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ANDRÁS VISKY
made of wood, which makes the text incomprehensible even at close range.
The actors are surprised, and none too soon, at the difficulty represented by
this echoing proximity.
Purcärete tells the masked doppelgangers speaking into microphones: “Je
ascunzi, sa te vada lumea” (“You're hiding, but only in order that the audience
see you still better”). And he shows how he imagines it: everyone laughs at this
childish grandiosity. While directing, the joy of play often seizes him. This un¬
inhibited, ludic perception of the world, in which, as Imre Kertész” would say,
the trust in existence shines through, is liberating. The fact that we live amid
ruins — we ourselves brought them into being — calling it all history, while in
fact we ourselves are also ruins, yet “everything’s fine,” because we recognize
ourselves in what exists and the entirety of existence within ourselves. It is
the Greek feeling and the risus paschalis [the Easter laughter] together: these
might be the spiritual genes of theater.
Could it be because of the proximity of bodies, the unavoidable experience
of myself, and the manifold face-epiphanies, that I experience theater as a more
spiritual formation than institutionalized, wealthy, and self-satisfied reality, of
which I myself am of course the terrified, fallen, and slain subject?
We must strengthen the Lucifer throughline, since for him, the deed is not
merely the demonstration but the destruction. Will he be able to convince
Adam to join in the rejection and destruction of the world, in fact, of the Crea¬
tion? Can he persuade him, having seen the horrors of history, to commit an
Adrian Leverkiihn-like retraction of his Ninth?
He removes the hammering of the nails into the wood in the Roman scene,
or rather, the sound of the distant hammers; it lacks “toacd.” He ties the scene
change to the recurrent blood-chilling wolf howls, and this indeed remains as
the acoustic element linking the production’s fragments. In Rome, the appear¬
ance of the plague is the more important motif, he says, and not the apostle
Peter’s crucifixion that Purcarete had inserted into the scene. I regret the
disappearance of these offstage hammer blows; their sound opened an entirely
new dimension before me. Furthermore, I feel the text:
“They’re crucifying a few lunatics
Who dream of justice and fraternity””®
to be a very contemporary message, since only some new or renewing frater¬
nal turn of humanity could save civilization from the ecological catastrophe
at whose threshold we stand today. I preach to the director at length on the
> Imre Kertész (1929-2016): Hungarian author (Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child,
etc.); Nobel laureate in Literature (2002).
76 Madach: Ibid. (trans G. Szirtes), 95. Translator’s note: the production, whose text Visky
quotes, modifies the lines: They’re crucifying a few unfortunates / Who dream of fraternity...
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