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ANDRÁS VISKY
Yesterday, in the midst of feverish work, I suddenly began to pay attention
to the mirror play in the theater dressing alcove: how many mirrored replica¬
tions of ourselves do we see, and how many of the versions of the space present
different interpretations of the relationship between the two of us...? When
it’s a matter of play or of something expressed plastically, Purcarete instantly
switches and suddenly, he, too, studies the infinite variations with childlike en¬
thusiasm and alert attentiveness. We take pictures with our phones and show
them to each other unselfconsciously, and both Ilir and Vasile join in quickly.
A layout table as theater appears in several Purcärete productions. In his
Danaids produced in Craiova in 1995, the gods sit around a transparent layout
table lit from below, discussing tragedy as artform, while disposing of humans
and the world’s fate with a single motion. The sentences of Aristotle, Corneille,
Stendhal, Etienne Souriau, Scaliger, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Nietzsche on
the lips of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and Hermes: they commit themselves to de¬
fining European identity by inventorying the Greek heritage of tragedy while
refugees disembark on the shore: the fifty virgin Danaids who, as they say
ashamedly, speak with a barbarian accent, only babbling the lofty Greek lan¬
guage. In the final scene of Julius Caesar in Cluj (2015), the war plays out ona
table, the warriors seizing on each other wear only loincloths; in the battle, the
fallen slide off the table surface: the minimalism of this utterly absurd battle
that tips Roman democracy into ruin is totally upsetting. The minimalist ap¬
proach to greatness — divine events, metaphysical questions, world history,
fundamental human needs — also comes up in the Timisoara Tragedy: it’s an
exceptional poetic aspect of Silviu Purcarete’s theater.
JANUARY 22, 2020
Purcarete rehearses not the piece but the theatrical language he envisions —
nobody among the directors with whom I’ve previously worked travels this
path. Robert Woodruff seeks the reality of the actor’s presence in the rehearsal
process; Vlad Mugur doesn’t rehearse but anti-rehearses: he proceeds in the
most extreme way opposite expectation and constructs the performance out
of these “anti-materials”; Andrei Serban’ is most interested in discovering the
distortions of human relations; Yuri Kordonski, in the course of rehearsals,
is most interested in observing the unavoidable emergence of hierarchies and
the necessary ritualization of human activity in every situation; Karin Coon¬
rod discovers the text’s concentrations of meaning and weaves them into a
performance; Matthias Langhoff seeks the reflection of contemporary social
relations in the piece and grows them into critical paradigms from a faithfully
3 Andrei Serban (1943- ): Romanian theater director.
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