Bucharest – Romania’s Culture Minister has called for an investigation after the National Theatre in Bucharest, TNB, hosted a show on Sunday performed by a nationalistic and pro-Russian director and actor, Dan Puric – before which a newspaper containing nationalist and antisemitic articles was distributed in the foyer.
Earlier, the interim director of the National Theatre, Mircea Rusu, had refused to organize events in support of Ukraine’s resistance to a Russian invasion on the grounds that the theatre “does not do politics”.
“An antisemitic newspaper [was put] in the hands of the audience right in front of the interim general director of the TNB,” actor Mihai Calin wrote on his Facebook page, publishing photos of the audience reading the newspaper before Puric’s show, which about 500 people attended.
The newspaper contained anti-Semitic and anti-Roma articles and various conspiracy theories about the secret services. Puric has not made any public comment about the incident.
The theatre management must investigate and, if need be, file a complaint with the police about the unauthorized distribution of a publication inside the institution, Culture Minister Lucian Romascanu said. “No one in the [theatre] leadership was informed about this serious incident,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Romascanu added that he would not tolerate a symbol of Romanian culture becoming “a space for the propagation of private material, regardless of their content, especially of material that could spread foreign interests in Romania”.
A deputy from the Save Romania Union party, USR, Iulian Bulai, chairman of parliament’s Commission for Culture, Arts and Mass Media, called on Romascanu to go further and dismiss the interim director of the theatre.
“The National Theatre ‘does not do politics’, but has no problem with propaganda. About 500 spectators of the Bucharest National Theater found today, in the Hall, a copy of a nationalist, revanchist, racist and anti-European publication entitled ‘Certitudinea’ [‘Certainty’] to ‘accompany’ Dan Puric’s monologue, presented on World Theatre Day,” Bulai said.
