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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 imagination. “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 organize 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 imagesentences. 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 +
