Sota la Ciutat
Written and directed by Llàtzer
Garcia and performed by the Companyia Arcàdia, this piece—currently running at
the Teatre Lliure (Montjuïc)—raises intriguing questions about who funds
theater, what gets censored, the role of education, and talent—talent pure and
simple. The play basically hinges on the comment of one of the characters,
Narcís Munt, an aging teacher/director, to the effect that, rather as in Hamlet, “something is rotten in the
Catalan theater.”
The opening scene peers into the
lives of a young couple in a provincial town. They are trying to find their way
into the theater world (she, Dàlia); or the world of novel writing and
publishing (he, David). They struggle, they quarrel. Finally, they move to the
metropolis (Barcelona),
where everything is possible. One of their neighbors, Bàrbara Bonay, a successful
painter and designer, befriends them and introduces them to her sister, Miriam,
and Narcís Munt, her brother-in-law. Narcís agrees to mentor Dàlia as he
attempts to kickstart his own career. There follows a series of rather
bourgeois scenes of quasi-Bohemian joie de vivre leading up to a potential new
role for Narcís at “the National.”
Predictably, he blows this chance by
showing his outspoken disrespect for anybody who disagrees with him. Narcís is
ready, in fact eager, to refuse to be hypocritical. Crisis thus returns. However,
seeming resolution comes as “the National” accepts a new performance of his
previously successful production of Godot.
But in the end it is curtains for
Narcís. For we learn that he has died in mysterious circumstances. Dàlia bravely
vows to fight on, nevertheless; and Bàrbara delivers a difficult elegy for the
dead director whom her well meaning efforts had previously attempted to
Apollonize or hypocritize.
The play ends there, but the
questions raised in the course of the action go on. “Who’s watching?” is one of
these questions. For the egoistic aspect of art so naturally welded to the idea
of hypocrisy is bound to follow us out of the theater. And this seems to me an
interesting issue to ponder in multiple hitch with “Who funds theater?” and
“Where?” Llàtzer Garcia and the Companyia Arcàdia are no doubt aware of the
impossibility of matching Godot’s
nada, old or new, whether at “the National” or at any other venue. Yet (fortunately)
they search on, exploring well under the city—Sota la Ciutat—where answers are notoriously elusive.
(Sota la Ciutat will be on at the Teatre
Lliure de Montjüic until the first of May, 2016.)
