Oldal 276 [276]
ANDRÁS VISKY
of Caravaggio and an ink drawing of Saint Peters martyrdom. I would love
to have a duplicate of this pictorial commentary so I could better understand
what has happened to us during the course of the rehearsals.
The Lord’s voice always arrives unexpectedly and movingly. An ageless child
speaks to us, or rather, does not even speak, but sings, sometimes stepping
out of song into the recitative of intimate address, as if it were here, in our
immediate proximity.
MARCH 3, 2020
Rehearsal, even on the day of the premiere. Corrections: masks, lighting, and
occasionally even entire scenes. “We need two more weeks,” he says, “but we
always say that, before every premiere,” he adds. Purcarete reminds me of
the most valid definition of theater, which I had told him at the start of the
rehearsal process: the art of “perfect clumsiness,” yes. “You are creating this
theater, too,” I tell him, thinking not only of his latest work, this Timisoara
production of The Tragedy of Man. Tragedy shows its true face in the laughter
of children and in their suicidal trust in the world. “It is a long path that leads
to perfect clumsiness,” he says, “and individual productions are each a single
stairstep on the path. I’ve got to stop now,” he continues, “direction is a concern
for the things of the world that is meant for the young.”
“It is not Shakespeare whom we direct but a production of the sort that
Shakespeare would have directed if he were our contemporary,” said Purcarete
at the first rehearsal of the Cluj Julius Caesar, according to my diary entry for
the day. To imagine the text as theater we can only read the Madach poem
validly from the perspective of our own bodily experiences. The text is, as it
were, the document of a virtual production that played in Madach’s imagina¬
tion. “What I read transforms into a sort of hallucination inside me, which is
visual in its essence. But not only visual. Tentative rhythms and sounds are
added, traces of atmosphere, music. [...] The only thing I’ve led myself to do
while reading is to relate to the text as irrationally as I possibly can, to let the
irrational work as freely as possible within me. At least at first. Later, when I
sit down to work, these images and traces of hallucinations begin to organ¬
ize themselves — true, with a fair amount of difficulty. As a consequence,
the next stage aims at a sort of syntax of the imagery, the creation of image¬
sentences. And when I say ‘image,’ I am not thinking solely of visual tableaux.
The text, in practice, changes into images of the production that are all the
better, the more irrational they are. I am inclined to preserve this path for the
+ 274 +