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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 uninhibited, 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 Creation? 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 appearance 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 fraternal 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... + 262 +
