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ANDRÁS VISKY
Still, slight the folly was most surely not
Which caught him at the last and overcame."?
The Lucifer of Madach, however, is convinced that the Lord cannot cast him
away, since he himself is an important principle of the creation: God, therefore,
depends on his existence, the way a king depends on his valet to dress him:
without a valet, the king remains naked. Madach’s poem, examining modern
ideas, bears the readily visible imprint of the feudalistic worldview.
The difference between the two, Faust and The Tragedy of Man, is not only
philosophical-theological, but also and at the same time dramaturgical (of
course, the latter is the inevitable consequence of the former): it is Adam’s
induced “Adam and Eve dream” that frames the Tragedy, as instrumented
by Lucifer. This dream-dramaturgy, with history presented to them (and the
fresco of past-present-future displayed before the viewer), takes on the mean¬
ing of the crossroads presented to humanity, and it transmits the conviction
that purifying struggle (“strive”) and doubt-free faith (“trust, have faith”) have
intrinsic value.”
The parallel reading in terms of similarities and contrasts will permeate our
further conversations. Purcarete’s 2007 production of Faust in Sibiu — which
the standard-setting critiques (N.B.: does such a thing still exist, hereabouts?)
proclaimed as the apex of his lifework, a wonder and a masterpiece, and which
the Radu Stanca National Theater of Sibiu continues to keep in its repertory
— remains the mirror of our interpretations and disputes, and in a certain
sense, our standard. If I count correctly, I saw the Sibiu production six times,
and from today’s viewpoint I consider Purcarete’s distancing from the Sibiu
production’s language, heading in an entirely different aesthetic direction, to
be even more significant. Nothing is brought over from Faust into the Tragedy,
at most his creative experience in debasement and exaltation, the imprint of
ephemeral (theatrical) creation in his soul.
We're not playing a parody of Madach — or rather, the Tragedy — but a
guignol: we seek the amateurism and immediacy of folk theatrics, he tells the
actors. If the Bible, then a peasant bible or a biblia pauperum; if theology, then
a theologia pauperum.
The stage dimensions: 6.5 by 4 meters, that is, 26 m? — a dizzyingly con¬
fined space that The Tragedy of Man can scarcely have seen before. Of course,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Part II, Act V, trans. Charles E. Passage, New York,
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, 402. Alas, no English translation I know remotely approaches the ex¬
treme wit, insolence, and toughness of Läszlö Märton’s Hungarian translation (Pozsony/
Bratislava, Kalligram, 2015) as quoted by the author.
This refers to the closing line of the Tragedy; in Szirtes’s translation: “Man, I have spoken:
strive on, trust, have faith!”. Madäch: Ibid., 260.
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