Theater fans

At the end of Opereta Imaginaria , one of the characters in Valère Novarina's play asks the audience: "Are there any followers of reality among you?" The question is not irrelevant, especially when it is addressed to the spectators, who this season in Barcelona have been able to enjoy a good handful of theatrical texts that reflect on or look at the theatre from within, from Tréplev in La gavina who calls for new forms to Guillem Clua's old comedian ( Mort d'un comediant ) who, through the classics, seeks to transmit his passion for the theatre to his illiterate carer, without forgetting Andrea Jiménez's exercise ( Casting Lear ), in which through King Lear he explains his relationship with his father. We have also seen the precariousness of the profession in La nit del peix kiwi (by Josep Julien), Pablo Macho Otero in the midst of an existential crisis who discovers a myth about the origins of theatre ( Prosopopeya ), and a director like Carlota Subirós who remembers everything that theatre has meant to her, a refuge from the storms of the world ( Olympia ). Not to mention Lorca's El público or Calderón's El gran teatro del mundo , which have been shown at the Lliure and the Romea, respectively.

Theater serves everything. And for centuries, authors have used their own medium to shape their plays. In Hamlet , Shakespeare uses the famous scene of the comedians to uncover his father's murderer. At the TNC, at the beginning of the season, Sergi Belbel and Enric Cambray explained ( Hamlet.02 ) the first two acts of the magnum opus. We'll have to wait for Hamlet.03 for their analysis of the moment when Claudius is seen poisoning his predecessor through a troupe of comedians instructed by the Prince of Denmark.

⁄ “The history of theatre, if one were to write it from the actor’s point of view, would be the history of a protest.”

Imaginary Operetta offers another key. Arribas asserts that Novarina's piece is special for many reasons, but above all for one very curious reason: "It seems to say nothing, accumulating information that seems to weigh heavily, but when it's staged, it has a marvelous brilliance, and the words acquire a surprising power." Since he translated the work, it has taken him fifteen years to stage it in every detail, to the point that it will be Novarina's first text to be staged here.

Novarina speaks, yes, about the theatrical act itself. With the aim, according to Arribas, of "celebrating the human present and the acting presence." This demonstrates "a great passion for theater," which is nothing more than a vindication of the "ephemerality of the present" and the shared experience between a troupe of actors and actresses and a community of spectators. Something we can also see in all those works that, from within the theater itself, vindicate the theatrical act, theater as a mirror of society, as a place to share an experience, to be a community, to vindicate words, gestures, and gaze. They even try to find meaning in the act of performing every night before a troupe of strangers, that strange relationship between performers and spectators. All of them theater enthusiasts.

Arribas places Novarina more in the vein of Artaud than Beckett or Ionesco. It's not absurdist theater. It's something else. A playwright who parodies reality and theatrical ritual, understood as a phenomenon that contains a more elaborate, thoughtful element, but is at the same time filled with "nonsense and arbitrariness." This is how the Swiss author's characters behave, somewhere between grotesque and depth charges. Between performers who want to escape the human presence and others who wouldn't know what to do without the audience.

Imaginary Operetta is a feast for the ears. The Barcelona-born director, at the Brossa Foundation, has Mònica Almirall, Màrcia Cisteró, Antònia Jaume, Oriol Genís, Roosevelt Jimenez, and Griselda Ramon in the cast. These performers, already experienced with Arribas's personal fetish, Lluïsa Cunillé, were able to take on Novarina's piece with enthusiasm, the main difficulty being, from the start, that they didn't know how to perform it. "Each scene had to be different, which is wonderful," adds the director.

Sorin, at the beginning of The Seagull , says that one cannot live without theater. Earlier, Treplev had told him that contemporary theater, for him, was “pure routine, conventionality.” Operetta Imaginaria is a powerful response to what Chekhov's character was thinking at the end of the 19th century. At the end of the play, one character asks the audience: “What are you representing?” Another replies: “These people are perpetually representing themselves.” This makes the first character reply: “What have you come to this theater to do?” It is clear that Novarina's characters are here to challenge convention.

And the thing is, theater people love to talk about theater. Often from a celebratory perspective, from that act of resistance that is theater. The Swiss author made something very clear in his famous Letter to Actors : “When he acts, the actor knows well that all this truly transforms his body, that it kills it every time. And the history of theater, if it were finally to be written from the actor's point of view, would not be the history of any art, of any spectacle, but the history of a long, silent, renewed, and stubborn protest against the human body.” In Milton's Paradise Lost , the Almighty complains to the Devil that actors question his greatness because they play at being gods. And the Devil replies that he created hypocrisy and pretense and that his job had been, solely, to turn that into a profession.

On stage

Valère Novarina Imaginary Operetta Joan Brossa Foundation. Until May 18th Guillem Clua Death of a Comedian Romea Theatre. Until June 1st