Àngels Gonyalons: "I had this title on my list since I was 30, and I'm double that now"

BarcelonaThe challenge that Àngels Gonyalons has in hand in the new show she premieres at the Grec Festival is so complicated that, before starting, she has a request: "I hope the audience turns off their mobile phones and the watches that turn green and seem like aliens in the stalls. It's a great acting challenge and a very delicate mental gymnastics, and I'm training a lot so that nothing distracts me, but...", she says, and asks theaters to invent a method for confiscating mobile phones before entering. The director of the Teatre Romea, Josep Maria Pou, believes it is "a lost cause". The actress resists: "There is a certain connotation of 'I paid for the ticket and I do what I want', and no: you are going to a very important and delicate ceremony, and there is a code, you are not in your dining room with a bowl of popcorn".

The challenge in question is a version of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde written by director Marc Rosich, in which she embodies the four protagonists of the novel and also the author. The play can be seen at the Teatre Romea from June 30 to August 2. The show is created for Gonyalons' acting brilliance. Not only is she the main protagonist of a canonical text of universal literature, but Marc Rosich has made her a tailor-made Victorian dress and added a string quintet with original music by Jordi Cornudella to exploit the actress's musical side.

A corrupted painting

To begin with, Oscar Wilde appears on stage, who defends "art for art's sake, the precise uselessness of art as a philosophy of life", says Rosich, who has adapted the second edition of the novel with the prologue included. The author presents the characters: Dorian Gray, the aristocrat who sells his soul to the devil to maintain his attractiveness while a portrait of him is what ages and deforms due to the evils he commits;the diabolical Lord Henry Wotton, the instigator of the protagonist's moral corruption in the low-life of London; the painter Basil Hallward and the actress Sibyl Vane. Rosich adds three male presences, which underline the homoerotic drive of the original and act as a chorus. "They can be acolytes, ex-lovers, fans or multiplications of Oscar Wilde's soul", points out the director, and they are played by the singer actors Jordi Vidal, Pau Oliver and Pol Blancafort. Montserrat Colomé has directed the movement of the quartet on stage. Arriving at a point in the show, when the painting already marks Dorian Gray's sins, it is he who takes over the narration.

Rosich does not define this portrait of Dorian Gray as a musical but as "a chamber piece where music and text coexist organically". "Mahler and Stravinsky already associated the violin with the devil", but here the Leos Quartet has been reinforced with the double bass to "seek the darkness", explains Cornudella, who has composed the music following the musicality of the word and an argument that darkens. "The novel advances towards a very beastly monstrosity, it ends up being sordid, and we wallow in it, it is one of the strong points of the show", says the director.

"The essence of everything is there, but brought to a very recognizable timeless place," says Gonyalons about the adaptation. So recognizable that they believe it speaks directly "of the society of the selfie and the cult of the current narcissistic image," according to Rosich. Àngels Gonyalons, in fact, thought she couldn't play the role because it required someone younger. "I make lists of things I like and I had this title on the list since I was 30, and I'm double that," she recalled. "Precisely at your moment of maturity it is interesting to talk about what it means to grow up," Rosich replies. A work about beauty and immorality, hedonism and pleasure, frivolity and social classes "that claims the value of art for its own sake". "It is very important and more necessary than ever, in these convulsed times we are living in, in this country and in the global situation of profound and terrible changes, of anguish — adds Josep Maria Pou—. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, art exists so that reality does not destroy us".