize for “Titus Andronicus” – Romanian National Theatre Festival, 1992
Best Foreign Performance Award
at the Montreal Festival of the Americas, for “Titus Andronicus”, 1993
Golden Globe Peter Brook Prize
for Best Theatre Director, for “The Tempest” – Nottingham Playhouse, 1995
Critics’ Award
at the Dublin Theatre Festival, 1996, for “The Danaides”
Excellence Award
UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union), 1997
Best director Award
UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union) for “Twelfth Night (As You Wish or the Night after the End of the Fair)”, 2005
Special Jury Prize
at the International Shakespeare Festival, Gdansk, for “Twelfth Night (As You Wish or the Night after the End of the Fair)”, 2006
Excellence Award
together with Helmut Stürmer, Lia Manțoc, Vasile Şirli and Andu Dumitrescu, for the international impact of “Faust” at the Edinburgh Festival 2009, UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union), 2010
Herald Angel Award
at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival for “Gulliver’s Travels”, 2012
Multiple awards
GOPO Awards for Romanian Cinema 2013, for “Somewhere, in Palilula”
Best Debut Feature
for “Somewhere, in Palilula”, Film Southeast European Film Festival Los Angeles, 2013
Special Prize
Premio Europa per il Teatro, Craiova 2016
Lifetime Achievement Award (Director)
UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union) 2017
Best Director Award (“Lucian Pintilie” Award)
for “Antonin Artaud. The Cenci Family”, UNITER Gala (National Awards offered by the Romanian Theatre Union), 2023
Doctor Honoris Causa
of the University of Bucharest, 2019
Doctor Honoris Causa
of the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, 2022
Order of the Star of Romania
in the rank of Commander, 2000
Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres
France, 1996
„A magnificent production!”
Bernard Faivre D’Arcier
director of the Festival of Avignon 1993-2003
„Purcărete’s show has been one of greatest hits of the Festival, an original and powerful production.”
Frank Dunlop
director of the Edinburgh International Festival 1984-1991
„Ubu Rex and Titus Andronicus
are doubtlessly masterpieces.
Both productions are truly brilliant, powerful and free.”
Marie-Hélène Falcon
director of the Théatres des Ameriques Festival, 1985-2014
„So ravishing that you’re almost prepared to sell your soul to the devil to keep the succession of lush images coming, Silviu Purcarete’s version of Goethe’s Faust is such a seductive visual fantasia that you might not notice it has sold its own soul to spectacle. But what a mighty spectacle it is, with a series of eye-popping illusions and conjuring tricks that make you feel as if you’ve fallen into a waking dream – or a nightmare. You leave the theatre hungover from having binged so greedily on the rich visuals, but almost entirely unmoved by the simple purity of unaccompanied voices and the weet songs of the doomed Gretchen, whose love redeems Faust. In Purcarete’s vision, hell is so much more exciting than heaven. ”
Lyn Gardner
The Guardian
„Purcărete’s talent for creating images shines through from the very first seconds of the first part, Agamemnon, with the appearance of the messenger, suspended in the sky, then of the chorus of obese old men wearing suits and ties. The sumptuous grey lighting, the violence of the murder, a bloody Clytemnestra facing Agamemnon’s corpse thrust into a zinc bathtub, the poetry of a scene lit entirely by candlelight… For two hours and forty minutes, Purcărete displays an impressive mastery of stagecraft.”
René Solis
Libération
„Silviu Purcărete is a director-poet. Double identity, communion of two roles, which interfere and give him his own status. On the stages of this world, his theatre is the expression of the presence of an artist, but also that of an interpreter: this is where his unique role comes from. It’s a double role manifesting itself with various accents in the performances, one by one, one never to eliminate de other, different side; Purcărete is seduced by cohabitation, by the cohabitation between reading the texts and their poetic treatment on a theatre stage. Purcărete exerts a relative freedom, recognizable, but not predetermined, because he maintains a consensual relationship with the text, an affective rather than strictly interpretative one. This is why, in his case, the stage bears the trademark of the artist’s signature, but, at the same time, it does not absolutely exclude the impact of the written work. This relationship modifies with each of the performances he creates, but it does not disappear: the poet’s freedom and the director’s reading. Reunited!”
George Banu
Observator cultural