I will now tell you about just how paranoid they could be towards one another. Once we put on one of DR Popescu?s plays, ?The Cat on the New Year?s Eve Night?, a pretty good text and rather daring for those days. It was about this former political prisoner who left prison on the New Year?s Eve night. The Godly Popescu auditioned the show ? I would simply be hard put to tell how many times in a row - and gave it the go-ahead. One of the performances was attended by the Mayer General of Bucharest City, it must have been Danalache if I remember correctly. During the break Beligan, the famous actor, went up to him and asked him: ?How do you like the show?? But the Mayer General simply wouldn?t answer the question. At which point Beligan went like: ?You know, Comrade Dumitru Popescu came to see it and he really enjoyed it!? The answer was: ?Brilliant show indeed! Absolutely marvelous really?. It was staggering how this opportunistic sucking up to the right person worked.

You should also have seen the contempt they had?If an audition was scheduled for, say 10, they came anywhere around 12 o?clock and didn?t as much as bother to apologize for the delay. They really knew how to keep you strung-up, all the more so as they knew their approval was life to you. I think it was all done on purpose, just to humiliate you.

Basically what they did at auditions was chop off a couple of lines here and there. You couldn?t put them back in, because every performance would be watched by the Securitate people. We only became aware of that after the old National Theatre House had burnt down, had been rebuilt and people had started coming to the theatre again. We staged Dan Tarchila?s ?The Mighty Trooper? based on a War of Independence story. A mere couple of minutes before the end of the show, we heard a voice yelling in a loudspeaker: ?The audience are kindly invited to vacate the hall in quiet. A fire has just broken out in the basement?. Poor late Negulescu, he only had to go through the final monologue so he started to beg the audience ?Bare with me for another 2 minutes, it won?t take long, I?ll just finish the monologue?. That was like a tragic comedy. But people rushed out of the hall and into the foyer. The announcement had been made by some lunatic in the audience. So they just picked her up instantly. Which meant they had been in the hall all along, otherwise she couldn?t just have vanished in thin air. Which meant the Securitate blue-eyed boys were planted in any theatre hall, and we hadn?t been aware of that. Then we got to know our own watchdog, Colonel Sterian, besides the informers among us, that is one out of two.