Preparing for retirement

Carles Sans is back at it. After closing his silent stage with Tricicle, he flew solo with the help of the spoken word in a highly successful show that toured for five years: Finally alone! And he keeps on talking. Even a bit too much, because his verbal gags work less well for him than his gestural ones. He says I'm leaving, but in the end, he might act like bullfighters who never quite leave the bullring. The leitmotif of the new proposal is precisely what to do when he stops performing and has time to do whatever he feels like.

In an empty stage space copied from his previous monologue, with a screen and some projectors, Sans analyzes the many suggestions friends and acquaintances have made, and continue to make, about what to do after retirement, while looking for the most comedic side. If they tell him to travel, he remembers the words of a friend for whom traveling is only changing the place where one takes a crap and... he shows us a map of Europe where he has already taken a crap. And so he makes fun of proposals like doing yoga, meditation, going to museums, to the cinema, fishing, hunting, or signing up for a gym... A series of stories that are not always very original, with humor somewhere between clean and crude, and with details of Catalan scatology where the word imposes itself over the gestural gags characteristic of the comedian, which, at the end of the day, are what work best, as was made clear by the loud and satisfied laughter of an audience of celebrities who delayed the premiere by fifteen minutes with hugs and handshakes.

In the second part, and once the list of suggestions is finished, Sans jokes about everyday issues like the constraints of sleeping as a couple or ending up in a hospital. And this is where we witness the most fantastic number of the show with the hilarious exclusively gestural dialogue of a couple arguing inside a car stopped at a traffic light. Brilliant. I don't know if Sans will achieve his goal of making people laugh more than in the first monologue as he had set out to do, but it is certain that a good laugh is guaranteed.