A prize-winning playwright, Garcia (born in 1964), an Argentinian who made Madrid his home, has a reputation across Europe for his radical and confronting work. While his writing draws upon the high-energy classical windmill tilting originating in Cervantes, he draws also on 20th-century sources such Beckett, Celine and Pinter, and is similarly disruptive of theatrical traditions. As Jahjah comments ruefully, Garcia did not provide any stage directions, which allows directors immense interpretative freedom but at the same time makes them feel very vulnerable.
Fortunately, this production’s decision to base their set on a Christian Bolkanski installation in homage to the novelist Borges, was an inspired one. Immediately on entering the theatre space, the flock of books, birds, thoughts, suspended above the stage area, lifted the heart and mind into a different realm. Below, what seemed like, and were, blackboards, created the open pages of a book, upon which the tousled, desperate, rebellious hero (Gerry Sont) is to write his own story, create his own map as opposed to “just googling it”.
Another inspired choice was the ethereal cellist (Sister Ursuline), who gracefully took up her station at the side of the performance area, and whose “tuning up” began the action. A romantic figure, dressed like Goya’s rendition of the Duchess of Alba, and embracing her cello, she seemed an image both of the relationship between art and artist, and of the “high art” which becomes the site of contestation between our hero and his two unseen judgmental children. Despite their bizarrely accelerated intellectual development, or because of it, they prefer Disneyland, a metaphor for the enclosed, sanitised capitalist culture.
As the cellist plays, the stage darkens and lightens, and there our hero lies asleep before us, waking abruptly to give the impression that Sister Ursuline, or even he, may be an hallucination. As a young man, he tells us with a mixture of frustration and pain, he never dreamt that he would wake up in middle age and find himself at “rock bottom”. His anxieties, however, are not just at a personal level but stem from his deep disenchantment with the world of consumerism. “I would rather Goya robbed me of my sleep than Adidas, Bofrost, Volkswagen”, he says, that is, referencing not the material goods but the happiness, contentment and fulfilment which products promise but fail to deliver to consumers.
He does not take his misery lightly however, and determines “to do something”. The “something” is to spend his million (of pesetas) flying in a fashionable German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk (shown via projection) to talk with his children and to break into Prado Museum so that he and his children can meditate undisturbed by other patrons on Goya’s Black Paintings. While we may have many reservations about this desperate and often hysterical man – his misogyny, his irrationality and dissolution – we follow his odyssey with sympathy. His link with the lovely cellist, established through a fleeting exchange of eye contact, remind us that he is motivated by desire for a richer inner life for himself and future generations.
Altogether an original production of an original play, which owes its success to strong direction, high production values and the ability of Gerry Sont to encompass both the humour and the agony of the play’s protagonist.
