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ANDRÁS VISKY
Vasile Sirli has already been auditioning many children invited from the Bela
Bartók Elementary Lyceum in Timisoara, searching for the most appropriate
childrens voices to make sound recordings of them. And there were several
who made their way to the theater as well as working on the text at home,
and now they’re dropped from the production. It’s sad but seems somehow
unavoidable. An unresolvable contradiction also lurks here: is it precisely the
children’s voices, upon which the very concept of our Tragedy is built, that will
go missing from the production? My Lord, do not abandon me!
Another most weighty dramaturgical justification appears alongside the
voice we’ve found: to the extent that the Lord’s voice is a voiceover that the
sound engineer provides as the final word, the Lord transforms into a me¬
chanical voice, and thus the child, no matter how fine its singing voice might
be, cannot be a part of the production’s present time: the Lord’s personal
drama would cease. And another justification, if needed: it seems that the
theological content of the Lord’s texts is utterly beyond the children; one can
hear how the text detaches from them and sounds alien. This distant poem
fails to become their own text, at least not in the time span at our disposal.
Singing, of course, would solve this problem, it could become interior. But,
well, now this has taken an unexpected turn.
Time, always. Theatrical performance is made from the material of time; the
infinitely long rehearsal time liquidates theater — this is just one of Brook’s
important realizations, as he says in Threads of Time: “nothing can alter the
fact that we need an audience.” One must step beyond rehearsals at some point:
one must present oneself. The theatrical production can never be finished and
perfect, because then it would be inhuman. Becoming mechanical is the death
of theater: “the audience is a mirror in which we confront our own inadequacy,”
Brook emphasises once more.”!
I mention to Purcarete that the idea of transposing the Lord’s words into
song had already come up in the 1934 production of the Tragedy in the Burgth¬
eater in Vienna, which amplified the poem’s dramatic emphases. According to
Antal Németh’s account, the Lord “does not speak but only sings in a recitativo
secco-like manner, which effectively differentiates what he has to say from the
angels’ verses, although they could have easily modified stylized speech to the
point of pure sung speech.””
71 Peter Brook: Threads of Time: Reflections, London, Methuen Press, 1998.
72 Koltai: Ibid., 39.