Josep Maria Miró's 'The Monster': A Puzzling Creature

The monster Josep Maria Miró tells us about lives in a small rural community very similar to the one where the multi-award-winning tragedy took place. The most beautiful body ever found on this site(2022) and not far from The housekeeper (2024). In addition to the geographical and mental space (or perhaps because of that very reason), in The monster, as in the aforementioned works, the strange and the incomprehensible become evident within a framework of tense violence.

But if in those works Miró's always rich and stimulating words flowed, dragging us along on a tense and expectant theatrical journey, this one Monster It is quite a challenge for the spectators. The audience tries to unravel, with little luck, a mystery that the author and director surely knows very well, but which on stage transcends with an excess of chiaroscuro, of unresolved mysteries within an environment where it is against. without the background of the author—would have served to find expository clarity. In the face of this confusion, we must celebrate the great interpretive work and the beauty of the word within the framework of an extremely sober, austere, and aesthetic staging, very much in vogue today. Miró's theater is a theater of the well-written word. A word that amplifies meaning, descriptions that go beyond what they describe, a narrative action charged with feeling.

The author wants to talk about fear. And it is there, reaching us with the harmonious everyday life of Àurea Márquez's Berta and the emotional bewilderment of Albert Prat's Santi, awake at dawn in an isolated house in a small town with sexist traditions. A conversation that prompts a visit from a dark angel (Joan Negrié), who lived in the town twenty years ago and had relations with both of them. A friend. Perhaps more than a friend who had to leave. And a violent father. The elements are there. The mystery too, but we ended up lost.