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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
all round, / A very Job, shocked at the state he’s in...”*? The great assumption of
Mephistopheles by Ofelia Popi arises in my mind, one of the final, irresistibly
humorous scenes: with despairing urgency she tries to glue the angel feathers
falling from the sky onto herself: what if she could, all unnoticed, get mixed
up in the angelic ranks rising heavenward with Faust’s soul, and ascend to
heaven, herself?**
All the Purcärete-humor in The Tragedy of Man originates in parousia: the
catharsis of the Last Judgment.
Knowledge, ambition: Weapons that beguile:
Yet fight I not anew with them in vain,
Their only shelter: love ...?°°
The word “love” is strong, too strong: I return, after all, to Madach’s “senti¬
ment.” Although if we approach this question from the viewpoint of the actor’s
play, Lucifer is, as a matter of fact, the character incapable of love: the furor
of impotence rages within him. Eve’s proximity and the unexpected turning
points arriving because of the woman, remind Lucifer of his own incapacity
for physical love: he feels himself even smaller than Adam. Opposed to “cold,
calculating reason,” Eve represents the “child’s disposition,” and because of it,
the Luciferian attempts fail, one after the other, in the historical scenes. Eve is
a stronger personage in The Tragedy of Man than Adam, and this is important
also because in eliding Madach’s teeming misogynistic lines we obtain a more
contemporary text; not completely contemporary, of course, which I happen to
regret, since Madach seemingly saw modernity’s turn for the better in woman.
He paid a severe price for this recognition, but, well, who hasn’t?
JANUARY 24, 2020
To display the infinite in the minuscule — here the theatrical space reduced to
the size of a tabletop — this spatial proposition fills me incessantly with worry.
I believe that we must free ourselves from thinking of minimalism as a style.
Rather, we must interpret it as a mode of thinking about space — its proportions,
surfaces, and illuminance relationships. This way of looking at it is comprehensive
% Goethe: Ibid., trans. Passage, 401.
34 Ofelia Popi, taking the role of Mephistopheles, is a female actor.
35 Madách: The Tragedy of Man, trans. J. C. W. Horne, Budapest, Corvina, 1963, 9. Translator’s
note: Szirtes" translation used for most of the citations; Horne translation for the first two
lines. However, as A. Visky quotes his own adaptation of the third line, it has been translated
literally.
* 241 +