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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
Brechtian viewpoint — all of them, however, without exception, constantly
focus on the piece purified into a playbook: that is, they devote the rehearsal
timeline to the dramaturgical reading of the text. They place the text onto the
stage or into the space. Not Purcarete: he first examines the possibilities in
the surmised theatrical language: could that which he hears and senses as¬
semble into a distinct theatrical form? Can it hold up to theatrical reality? This
is why, at the beginning of rehearsals, after having collected many kinds of
speaking variations and different sound samples, he rehearses scenes that can
most probably demonstrate what the proffered aesthetic can make possible.
Now, he’s beginning with the London scene: it’s as if the entire scene were
a danse macabre in Madach’s vision. And then he returns to the beginning of
the playbook and constructs the scene of the Creation.
Perhaps — although I haven’t asked him — this is why he never repeats
himself. For him, a production brought into existence is like a newborn poem:
it’s impossible to write the already self-writing poem anew. Purcarete’s score is
not the piece, but the performance outline he has composed, which becomes
real communally with the actors, composer, and scenographer. I must ask him
this question about his systematic rejection of self-repetition.
Starting the rehearsal with the London scene’s harrowing, exceptionally
beautifully written dance of death is thought provoking. In the course of his
studies in Berlin, Antal Németh viewed a performance of a danse macabre,
and the sudden realization that Madach’s Tragedy is built on the death dance’s
conceptual world struck him like a bolt of lightning. Later, as I’m reading a
study by Gabor Kozaky,” the thought grows stronger: “to my greatest sur¬
prise, I have found philological support for my intuitive sense of a couple of
years ago. The study definitively shows, via thorough reasoning, that Madach
indeed likely thought about something related to the medieval death dance
while writing his work...”
JANUARY 23, 2020
Purcarete outlines the Creation as a resurrection-event with disarming theo¬
logical precision. The first Adam-Eve pair (Attila Kiss and Rita Lérincz) learn
the language of animals: they first behold the world, come into existence be¬
fore them and without them, as an acoustical richness. Lucifer (Andrea Tokai)
wants to make the forbidden fruit — already desirable in itself — desirable by
first tasting it him/herself,”° before offering it to Eve. Might this be theologi¬
24 Madäch: Ibid., Scene 11.
25 Koltai: Ibid., 111.
6 Evil itself has no gender, and in this production the role of Lucifer is shared between male
and female actors.
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