THE GAME OF SHADOWS. MIHAIL SEBASTIAN’S THEATER
THE GAME OF SHADOWS. MIHAIL SEBASTIAN’S THEATER

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to investigate the playful dimension of Mihail Sebastian’s theater, focusing on how play and games constitute not only dramatic devices (techniques), but also mechanisms for constructing and deconstructing identity and questioning reality. The analysis considers the four plays in his dramatic repertoire (The Nameless Star, The Holiday Game, The Last Hour, and The Island) and starts from the premise that, for Sebastian, play and games represent a fundamental aesthetic category through which the author artistically explores the tension between reality and unreality, constraint and freedom, the desire to escape and the need to confront reality. Essential structures of his theater, “ludus” and “paidia”, as understood by Roger Caillois, fulfill a dual function: on the one hand, they open a temporary sequence of liberation, fantasy, and experimentation, in which the mask plays a primordial role in constructing the mirage, and, on the other hand, they expose and ironize the negative aspects. “Iocus” becomes a key concept through which the playwright inscribes himself in a modern tradition of playfulness, where it, synonymous with illusion, understood simultaneously as a space of freedom, a travesty of being, a critical/ satirical mechanism, and a solution for survival, is not the opposite of existential gravity, but rather the very means by which it is expressed and problematized.

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