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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 replications 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 enthusiasm 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 defining 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 language. 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 approach 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 Coonrod 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. + 236 +
