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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 mechanical 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 Burgtheater 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.
