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ANDRÁS VISKY
music amplify the pronouncement, then it will sound to the viewer as a drama
he can experience.” This lesson of Purcarete well describes the poetics of his
most recent productions: he tends increasingly to investigate the theatrical
possibilities of operatic form. His production of Victor, or Power to the Children
(2013) in Cluj-Napoca’ slips unnoticed, as it were, into opera: by the time the
viewer realizes it, every rejoinder has long since been sounded in song. It is as
if Purcarete’s latest works were testing the rehabilitation of pathos in theater.
Actually, I sense every danger of this communal rehearsal process-initiation
already in the first rehearsal. Since, as a matter of fact, the director made the
entire enterprise largely dependent on my participation, he had to find some¬
one whose decisions he could trust, given that the work is a monument of the
Hungarian literary canon and the holy scripture of its theatrical tradition: thus
we must read it together and be brave; to listen to (and hear) and observe (and
see) the echoes of tradition and face them if they’re unavoidable. Above all be¬
cause when working with the text Iam liable to take a leap in the dark and deal
dishonorably with textual canons, “not consulting with flesh and blood”” as
my heart’s apostle, Paul, says. To remain sensitive to every invitation, interior
and external equally; and to go to the wall, indeed, to go through it, if that is
the price of being able “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
He constructs situations, he outlines and sketches in scenes, then hands
them over to Assistant Director Ilir Dragovoja, while we two enter a dressing
alcove to work on the text and take account of the interpretive traditions of
the Tragedy. Purcarete inquires with great sensitivity about the poem’s place
in Hungarian culture and about its theatrical productions that were, in my
experience, defining. I begin by mentioning two films, The Annunciation by
Andras Jeles, and the animated version of the Tragedy by Marcell Jankovics.”
My lengthy explications of both films enthrall him. He returns to the Jeles film
several times; he cannot tear himself away from it. Today, though, it would be
unrealizable, he says, since the virtual (but very much real) space’s child por¬
nography mania has made an innocent relationship to the naked child’s body
impossible. The depiction of the human body, but especially the child’s and
the woman’s, is undergoing a thorough alteration of meaning in contemporary
culture, one that relates to the identity crisis of Western culture. We cannot
relate to the naked body in an unspoiled manner because we cannot relate that
way to our own body, either. The purist and iconoclastic movements of the
The capital city of Transylvania, known to Hungarians as Kolozsvar. Cluj-Napoca, its official
Romanian name, is colloquially abbreviated to Cluj, which is how it will appear henceforth.
1 Gal 1:16.
1° William Shakespeare: Hamlet, 111.2.
Andräs Jeles: Angyali üdvözlet [The Annunciation], 1984; Marcell Jankovics: Az Ember tra¬
gédiäja [The Tragedy of Man], 2011.
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