Page 262 [262]
OCR
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 taking 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 amphitheaters, 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) revelations. 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. Technical 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. + 260 +
