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ANDRÁS VISKY
FEBRUARY 9, 2020
Athens, again. Silviu reaches back to the tradition of movie stills when he sets
up the scene (I could have noticed it in his Julius Caesar!). Hes in command
of a lot of material, not only in his accomplishment in the plastic arts, but
also thanks to his own refined theatrical language, so that the visual artistic
variety of his productions is infinite. (How much lazy and calculated reuse can
you see in theater, O my Lord!... And that’s just in self-epigonism... But what’s
going on with “production quotations”: solutions that simply consist of lifting
pictorial solutions from others’ productions?)
Silviu does not repeat himself, he just speaks the Purcarete language. Once
a language exists, the variations are inexhaustible. The theatrical language is
not born from the piece but from the worldview. Not the language from the
piece but the piece from the theatrical language.
Back to the movie stills: Adam and Lucifer, as Virgil and Dante, watch the
infernal scene, and furthermore, Adam, suddenly doubled, witnesses his own
lynching, shocked, “And only I was fool enough to think / That people such as
this would welcome freedom," he says." Allin vain, as we know.
FEBRUARY 10, 2020
Purcärete links the scenes in the Tragedy together using a pair of blood-red,
stiletto-heeled women’s shoes. This object, shining out from the faded, skin¬
colored overall picture, connects the fragments like chain links, satisfying
the viewer’s need for narrative modestly and wittily. It’s at once an erotic and
surrealist image: Lucifer’s prime objective is the poisoning of love. The shoes
comprise the production’s unifying eros-thanatos motif, shining forth from
the entire production’s dominant skin and beige tones and burning into the
viewer’s memory. First, Lucifer places them on the table when Eve wants to
pluck the fruit but cannot reach it. With Lucifer’s help, however, she dons the
shoes and can finally pick the fruit. It’s undeniably an amusing scene, fore¬
shadowing the coming concealment of their nakedness, and the shame hidden
in fashion. In the Byzantine scene, the shoes appear on a flaming platter; Eve
runs onstage fleeing the crusaders: Adam is seeing a dream, not a real Eve,
who indeed disappears before his eyes. (Adam: Zsolt Csata, Eve: Anna Csabi.)
For a person, physical love is not merely the instrument of species survival:
precisely because of its metaphysical nature we don’t have any idea how to
handle this burden. For, as a matter of fact, amorous love is the language that
sustains and nurtures the innermost human identity. Amorous love: I love
6 Madäch: Ibid., Scene 5, 82.