It was really an ordeal to put the bits back in place after butchering the text. At the audition you tried to sort of get away with it, you soft-pedaled the tricky parts so they wouldn?t sniff a rat somewhere. And then you stressed what they wanted to hear. The ?lizards? as they were called in the actors? slang were actually allusions intended to ?them?. And the audience would never miss any, chiefly the allusions to the Ceausescu couple. That was a delight for both your audience and yourself as an actor directly involved in the business. All the performances had a whole series of cues which you didn?t expect would cause any particular stir, but what initially didn?t sound like a subversive allusion more often than not became one in the minds of the audience.

I am still convinced that the authors didn?t dare say anything they were not allowed to say. But at the audition you were told: This line or that one must go. They also tampered with the direction and the set, the costumes, just everything. In the last couple of years before the Revolution they went all the way from banning the words ?Lady or Mrs.?. They weren?t even allowed in the older plays, in contexts such as ?My Lady?. That was why we couldn?t stage Nusici?s ? Mrs. Minister?.

At first the censors were all a bunch of hopeless idiots. Then they did this awfully beastly and most cynical thing: they did replaced censorship with self-censorship. And that was just as bad as it could get because it made you directly answerable for whatever you did. So when we were preparing a show the director or some other actor on the cast and said: Forget it, they?ll cross that out! ? Let them cross it out. We?ll do 20 lines, they?ll cut out 10, but then there will be 10 lines left at the end of the day.

There used to be this winter poetry recital show that they were preparing for Television viewing every year from mid November to December. Basically it was all poetry classics, no necessary political implications. Among other things, I (IT) was supposed to do George Cosbuc?s ?Wintertime? which starts off like ?The gruesome winter etc?. I wasn?t allowed to say that, because winter was described as ?gruesome? and the winter outside was not particularly clement. You weren?t supposed to mention ?cold?, ?no running water? and any number of other such things, let alone ?hunger?. If ?death? somehow cropped up in any of the verses, that line had to go?