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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
powerful the present message of the performance.”® Purcarete does not direct
contemporary texts: is it possible that it is exclusively the signs of accumulated
time in people that interest him? The imprints of time on the human soul
clothed in a decaying body?
FEBRUARY 8, 2020
The Roman scene is continually becoming clearer (Adam: Levente Kocsardi,
Eve: Monika Tar). It casts aside details that wring my heart, but, well, what else
would artistic creation be but the discovery of its own limits and acquiescence
to the composition’s mysterious mathematics — so I console myself. Next, back
to Athens in order to upset the temporal sequence and find and uncover each
scene’s individual emphasis (Adam: Andras Csaba Molnos, Eve: Enikö Eder).
He’s taking theater back into music and dance: where it came from. “Dance,
and consequently theater, had not even come into existence yet,” Derrida
quotes Artaud, if I recall correctly. The memory wells up in my mind, again,
of the firmament-ceiling of the stage box in the Cluj production of Victor, that
flawless digital print that portrays, in a plane, the beautiful, living, and mov¬
ing painted firmament of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the cupola’s heaven
spread out overhead. Except that in Victor, Buhagiar’s digital print announces
the impossibility of catharsis: like the colored landscapes covering bedroom
walls in the 80s, which mercilessly abducted the sexual act from its own bod¬
ily reality to replace it with reverie. It is as if love, despite our intent and in¬
stincts, were pure pornography and eternal shame and debasement, because
neither of us is “present in the present,” in each other’s sweaty, happy body,
but somewhere else, in a porno film displaying oneself as a perfect world, and
each as the other’s object. One was unable to travel, but there on the bedroom
wall undulated the motionless ocean, and yes, the motionless gulls carved the
motionless sky.
The Mediterranean, that is Greek, theatrical discourse permanently changed
when it was forced inside a stone building that shut the sky out from overhead:
when they exiled nature — the sun resting in the clouds’ cove, then peeking
forth, the rain or the airborne birds flying above us and resting on the ridges
of the amphitheater or the Globe, and the wild animals seeming to shout into
the productions — in other words, when they locked the nature that echoes our
lives out of the plays of existence. The cosmically universal became particular,
and God became an aging, tiring janitor. We also turned away from ourselves
then, and not just from God.
6 Purcärete: Images de thédtre, 20. (Translated by A. Visky).