June 2014
Ballarat Arts Academy, School of Education and Arts, 2014 Graduating Acting Company, Federation University Australia

Directors Bryce Ives 
Designer Adam 'Gus' Powers
Photography Jodie Hutchinson

Directors Notes

When asked 'what was the importance of the French Revolution' Mao Tse Tung supposedly replied: it’s too early to tell.

Three months after the intense bloodshed of December 1989, Caryl Churchill travelled to Bucharest. With a group of her graduating actors she set out to investigate what had happened. Mad Forest opened in July 1990, less than seven months after Ceausescu had been executed.

In other words: if the importance of the French Revolution is still too early to tell, MadForest provides no clear answers about the Romanian Revolution. Instead it's an immediate mosaic, a British perspective “from Romania” and a poignant reminder that history is not always knowable. 

We investigate and try to know what it would be like to live under a totalitarian dictatorship, repressed and confronting constant censorship and cultural stagnation.

The actors involved in tonight’s performance should be commended for their intense and thorough examining of themselves, their individual and shared values, and their dedication to sitting within the unknown of this process. I believe the quality of their work will demonstrate the lengths they have gone in realising this investigation.

As our present audience you must deal with (in no particular order) a work of art by Caryl Churchill, an investigation by the ensemble of actors, a documentary piece of Verbatim Theatre, the real and accurate, the imagined and the other.

A note on the events surrounding this play

“the most extraordinary end, through the most extraordinary revolution, of the most extraordinary dictatorship in all of Eastern Europe.”
Bob Wylie and George Galloway

Unlike other Eastern European transformations where administrations in the main peacefully conceded the overwhelming demand for change, Romania was the site of bloody revolution with mass demonstrations, the shooting of protesters, and the taking up of arms by civilians against a resistant state, hence the importance of the second part of the play, which forms its structural centre.

Unlike other regimes, which responded to the escalating demands for change and would not risk the unpredictable outcome of mass uprisings, Ceauşescu clung firmly to power, condemned the actions of other Eastern European states, and in so doing, precipitated the uprising.

So what happened? The historian, Martyn Rady, claims: 
“The rapidity with which the new government of the National Salvation Front was formed, strongly suggests that close discussions between members of the party ‘old guard,’ the army and the Securitate may already have been underway by the time of Ceauşescu’s flight.”

Confusion and debate continue.

Bryce Ives
June 2014