Măscăriciul is a heartfelt theatrical event for any spectator, even for those who rarely go to the theater. They won't be able to forget it for a long time, it will amuse them copiously, but also impress them, looking at the actors and their lives differently. An illustrated history of the theater or a history of the styles of the actor's art, always on that imperceptible edge (which Horaţiu Mălăele knows so well how to feel) between tragedy and its parody, between comedy and its caricature, between genius and buffoon. Because this Svetlovidov is in Mălăele's interpretation an actor as great as he is a buffoon. Why? Because an innate delicacy prevents him from being sure of himself and forces him to laugh at himself.
He is the buffoon, the true actor, and his swan song is an aria of the buffoon. But also a lesson in acting because the Prompter, played by Niculae Urs (whom Horațiu Mălăele drew into an adventure of creation of great coherence, in a picturesque, miserable and touching representation of the difference between the artist and the common man), who knows countless roles by heart, warmed by vodka, tries to perform them as well. There are numerous theories about the theater that meet, exclude each other and complement each other in this lightning-fast passage of Mălăele through the great roles of universal theater. Wonderful each, wonderful as partners for each other, Horațiu Mălăele - in a less known guise of artistic vulnerability - and Niculae Urs - who plays a role of great delicacy and sensitivity - the Actor and the Prompter, Svetlovidov and Nikita Ivanich look back sometimes with anger, sometimes with pride, sometimes with melancholy.... small scenes are played, theatrical jewels, lines are exchanged, lights, poetic, stylistic registers, gossip, drinking, sighing. Fragments, small scenes, passages from famous monologues. From roles played or only dreamed, desired. Special moments, directed and interpreted with the means of sensitivity, the edifice on which the whole show is, in fact, built. Between Shakespeare and Chekhov, between Lopakhin and Lear, a path that the buffoon in him does not abandon Svetlovidov. Not for a moment does the strange mixture of beginning, end of the world and beginning of another, of sincere, total confession, in which one can look inside, deeply, into the smallest corner, dissolve. Irony, self-irony, jokes, playful, laughter - crying, irritation, gestures of artists, gestures of drunks, nostalgia, the devastating feeling of uselessness as an artist and a man, the illusion that without Svetlovidovs the theater dies. Disappears. An illusion, however, without which the actor cannot get on stage.
HORATIU MALAELE ( Vasili Vasilici Svetlovidov )
NICULAE URS ( Nikita Ivanici )
