In Romanian, surtitled in French

One can imprison artists and poets in prison; but whatever one does, one cannot gag their ability to transcend the prohibitions to reclaim, in their own way, the enormous incongruity of the situation. In a communist Romania where the daily absurdity rivaled the theater of the absurd, the Romanian-style Stalinist jails are no exception to the rule.

We are in 1959, in Communist Romania cut off from the West and forced to adopt the Soviet model. Literature also has to respond to the new ideological “demands”, which the poet Sergiu Penegarou, protagonist of the play, refuses to accept. He likes the surrealists, the unclassifiable writings of Lautréamont and Ionesco’s theatre piece The Bald Soprano, that he managed to obtain in order to translate into Romanian. His bohemian spirit and inner freedom do not go well with the standards imposed by the Party on the Writers’ Union. He even dares to ironize in his verses the Party’s excessive appetite for patriotic poems…

It is not surprising, therefore, that his translation is refused and that he finds himself on the “black list”, forbidden to publish anything. The situation shifts the night when, returning home drunk from a party, Sergiu Penegarou urinates at the foot of the statue of Stalin, in the center of Bucharest.