Great start to the year at the Teatre Lliure

Valentina It's a fantastic story, and also a fantastical tale brimming with empathy, emotion, and the talent of French director Caroline Guilea Nguyen, whose equally fantastic film we saw six years ago. SaigonA grand, epic, and choral tale about connections and territories through the lives of a group of Vietnamese immigrants.

The French director, of Algerian and Vietnamese parentage, works with stories of people who rarely reach the stage. She did so with Saigon and also with Lacrima, which was performed at the National Dramatic Center in Madrid, and which also had a fairytale feel. In this case, it was about the pattern makers, seamstresses, and embroiderers who made a wedding dress for the Queen of England. Valentina It's more personal, insofar as the director's mother refused to speak to her in Vietnamese. This led Carolina Guiela Nguyen to consider the vulnerability of children arriving in a linguistically unfamiliar environment.

She researched the story by doing fieldwork with the Romanian community in Strasbourg and imagined the tale of a girl who arrives in France with her mother, who suffers from a serious heart condition. Neither of them speaks French, but Valentina learns it very quickly and becomes her mother's interpreter with the doctors—an interpreter who, as events unfold, will invent lies, both big and small. The story moves between the school, where there is a dedicated and caring teacher who wants to help her, and the hospital, with a doctor pressured by her inability to communicate with the patient and by the haste and coldness of the public healthcare system. In a stage space that evokes an Orthodox temple, all the action takes place around a central table and on a screen that brings the faces and expressions of the performers closer.

There is only one professional actress, and the rest are amateur performers, including a seven-year-old girl who captures the attention and emotion of the show. What a find! She is the protagonist and driving force of the story, and the naturalness and ease with which she constructs her lies is striking. The tension surrounding the mother's possible death is relieved by the humor of Valentina's inventions, in a perfect balance that thankfully leads to a magical happy ending, stopping the tears that threatened to flood the audience's faces. A great start to the year at the Teatre Lliure, with a production that demands the director's continued presence among us.