'Blind spot', the comedy that resists the summer drought

BarcelonaPerhaps because they conceived it as a game during one of the toughest recent times, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, playwrights and directors Sergi Belbel and Roc Esquius wrote a long-running comedy and one of the most celebrated recent successes at Sala Versus Glòries. Angle mort premiered in 2021 and the audience soon showed their enthusiasm. The play won the Teatre Barcelona award for best proximity show and was reprogrammed, year after year, at the Barcelona venue. This August it is in its fifth season, with performances until September 13.

Belbel and Esquius had already worked together on previous occasions – on plays like Les roses de la vida (2017) and Sàpiens (2018) – and they were clear about the starting point of the show: to address precarious labor in the present day. "It's a bit of the inverse of El mètode Grönholm. That play appeared when the economy was going in favor and presented the characters with the possibility of getting a good job. Here, on the other hand, it's the opposite. We imagined a very small company that, due to the crisis, has to fire one of its workers," explains Belbel.

The four characters are played by Berta Bähr, Ramon Godino, Antonio del Valle, and Rafaela Rivas and are archetypes. There is the apparently friendly company executive, a worker obsessed with numbers and control, a quirky creative, and the company's communication manager, an naive woman who is the one who, initially, wants to be fired. "They are all very archetypal, because we are playing with pure, wild comedy, made of small twists. Complicities will be woven between them that will become entangled," points out the director, who adds that for this new season they have shortened the play a bit to make it more direct and dizzying.

A play of spaces and senses

Beyond the plot, the great turning point of Angle mort is formal. The show is structured in two very distinct parts that take place in the same double stage space: the director's office and the workers' waiting room. "Throughout the first part, we see and hear what happens in the office and, at the same time, we only see what happens in the waiting room, without sound. From the middle of the play, the exact same thing is reproduced but with the sound in the waiting room instead of the office. We were interested in the audience having a full view of both spaces but not hearing them at the same time," explains Belbel.

In this way, the audience gets an idea of what might be happening on the other side of the stage from the characters' movements and gestures, but it's not until the second part that they can verify if what they sense corresponds to the story. "It's a game of expectations that works a bit like a puzzle. The audience pieces together things they saw at the beginning and that perhaps seemed surreal to them," says Belbel.

The success of this show led Esquius and Belbel to create another similar one, which they titled La torradora and which premiered last season in the same theater. In that one, instead of playing with hearing, they play with sight. "There is something that is not perceived at first and that will be fundamental for the play," emphasizes the director, who adds that La torradora will return next season to the Sala Versus Glòries. Belbel also celebrates that the theater season does not stop in August and argues that theater has an audience in the summer. "Not everyone goes on vacation, it's fantastic that it doesn't all come to a halt. Comedies are very well suited to summer, and theaters end up being small climatic refuges," emphasizes the director.