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ANDRÁS VISKY
the Budapest Cherry Orchard — how long shall I extend the list?! — then we
become swept away, participants in the performance; and later, when we’ve
been reborn as ourselves and view our own relationships with these other
eyes, we shiver to think of what we’ve brought into being and who we truly are.
Not two but three tables of equal size play in the production. The direction
that rehearsals took finally excluded projections, and Géza M. Toth is not tak¬
ing part in the production. It is sad, but the language of theater and style has
no regard for friendships: it is implacable and absolute.
FEBRUARY 27, 2020
The space. It’s an impressive construction, an ancient amphitheater and an
elliptical Renaissance operating theater — which itself quotes the Greek am¬
phitheaters, of course — and thus the captivating combination of the theater
of the human body. Planed planks, beige, light brown: its grain is highly visible.
It’s the theatrical space of the salvation-agon: its struggle for the (final) revela¬
tions. For Silviu Purcarete, posing the question of salvation in the theater is
an ineluctable deed: one can sense it the moment one steps into the space. The
seating area, set up high, paradoxically brings the viewer close; we see inside
the salvation-laboratory in a way that we are simultaneously inside it. It is
loftiness, at least a location raised out of the everyday, and a “great” event: it is
pathos, to be precise, but in the sense not of affectation but of anguish.” But,
on the other hand, what glimmers in the depths of the mirror of pathos is a
sharp humor, and at times more than that: sarcasm, provocation, subversion,
the silent — or sleeping? — God’s persistent “prodding.”
The viewer sees three tables along the long axis of the ellipse; someone is
asleep under them — we don’t know who. These and similar installations are
born of constraints that, in the best case, remain unnoticed by the viewer:
someone has to be there to hide the props prearranged under the tables. Tech¬
nical theatrical requirements (scenery, costumes, props, lighting, the viewer’s
way into the space, as well as the departure route) are the very material of
theater. Without recognition of the boundaries of language (of theater) and
their mapping, there is no theater (more broadly: no creation of works). The
characters enter, following a snake, the tempter of the Garden of Eden, which
slithers all the way along the length of the tables and disappears before our
eyes. We sense that it will return. And of course, we expect it to. For if we await
the snake, then the snake will come to visit.
73 Translator’s note: Visky makes a play on the Hungarian words, szenvelgés = affectation and
szenvedés = suffering, anguish, which share an etymological root.
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