Lluïsa Cunillé's visionary work on the end of Europe and the world to come

BarcelonaAfter inaugurating the Teatros del Farró with some short texts that accompany Freshwater by Virginia Woolf and after opening the season at the Atrium Hall with the excellent I count every step I take on earth., the National Theatre of Catalonia opens its Sala Tallers with the third show by Lluïsa Cunillé, one of the most prestigious and performed authors in Catalan theater. Lurdes Barba directs, from October 9 to November 9. Fog, a show set 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in a former Soviet republic where dreams of progress and freedom have been buried.

Fog It's a work written a decade ago, but given the themes it addresses, it seems rather visionary of the world to come—and which, in some places, seems to have already arrived. "It speaks to a specific time and place, but it also speaks to us here and now. We are in a very difficult time, in which the democratic quality of our countries, which we thought had immutable values, is declining; freedoms are being questioned; there is a paradigm shift that is uninhibitedly taking place," the director says.

Cunillé's text is dark and complex, as is usual for the author, who examines the most ordinary people and the most concrete situations to explain the state of an entire society. "The fall of the Wall offered hope to many people and ended up being a rather sad failure. The indicators are very clear: incredible social differences, a low level of democracy, the level of corruption is immense... And society's failures affect people. Lluïsa talks about people," notes Barba. In this case, it's about a journalist who is stranded due to fog in an Eastern European country that could be Bulgaria.

Àurea Márquez, Quim Àvila, and Jordi Collet

The woman, played by Àurea Márquez, rents a room for one night in the home of a couple who need that extra income (Lina Lambert and Albert Pérez) and who live a reclusive life of nostalgia and paralysis, suffering from fibromyalgia and in the stages of dementia. The two characters who disrupt this fragile balance are a son blinded by easy money (Quim Ávila) and a former astronaut who has gone from aspiring to go to the moon to being at risk of falling like an alcoholic projectile into homelessness (Jordi Collet). Communism and capitalism may be two antagonistic forces, but they equally converge toward disintegration, both for the individual and the world.

The characters try to float in this humid limbo, in which the author never gives all the keys to understanding: she leaves gaps that the actor and the spectator must fill. "Cunillé's plays have a mysterious air and seem cryptic, but that's not true: things are happening to the characters, but they're not made explicit," says Albert Pérez. Some of the actors, in addition to the director, are regulars in the author's plays and know how to prop up the story's pillars. "The Traveler ponders the meaning of many things: if there's still a shred of hope, if anything can still be saved," says Barba. But the dismantling of the European edifice and the pessimism will be difficult to reconstruct. Lurdes Barba offers a relentless hypothesis that's very much in vogue with the times we live in: "Luïsa Cunillé isn't someone who has much hope in the human race."