Theatre
O noapte furtunoasă
Not translated into English
Ion Luca Caragiale · 1879
Synopsis
In Bucharest, Dumitrache Titircă, a timber merchant and captain of the civic guard, is very protective of his honour as head of the family. He lives with his wife Veta, her sister Zița, and his right-hand man, Chiriac, who is secretly Veta's lover. Rică Venturiano, a young clerk, law student and publicist, has fallen in love with Zița and followed her to her home; a workman having swapped the house numbers, he enters Dumitrache's house at night, and Dumitrache already took him for a prowler.
Context
The author read a first version of it in Iași in 1878; the play, originally titled O noapte furtunoasă sau Numărul 9, premiered at the National Theatre in Bucharest on 18 January 1879. The audience gave the author a triumph, but a large part of the press judged the play immoral, for failing to condemn Veta's adultery, and civic guards disrupted the second performance. Ion Ghica, director of the theatres, cut passages from it; Caragiale withdrew it, and it returned to the programme only in 1883.
Who it is for
A comedy of manners whose humour owes much to the language; adapted into French by Eugène Ionesco and Monica Lovinescu.
Prizes and reception
Jean Georgescu brought it to the screen in the early forties, and Paul Constantinescu made an opera from it, performed in 1935.
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