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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, skincolored 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, foreshadowing 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.
