Miriam Moukhles also knows how to do cabaret

Abecedario is the second creation work by a young tandem of artists who made an impact with their first show at Maldà and who are residents at Beckett this season. Nodi: de gossos i malditos already looked back, specifically at the counterculture of the seventies of the last century, and this Abecedario continues to focus on the past. In this case, on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This, at least, was the starting point of the show. But in the process, things got tangled and very little remained of the alphabet of that philosopher who, at seventy, jumped from the window of his Paris apartment and left a recording of a long interview where each letter evoked a concept.

A fleeting but attractive image at the beginning of the play announces what, after all, is the core of its content. The actress Miriam Moukhles, on a podium enveloped in smoke and golden light and with the air of a starlet, sings a song in Arabic and Spanish. Immediately after, the performance seems to get serious with two young researchers who work and discuss the philosopher's legacy. Pure illusion, because then Fred Galiana appears, European featherweight champion residing in Mataró; the daughter, a pianist here, of the Russian painter Nicola de Staël, a close friend of Georges Braque and who, like Deleuze, one day jumped from the window of his house in Antibes; a North African storyteller griot, Mrabet, and, above all, Juanita de Tánger, a Tangier starlet imagined by the writer Ángel Vázquez in the international Tangier of the mid-20th century.

Juanita will devour everything. An elegant cabaret singer with the air of El Molino who sings – and sings well –, tells stories, and even socializes with the audience. Voluntarily or involuntarily, this Abecedario becomes a vehicle for Miriam Moukhles to show everything she is capable of doing, which is a lot. Along the way, the other characters, and with them the performers, get lost wondering what they are doing in this mess. What does it matter, because the one who plays and wins with resolution and authority is Moukhles, an unbridled actress who gives us and will give us nights of theatrical delight. Without a doubt.