Early performances and related scandal Before completing
A Stormy Night, Caragiale, still working as a minor journalist, had enjoyed massive and unexpected success with his translation of
Dominique-Alexandre Parodi's
Rome vaincue. This had brought him to the attention of
Junimea society, whose leader,
Titu Maiorescu invited him in his
Bucharest home in 1877. He felt encouraged to complete his own play, now imbued with
Junimist ideology; he gave his first reading at
Junimeas original hub in
Iași, in November 1878—when the group was celebrating its 15th anniversary with a banquet in
Iacob Negruzzi's home. On that occasion, Negruzzi enlisted Caragiale as the 82nd
Junimea affiliate. Negruzzi recalled in 1931 that Caragiale had a "rather raspy voice which fit in perfectly with the characters of the Bucharest
mahala". including Maiorescu himself, and was credited by the
Juminists as a "complete revolution in Romanian theater." the work was taken up by the
National Theater Bucharest (TNB), which was then under the direction of writer-politician
Ion Ghica. A moderate among the liberals, Ghica had made a habit of ridiculing Rosetti, whom he once called an "old macaque". The young author was affected by "something resembling stage fright", asking for his name to be removed from the playbill; the premiere's audience included
Barbu Bălcescu and his daughters, one of whom reported seeing him "all pale and shivering, cursing the day he got down to write it". Newspapers were near-unanimous in describing
A Stormy Night as "immoral", since it did not apparently frown on Veta's adultery. To Caragiale's surprise, a version of this critique was also found in a review published by the
Junimist tribune,
Timpul, and signed by his friend,
Ioan Slavici. Cioculescu suggests that Slavici was exceptionally prudish, while fellow scholar
Pompiliu Marcea believes that his attitude toward the play, which never changed, was a product of Slavici's belief in "national solidarity" as cultivated by
didactic art. Another paper,
Binele Public, featured an unsigned chronicle which questioned the play's validity, since, it argued, the characters were "perishable"—as Cioculescu notes, the anonymous author was the first in a line of Caragiale skeptics, leading down to
Pompiliu Eliade and
Eugen Lovinescu, all of whom raised the same marginal objection. On the second performance, members of the Civic Guard bought tickets and continuously heckled the actors, also waiting for Caragiale to show up and receive a beating. Vătămanu reports that the mob included "Fierăscu and the painter Alexandrescu", both of whom lived close to N. Dumitrache, suggesting that they may have seen themselves portrayed as Ipingescu and Venturiano, respectively. The same was acknowledged by journalist
N. Porsenna, who noted in 1924 that "the text can no longer be located." In 1880, the theatrical establishment preferred to showcase another political and anti-liberal play—
Sânziana și Pepelea; its similarities with Caragiale's text (possibly coincidental, since Alecsandri had probably written his comedy in or before 1879) include the
box populi catchphrase. In 1883, the TNB, no longer chaired by Ghica, was allowed to resume performances of
A Stormy Night, featuring the same cast. In the mid-1880s, liberal reviewers had become more lenient, but, as with novelist and chronicler
Nicolae Xenopol, preferred to treat the text as an entertaining farce. This position allowed him to become personally involved in productions of his play by the TNB, where
Maria Ciucurescu became his choice for Veta, with her sister
Eugenia appearing regularly as Zița. According to their recollections, he was enthusiastic about the lines improvised by Maria, and added them to the play in its second print; Eugenia was also the first to appear as Zița in a casual morning-gown, rather than in full costume, persuading Caragiale that this was more realistic. Public protests erupted in 1890, when Iulian allowed
Iancu Brezeanu to take over as Ipingescu; Brezeanu was able to convince the public that he would not improve on his predecessor's standard performance, and went on to perform in that role for almost 50 years. A continuous string of authorized and unauthorized production followed, with Caragiale noting in 1899 that his text had effectively been stolen, and that virtually no one paid him royalties on it. He continued to involve himself in authorized production and, in 1905, watched on approvingly as
Nicolae Soreanu began studying for Venturiano. In parallel, the aspiring comedian
Constantin Tănase broke with tradition by reciting Dumitrache's lines, instead of lyrical poetry, for his entry exam at the
Bucharest Conservatory.
Within Caragiale's political series The aestheticist and Caragiale supporter
Mihail Dragomirescu regarded
A Stormy Night as mainly a political play, which underscored his own theory that the source of all major masterpieces was political. As early as April 1879, Caragiale's friend, the conservative poet-journalist
Mihai Eminescu, had embraced "Venturiano" as symbolizing a "species" of "mediocrities" whom "one really needs to discourage". His article proposed that the gallery of Venturianos should include
Frédéric Damé, a Franco-Romanian republican journalist and noted plagiarist; this was twice a discreet encouragement of Caragiale, for validating both his art as a dramatist and his conflict with Damé. According to Vianu, the twin efforts by Caragiale and Macedonski had managed to reshape the "young romantic intellectual" type into a full-blown caricature, down to the 1910s—when the idealistic depiction returned timidly, with plays by
Dimitrie Anghel,
Ștefan Octavian Iosif, and
Mihail Sorbul. Situated more to the left, Cioculescu argued that "bourgeois progressivism" and republicanism, as rendered through parody in
Vocea, were not ridiculous in themselves–"only their formulation is". Ornea likewise proposes that: "Had the republican ideal been defended with determination, and not tarnished by conjectural interests, [Venturiano's republicanism] would be commendable. Alas, the anti-dynasticism proclaimed in certain circles (of whom the Rosettists were loudest) was well concealed, and pushed out into the open only when it suited this or that political intrigue." Țepelea, who argues that Caragiale was unfair toward liberal idealists, extends this critique to the language, noting that Latinate forms were more widespread and reasonable than they appear in Venturiano's debased rendition. The play still resonated with
Marxist reviewers, since it bordered on their own critique of Romanian liberalism. One of them is Mîndra, who proposes that Caragiale's mockery of the Guard was in itself a satire of the bourgeoisie's obsession with titles and ranks. He sees the Guard itself as a "typical institution for the pseudo-democratic smokescreen put up by the 'constitutional' bourgeois regime". Caragiale expanded on his anti-liberalism with another comedy play,
O scrisoare pierdută, which he completed in 1884. Ornea suggests that this work expands on the critique of Rosettism, shown here to have been embraced by a whole class of "extremist-minded intellectuals"; lawyer Nae Cațavencu is a more vociferous version of Venturiano, with his own newspaper,
Răcnetul Carpaților ("The Roar of the Carpathians"), being intentionally "a few octaves higher than
Vocea Patriotului Naționale". The stylistic elements of continuity, also found in the 1885 farce, ''
D'ale carnavalului'', were highlighted by Tomuș: all three plays show "an amorous triangle entangled with the obsessing over one's honor." The planned sequel
Titircă, Sotirescu & C-ie, on which Caragiale was writing around the time of his death in 1912, focuses on Dumitrache and Chiriac's social climb, turning the former into a landowner and oil magnate, as well as a
Senator, and the latter into a former
Deputy. It would have had them meeting Cațavencu, himself a government minister; Venturiano is instead pushed into the opposition, and continues to agitate in the press, this time as editor of
Alarma Română ("The Romanian Alarm"). His elderly brother in law now regards him as a "scoundrel" (
lichea). In another such twist, Chiriac was supposed to have become a victim of conjugal infidelity, which is more explicitly described in
Titircă, Sotirescu & C-ie. In one version of the project, his wife, Pulchérie de Gantscho, has a toddler, apparently born from her affair with Spiridon. Though subject to continuous changes and with possibly no scene ever written down completely,
Titircă, Sotirescu & C-ie was meant to explore the social uplift of that generation. In line with Caragiale's string of sketch stories, of "telegrams", it poked fun at both conservatives and liberals, and further implied that Dumitrache had moved to the right, closer to
Junimea (whose own political practices had largely disappointed Caragiale); the fragmentary dossier includes a clipping from
Politica newspaper of
Buzău, with a sample of Conservative-Party propaganda. In 1910, reacting to news that Caragiale had joined Ionescu's faction, Conservative journalist Ioan Manoliu jibed that the dramatist had come to see eye to eye with both Dumitrache and Venturiano. A non-satirical assessment, provided by Cioculescu, reaches the same conclusion. He argues that Caragiale, who had come to advocate for universal suffrage, had had a "revival of sympathy" toward Venturiano and his kind.
20th-century standardization ) at
Iunion, one of several scenes added in
Jean Georgescu's film version. Giugaru is the only man seated in the second row, with Zița (
Florica Demion) and Veta (
Maria Maximilian); behind them, in top hat, is their stalker, Rică Venturiano (Beligan) The mid-to-late stages of World War I saw
Romania being defeated and partly occupied by the
Central Powers, who managed to
take Bucharest. In the early stages of the occupation, a Conservative,
Ioan C. Filitti, was made chairman of the TNB. He tried to preserve the same program, including
A Stormy Night, but was ultimately forced to cede the building, which became an annex of the
Hessian Theater. This effectively interrupted stagings of
A Stormy Night and many other Romanian plays. Romania reentered the war during the
Vardar offensive, and the building was recovered; serving as TNB chairman to December 1918,
Constantin Rădulescu-Motru made a point of resuming production of the play. Meanwhile
Bessarabia (the former
Russian governorate and
Moldavian Democratic Republic) had
united with Romania, allowing for Caragiale's plays to be performed for a larger Romanian-speaking audience. In the late 1920s and early '30s, the newly opened
National Theater Chișinău staged its own production of
A Stormy Night, employing Brezeanu for his consecrated role. The Caragiale-approved
repertory version of the play, with Brezeanu and the Ciucurescus, was resumed in January 1924, and enjoyed uninterrupted success. By then, the secondary title had been dropped. That same year, as part of his visual homages to Caragiale,
Aurel Jiquidi released an album of
Stormy Night-themed lithographs. The comedy continued to inform his work to 1960, when he created portrayals of Venturiano as an old-age pensioner, and of Spiridon as a shrewd capitalist. As early as 1929,
Soare Z. Soare produced a
radioplay version for the
Romanian state broadcaster, with Paul Stratilat as Rică. Caragiale's text, meanwhile, inspired a similarly titled
opéra bouffe, written by
Paul Constantinescu in 1934–1935. Incorporating
mahala music by
Anton Pann, it was first performed at the
Bucharest Opera under
Jonel Perlea's musical direction, with Lucian Nanu performing as Rică. By 1937, many of the play's original performers had either died or been retired. In October of that year,
impresario Lică Teodorescu organized a final tour with the survivors reprising their roles—including Giurgea, who agreed to return as Spiridon. The psychiatrist and cinephile
Ion Filotti Cantacuzino was already campaigning in 1939 for
Romanian cinema production of the play. Working on a screenplay, he proposed that
René Clair be called in to direct. In 1942, at the height of World War II,
Jean Georgescu managed to complete the film project, which won enduring critical acclaim. Done from Georgescu's screenplay (though with some input from Filotti Cantacuzino), it had its production values greatly diminished by wartime vicissitudes, including the imposition of a
blackout.
Alexandru Giugaru appeared therein as Dumitrache; it also featured the debut film role of a 25-year-old
Radu Beligan, whom Georgescu selected over the more famous, but less believable,
Grigore Vasiliu Birlic. The film version takes some liberties with the theatrical standard, including with cameo appearances by Țârcădău (
George Ciprian) Spiridon is unusually performed by a 13-year-old with no previous acting experience, Ștefan Baroi. According to a later note by film critic
D. I. Suchianu, the Romanian government, led by a far-right
Ion Antonescu, issued some objections to his playing Spiridon as a "socialist" who resents the establishment. The equivalent institution in Bucharest, presided at that time by
Liviu Rebreanu, marked Caragiale's 30th commemoration in 1942 with productions of all his plays, including a new version of
A Stormy Night.
Ion Ulmeni was Dumitrache, and
Florin Scărlătescu—Venturiano. This program was rivaled by the
National Theater Cluj, which had been evacuated from
Northern Transylvania to
Sibiu. It also used Caragiale's text for a new production, premiering in October 1942.
Stalinist interval Following the successful
coup against Antonescu, left-wing interpretations of the play could be made public, including in a 1945 staging at the new Bucharest Workers' Theater. A
Romanian communist regime was inaugurated in 1948, and reformulated its take on Romanian social and cultural history with input from
Marxism-Leninism, and, initially,
Stalinism as well. In that generation, the
Communist Party leadership included
Ana Pauker, who was well versed in Caragiale's writing, appreciated in particular
A Stormy Night, and used its title to mock the conspiratorial methods employed by colleagues such as
Teohari Georgescu. Sociological readings of Caragiale became a standard of literary discourse during the Stalinist supremacy. Chronicling
Sică Alexandrescu's production, which premiered at the TNB in 1949 (and had Beligan reprising his film role on the stage), Cremene suggested that Marxism had a mission to liberate the text from its "bourgeois" censors, who had staged it as "merely an 'insignificant' farce, [...] with tinges that are downright pornographic." She commended Alexandrescu for highlighting its value as a document of the "corruption and immorality that were characteristic of the ruling classes". Looking back on the event some 18 years later, theater critic Margareta Bărbuță suggested that Alexandrescu had "reinstated
A Stormy Night to its rightful place." There were state celebrations of the Caragiale centennial in 1952, even as the writer's daughter, Ecaterina Logadi, was held in prison for political crimes; the 1942 film was re-released, but the print was heavily modified by
communist censorship, which permanently deleted a scene in which Veta strips down to her
negligee. The Alexandrescu version of
A Stormy Night, with Giugaru and Beligan, was also recorded on national radio in 1952, and released as a collectible
LP in May 1969. In that context, Beligan reported that he was basing his reading of Venturiano, rooted in
Stanislavski's system, on several new sources. These included the surviving fragments of
Titircă, Sotirescu & C-ie, alongside Caragiale's depictions of various other journalists and politicians, including the National Liberal
Dimitrie Sturdza. Alexandrescu was called upon to direct
A Stormy Night for a major show performed during 1962, celebrated by the regime as the "Caragiale Year". This was also his attempt to perpetuate his "Caragiale School" by having young trainees such as
Mihai Fotino (Venturiano) and
Coca Andronescu (Zița) appear alongside the aging Giugaru (who was again acclaimed as Dumitrache), the middle-aged
Niki Atanasiu (who chose to play Chiriac as "violent and abject"), and other consecrated figures. Meanwhile, Constantinescu's opera was removed from the official program, panned on grounds similar to the work which inspired it. The communist takeover also resulted in a literary purge, pushing interwar exegetes such as Cioculescu into the margins of society. In order to still make a living, he became an antiquarian bookseller and sold items from his own collection—reported to have included Caragiale's original manuscript of
A Stormy Night. There was also a purge of party cadres seen as unreliable or
liberal; one such victim was
Belu Zilber. Zilber later discarded socialism altogether, commenting that its one saving grace was having evolved not just under
Joseph Stalin's influence, but also that of Caragiale himself. One version of this quote includes an additional note: "Romanian socialism was indeed
A Stormy Night. But it was
A Stormy Night with a Stalinist epilogue." In parallel, the play had become an
intertextual component of various writings by
Camil Petrescu. His novel,
Un om între oameni, is centered on the
Wallachian revolution of 1848, and depicts early Romanian liberals from the Rosetti circle. Its fictionalized portrayal of
Scarlat Turnavitu relies heavily on Venturiano, and implies that some of the latter's amorous misadventures had happened to the real-life Turnavitu. One of Petrescu's last-ever works was the 1957 play
Caragiale în vremea lui ("Caragiale in His Time"), which also suggests that
A Stormy Night is based on real-life events. Costache Titircă, as the inspiration for Dumitrache, chances upon the real-life Caragiale after having seen the play; instead of being upset at his wife's secrets being exposed for the world, he is adamantly unpersuaded that the caricature targets her and himself, listing all the superficial differences between reality and its fictionalized version. Constantinescu's version was again taken up by the
Cluj Opera in 1971, expressly because of a "desire to promote Romanian operas". By 2010, it had come to be seen as a "masterpiece of the genre". Experimentalism was always contrasted by classical-comedic, "innocent" versions, as with Lucian Giurchescu's
burlesque interpretation, done for the Bucharest Comedy Theater in 1973. The sociological approach was carried into the realm of
semiotic literary criticism by mathematician
Solomon Marcus, who represented
A Stormy Night and other Caragiale comedies as
mathematical games, evidencing the strategies available to each character. Controversies were then resumed with the
television play, directed by
Sorana Coroamă-Stanca and aired by
TVR in January 1984. Critic Aurel Bădescu disliked the liberties taken from the original text, including a number of
plot holes, and argued that only
Tora Vasilescu as Zița had properly researched for her role. Another critic, Constantin Radu-Maria, objected to the "clown-like" performance of
Horațiu Mălăele as Venturiano, as well to his being assigned additional lines from
Titircă, Sotirescu & C-ie, which give the impression of a "foreign body". Coroamă-Stanca's interpretation was re-reviewed in 2017 by Constantin Paraschivescu, who praised both Mălăele and Vasilescu, while also noting that
Octavian Cotescu as Dumitrache had added an "uncommon nuance"—genuinely hurt, rather than simply infuriated, by Venturiano's apparent stalking of his wife. The
fall of communism in December 1989 allowed for the productions of
A Stormy Night which combined artistic experimentation with political commentary. Mircea Cornișteanu, who was involved with Cazimir in creating the Caragiale-inspired
Party of Free Change, had "enormous success" in 1995, when he redid the play in modern post-revolutionary setting. His vision, taken up by the
Târgu Mureș National Theater, had Dumitrache managing a
private limited company in a half-ruined Bucharest, but moved the spotlight on Veta (Suzana Macovei). Similar guidelines were traced by Dan Micu for a 1996 show at Nottara, which was set in a "degraded
mahala", mixing
communist devastation of the urban landscape with the
nouveau riche mentality of its increasingly affluent inhabitants. In 2002,
Felix Alexa directed another TNB version, which earned praise from cultural journalist
Dan C. Mihăilescu for being conservative and restorative, as well as for adding "a regimen of levitation, of oneiric extravaganza", with "Spiridon as
Puck". Mihăilescu was positively impressed by
Dan Puric as a "dastardly" Venturiano, noting that he carried all of Act II. In early 2008, the play's 130th anniversary was marked with another staging, taken up by
Gelu Colceag for
Palatul Copiilor—with
Ioan Gyuri Pascu as Venturiano,
Maia Morgenstern as Veta, and
Monica Anghel as Zița. Colceag changed the historical setting, adapting it to the early years of Romanian communism. A series of bronze sculptures done in the 2000s by
Ioan Bolborea, and subsequently displayed outside the TNB, features Caragiale and several of his characters, using the real-life actors of various productions as his models. Rică was selected by Bolborea to dominate over the landscape, a "central axis" of the monument. ==Translations==