Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Radio Plays in Socialist Romania

What is it about?

The popularity of radio drama increased during the dark decades of Romanian communism, being probably one of the handiest and most efficient ways of escaping the cruel reality of the day. Many Romanian authors were staged on the radio (mainly dramatizations), but beginning with the 1960s, the number of foreign authors (especially Western authors) staged on the radio increased. Among these Western names was also Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s, one of the major Swiss writers in the second half of the 20th century, who had a very productive relation to the radio, having written no less than eight radio plays. Two of them could be heard on the radio in socialist Romania: one (A Dangerous Game) had three stagings and was broadcast with great success throughout the communist era – the other one (Incident at Twilight), on the contrary, was produced only with great efforts by the Romanian National Radio Broadcasting Company in the complicated 1980s. Along with the decline in the Romanian radio drama tradition in the 1990s, Dürrenmatt’s radio plays also faded into the background. Fortunately, they were rediscovered in the new century - but this time in book form, thanks to a group of students, more exactly InterDramText, a permanent German-language theater translation workshop that operates at the Faculty of Letters of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The article offers an unique insight into the reception of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s radio plays in socialist Romania.