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VALERE NOVARINA AND JANOS PILINSZKY OR THE POETIC THEATER OF UNSELFING RITUAL
Nyitott szemmel állt egész éjszaka, He stood all through the night, with wide
eyes and on into the morning, when he was
s reggel is, mikor agyonverték. beaten to death.
In his 1967 interview on Vatican Radio, he stated that his model for the sacral
theater is the Mass: "Following the problems posed so pointedly by the theater
of the absurd, we must do everything possible for the creation of a new sacral
theater [...]. Our age, which displays in high relief the end of a process of profa¬
nation, also offers numerous gualities that make possible the birth of a new
sacral artform, which I can best imagine as taking some sort of oratorical form.
It certainly sounds too bold, but it is in no way an accident that our attention
again turns its concentration toward the drama of dramas, the liturgy of the
Holy Mass." In motionless observation (“lying flat on the paling, hard asa
press”), the poem is heard as if it were silent, as if it were part of the Mass, the
liturgy: a prayer for embodiment; a motionless drama.
Novarina’s texts, just like Pilinszky’s oratorio and stage works, are indu¬
bitably text-centric, but the former can also rely on daily theatrical practice.
Pilinszky’s theatrical “pieces,” written in the seventies, draw a great deal on his
poetic technique: in truth, he worked out a theatrical poetics and not a theory
of the theater. His dramaturgy draws upon Simone Weil’s texts, Grotowski’s,
and, most of all, Wilson’s theater. Although his trust in the word occasionally
falters (indeed, in the seventies it moves to the sentence or, much more likely,
to a sort of deficient mechanism), after nearly falling silent he nevertheless
chooses the mediator-actor of immobile intensity Sheryl Sutton (and not the
deaf-mute little boy) as the lead player in his dialogue-essay, and in his final
notes he speaks of planning a book whose title would have been “He Finally
Speaks.”?! Just as with Pilinszky or Wilson, so in Novarina’s works, the actor
does not express himself: he is a being divided in two, his own witness, ob¬
server of his own Passion — a person who steps outside personhood.
In those expressions we arrive at in studying Valére Novarina’s works — the
theater of unselfed poetry, the theater’s modern (concealed) liturgy, etc. — we
must understand a deep inner compulsion, a teleological longing, rather than
Janos Pilinszky: Fable. Detail from KZ-Oratorio, trans. Ted Hughes — Janos Csokits, in
Pilinszky: Ibid., 50. (An earlier version in M. Vajda (ed.): Modern Hungarian Poetry, Buda¬
pest, Corvina Press, 1977, 149-150.)
Janos Pilinszky: Publicisztikai irdsok [Journalistic Writings], Budapest, Osiris, 1999, 526.
What we know about the productions achieved during the author’s life is that the first one
was presented in Kecskemét in 1963, and also staged in Orléans in 1967. According to the
3rd May 1969 issue of Film, színház, muzsika [Film, Theater, Music], the Universitas Group
also staged it, under the direction of Jözsef Ruszt. (Posthumous productions: 1994 at the
Castle Theater, Gyula, directed by Istvan Iglédi; 13-15 November 1996 in Paris, jointly by
the Théâtre Molière and the Maison de la Poésie, under Michael Lonsdale’s direction.)
2° Pilinszky: Naplôk, tôredékek [Journals, Fragments], 200-201.
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