The plowman and death

The Plowman's Dialogue with Death, written by Johannes von Tepl around 1400 and rediscovered by the Germanist Konrad Burdach last century, is considered to be one of the most important works of late medieval German literature. Two characters stand face to face and vehemently defend their right to exist against the other: life and death. The occasion that sets in motion this war of impressive proportions is a concrete fact: the early departure from life of a blameless woman, mother of a child and wife without blemish.(...). In terms of form and content, Tepl's dialogue already has a tradition behind it - in the era there was a varied thematic register from memento mori to vanitas vanitatum, from dances of death to contemptus mundi - but Tepl is not the only one who found the framework for the clever idea of ​​calling death to judgment, but also the scholar who made himself the creator of a work of art, which sows the spiritual harvest of this writing.

Marin Tarangul (from the preface vol. The Plowman and Death by Johannes von Tepl)

Awards

UNITER 2022:

Best Show Award

The prize for the creativity of video design and mapping, given to Andrei Cozlac

Festivalul Internațional de Teatru „Theater at the Crossroads” din Serbia, 2022:

Best show

The best scenography (Dragoș Buhagiar)

Best video design (Andrei Cozlac)

Best Male Role (Călin Chirilă)

Chronicles:

In the performance of the National Theater in Iasi, Purcărete replaces the original dialogue with an inner monologue: the plowman and his virtual double, alter ego inseparable from the protagonist confronted with the imminence of the end. Here, everything begins in an everyday setting with a refrigerator, sofa and desk where the "ploughman" turned writer types out his texts in a nervous stacatto rhythm. Solitude of an artist torn by fears, a refugee in the exercise of "writing" that replaces that of the original "orality". But, extremely subtle, a last-minute reconciliation intervenes thanks to love, thanks to the beloved who awakens and satisfies the sexual appetite of the protagonist. At the same time, the virtual "partner" circulates and intervenes, which is nothing more than the doubled image of the man facing death. Everything is double, but each of the terms belongs to a different regime of presence: the man and the ghost. Man and the real affected by unreality because, in Dragoș Buhagiar's scenography and Andrei Cozlac's video design, furniture appears and disappears, and, as in a dreamlike adventure, nothing is certain. The closet, the massive piece of furniture that made me think of Gaev's closet in Livada..., is present to be destroyed later. The "virtual" double of the Plowman when he respects human dimensions, when he expands like an immeasurable shadow: this fluidity between the real and the unreal is constituted in the puzzling poetic uncertainty of the representation. And, at the end of the road, an endless landscape of glaciers opens up like in a famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich, where the two lost characters are associated in the immensity of immobilized nature. Where are we, on which side, because the protagonist seems lost among the ice, and his alter ego has replaced him on the scene? From this uncertainty comes the "fantastic" perplexity of man's inner meditation on death with his double. Against the background of the distant echo of the typewriter chanting its beats like those of a woodcutter in the night. Death is in us. And the final image remains unforgettable, responding to the initial one that opened with a banal bed that, at the end, on the completely empty stage, turns over to transform into a grave.

George Banu

"A story that Silviu Purcărete chooses to tell primarily visually, in a montage of gloomy beauty, extraordinary simplicity of lines and with a strong impact on the viewer. A sequence of frames-states developed with theatrical and cinematographic means, in which the living body of the actor on the stage (and, implicitly, of the man on the "stage" of life), captured in his inner movement of collapse in the face of helplessness, is placed next to the other body, enclosed in an image that only gives the impression of life, but which is dead by its very ossification, captive in an illusion (for this is also the photograph, and the film, and the hologram - not a moment stolen from nothingness, but only the illusion that we are above him). And in this direction, a plus is given by the recovery of some images reminiscent of the silent film, with the predilection for black and white, with the minimal, slow movement, significant through repetition, through its multiplication with only slightly changed sign."

Nicoleta Munteanu https://alecart.ro/plugarul-si-moartea-purcarete-