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ANDRÁS VISKY
of the actors and of the audience. "How long will it be before they inscribe in
the theatrical tables the following law: words in the theater are only embellish¬
ments on the design of movement.”? Yes, Meyerhold.'°
It is a special, interesting and, on the whole, enrapturing moment in the
work when, atthe end ofa given scene, the non-Hungarian speaking Purcärete
asks me to read the entire scene out loud to him in Hungarian, in a sort of
interpretive reading close to the situation. He wants to hear the text’s rhythm,
the inflection points; he wants to feel the lifelikeness of the dialogues.
The “Poeme d’humanite” or the “Tragödie des Menschen” is aknown trope of
the nineteenth century that has become surprisingly close to us at the start of
the third millennium, particularly as posed in Madach’s sci-fi-sensitive man¬
ner. This is yet another reason why Purcarete’s approach via the theater “poor
in spirit” is of particular value to me. He doesn’t put it on a pedestal because
he approaches it fundamentally as theater and not as a canonical literary work,
locked up, controlled, and guarded by many. In addition, he alloys market¬
fair acting with Bunraku and then places this refined abstract choreography
and marketplace immediacy in an intensely sensory, situative musical world
unique to the theatrical music compositions of Vasile Sirli. In the Budapest
production of Richard II (2019) in which I participated as dramaturg, the mu¬
sical material, and more precisely the final scene, is exceptionally beautiful;
in the musical texture unifying the entire performance, for instance, one can
descry the shrieking of the wheels of the no. 2 streetcar as it negotiates the
sharp 90-degree bends in front of the Hungarian Parliament: this, too, is a
very fine Sirli invention.
JANUARY 21, 2020
‘The reading rehearsals with the actors are also in progress; he distributes the
roles for portions of the scenes in different combinations, like someone col¬
lecting sound samples. Meanwhile, he provides detailed and extremely precise
instructions on methods of voice production. Purcarete sets the Madach text
into an opera of his imagination, as if he could already hear the entire per¬
formance — this realization is staggering. He requests four different water
sounds (sunet acvatic, in Romanian) and experiments with them in the scene
of Creation, exhaustively, accurately.
As early as our first discussions in November, I mentioned to Purcarete the
curious coincidence that I had just been working with Levente Gyöngyözi on
the libretto of The Tragedy of Man, and that we had completed the outline of
16 Vsevolod Meyerhold: The Fairground Booth, in Edward Braun (trans and ed.): Meyerhold on
Theatre, London, Bloomsbury, 1978, chapter 10.
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