A vibrant theater scene
I was going to tell you “Don’t go bad”, because when this review is published there will only be five features left. But I just saw that all the tickets are already sold out. The contemporary drama of Catalan theatre. Some die of success, others die of disgust. It is somewhat what Ramon Madaula declared the other day on Ràdio Estel, although our solution would be a little different. Playwright Davide Carnevali has premiered Portrait of the Dead Artist at Lliure de Gràcia, a monologue starring Sergi Torrecilla. Or what would come to be the same: a Valencian actor tells us about the Argentine dictatorship under the gaze of an Italian author.
Documentary theatre: a subjective perspective
The documentary genre is never objective or reliable, as the writer and researcher Mercè Ibarz demonstrated very well when talking about Luis Buñuel and Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1933). Documentary theater often adopts the format of a conference (obviously performative), taking one or more of its premises: the speaker speaks in the first person and addresses the audience directly (breaking the fourth wall), there are audiovisual projections or graphic evidence that illustrates what is being explained, and a supposedly neutral or informative tone is used. But we must not forget that the stage is the place of fiction and that all actors lie by definition. Even if they use their real name.
The border between reality and fiction
The most interesting thing about this Portrait of the Dead Artist is the way in which the border between reality and fiction is blurred. Sergi Torrecilla appears on stage wearing a shirt from La Ruta 40 (his theater company), and tells us about his professional relationship with Argentina and its theater. The actor’s family is Spanish-speaking, and he explains that for him the languages of fiction are Catalan and Argentine, due to their particular prosody. Torrecilla tells us about republican grandparents, Falangist grandparents and Christmas dinners where the most uncomfortable silence reigned. Without quite knowing how, there comes a moment when we have already immersed ourselves in the fiction: like that camera movement in Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994), where we realized that we were no longer hearing the inconsequential conversations of the actors, but Chekhov’s words.
The reconstruction of the truth
The letters, the calls, the maps and the air of a private detective that Torrecilla has in some moments of the show made me think of Murder of a photographer, Pablo Rosal’s monologue that reminded us that every scene of a crime it is always a staging. There is a moment, almost magical, in which the silhouette of the actor is reflected in the photographs that are being projected. “All reconstruction is a fiction”, Carnevali tells us, in a story straddling two historical moments: Spain’ 1939 and Argentina’ 1978. Two disappeared, name confusions, family searches and Airbnb apartments that aim to give the feeling of a home. Clear foil scenography (design by Charlotte Pistorius) and large wooden boxes with the stamp of Piccolo de Milan, the co-producing theater of the show. Davide Carnevali has previously performed this show in Germany, France and Italy, adapting the text to each performer who has starred in it.
An intense experience
I don’t know if it was because of my tiredness on Friday evening (and that of the whole week), but it was difficult for me to follow a text that gets overwhelming, at many times, due to the avalanche of information and data that we don’t stop receiving It is something that, if we were talking about a book, we would stop for a moment and reread the last two pages. Memory and lies, real names and pseudonyms, Dachau, Argelers, El Camp de la Bota and baby thefts (on both sides of the Atlantic). All this (and more) within a function that, also in a very skilful way, passes with great naturalness from the theater to the museum. The power of explanatory posters.
A missed opportunity
It is a pity that this Portrait of the dead artist, the last show programmed by Juan Carlos Martel at the head of the Lliure, has had a life of only eight performances. Things that happen in the theater in Barcelona. It would be great if he toured Catalonia: who else has Falangist grandparents, Republicans or relatives or acquaintances who emigrated to Argentina. But our theatrical ecosystem has these things: we produce, we produce, that the world ends. Let things be born and die without stopping. “And, above all, that they don’t spin!”, some politicians and programmers seem to think. Sometimes I have the feeling that there is a kind of Catalan Bilderberg Club, malignant and secret, which is concerned that all Catalans only see a certain type of show. Just in case we hit them on the head.
