A playful text by Sergi Belbel and two great performers: nothing else is needed
Àgata Roca plays a woman exhausted by the dependence of others and Enric Cambray plays all the others
She and machine
- Author and director: Sergi Belbel
- Performers: Àgata Roca and Enric Cambray
- Heartbreak Hotel Theatre (Until October 11th)
Tradition says that the essence of theatre lies in a stage with a performer and a chair. Nothing else is needed. An idea that, if there is a Barcelona theatre that explores it, it is Àlex Rigola's Heartbreak Hotel, which makes a virtue of scenic minimalism. It returns now with the magnificent theatrical game that Sergi Belbel wrote some years ago and which won two awards (Ciutat de València 2022 and the Valencian Writers' Critics Award) but had never been premiered: She and Machine. An actress and an actor and a chair embraced by the splendid lighting of Kiko Planas in an empty space.
Hand in hand with two immense performers, Àgata Roca and Enric Cambray, Belbel proposes a reflection on a woman in crisis who is tired of always thinking about others and who, consequently, considers what to do to live her life without depending on all of them. Àgata Roca is a woman in her fifties (not far from the woman in The Categorical Imperative by Victoria Szpunberg) who confronts a series of characters from her life played by Enric Cambray. It is a chain of micro-scenes that follow one another without any change other than the meaning of the words.
They are common characters with common words, which feel relatable and which reinforce the exclusion of women. From the spoiled and selfish thirteen-year-old son who asks her, demands of her, to give him the latest iPhone model for his birthday, to the hairdresser who acts as her emotional advisor, passing through her cynical human resources boss, her husband, her father, a daughter, or her friend. Belbel's direction avoids any over-emphasis on the woman's emotional states, instead letting a tender helplessness emerge, tinged with irony if necessary, in the face of vital failure, which helps to modulate the expressiveness of the characters that Cambray masters. The play was titled She and the Others and the substitution of 'the others' for 'the machine' adds an element of intrigue that is revealed at the end, underlining the protagonist's tremendous loneliness. Do not miss it.