Good tribute with a great Sacristán

A good story and a great performer. Nothing else is needed to achieve a great theater performance. In this case, it is the story of the childhood and adolescence of the actor, director, and writer Fernando Fernán Gómez, adapted by the man who was his friend and collaborator for years, José Sacristán. A Sacristán who, it must be said, at 88 years old fills the theater with a clear diction full of nuances that can be heard perfectly until the very last row. It is a sincere and heartfelt tribute to his friend by a Sacristán who, at this stage of the journey that is life, has made the theater a territory of reality and pleasure. A Sacristán who does not need great scenography or theatrical machinery. A chair and a cushion (which he says was his grandmother's), a kind of trunk, a lamp, and the fall of a piece of curtain evoke a space of creation and life.

The story is worth it. It is the story of a boy cared for by his grandmother, because his actress mother is very often on tour and his father wanted nothing to do with the fruit of an adventure in Peru, even though the baby was registered in Buenos Aires. Such were the things of the tours through Latin America in those years. A story that is the story of so many children –poor ones, of course– of the era, a story of Spain that traverses the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Republic, and the Civil War to end up in Francoism.

Although Fernán Gómez completed his memoirs later, Sacristán has stuck to the first installment, which ends in 1943, when the actor had already begun his career in theater and cinema. Sacristán explains it to us by stepping into the skin of different characters, including the superb socialist and savvy grandmother. He is both narrator and character. He enters and exits one or the other with small changes in voice and intonation and manages to move the audience with the relationship between the boy and his grandmother, but also invites a smile. The Comedian's Son is a very suitable and recommended proposal for lovers of genuine theater without fuss.