Sota la Ciutat

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.)