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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 embellishments 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 manner. 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 marketfair 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 musical 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 collecting 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 performance — 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. + 232 +
