Romania’s Chairman of the Committee on Culture and Media Lucian Romascanu called for an investigation into a newspaper containing nationalist and antisemitic articles on Tuesday.
The national theater in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, hosted a show on Sunday which was led by Dan Puric, a pro-Russian director and actor.
“An antisemitic newspaper was put in the hands of the audience right in front of the interim general director of the TNB,” actor Mihai Calin wrote on his Facebook page.
Prior, the interim director of the National Theater, Mircea Rusu, had stated he will not help organize any events in support of Ukraine or that denounced Russia's invasion of Ukraine, stating that the Theater “does not do politics."
The newspaper contained antisemitic and anti-Romanian articles as well as a few conspiracy theories about Romania’s secret services. Puric, which led that night’s show, has not responded about the incident.
“The Theater management must investigate and, if need be, file a complaint with the police about the unauthorized distribution of a publication inside the institution,” Lucian Romascanu said. “No one in the Theater leadership was informed about this serious incident,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Romascanu added that he would not tolerate a symbol of Romanian culture becoming “a space for the propagation of private material, regardless of their content, especially of material that could spread foreign interests in Romania.”
Iulian Bulai, a deputy from the Save Romania Union party (USR), who is chairman of parliament’s Commission for Culture, Arts and Mass Media, called on Romascanu to take more drastic measures and dismiss Mircea Rusu, the interim director of the Theater.
“The national theater ‘does not do politics’, but has no problem with propaganda,” Bulai said.
“About 500 spectators of the Bucharest National Theater found today, in the Hall, a copy of a nationalist, revanchist, racist and anti-European publication entitled ‘Certitudinea’(Certainty) to ‘accompany’ Dan Puric’s monologue, presented on World Theater Day,” Bulai added.