'The last atom', an ingenious linguistic and mathematical game that doesn't quite work

I don't know if Jordi Oriol, one of the most original creators of Catalan theatre, knows the work of the linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, but his theatre in general and in particular L'últim àtom make me think so, because he uses linguistic games that alter the meaning of signs and words, illustrating the principle of linearity of the signifier and achieving surprising and humorous results. This is evident, for example, in the pronunciation (the speech) of the title of the show if we connect the two words or, more naively, if we consider the presumed and unknown actress Lara Segur, with phonetics that recall the name and surname of another well-known actress, who will not appear on stage and will be replaced by a supposed director: the actor Rubèn Ametllé. There is much more on the old green blackboard of the language teacher Mia Esteve, who plays with signifiers and signifieds and who replicates the mathematical formulas of professor Joan Carreras on another blackboard, where, talking about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat, she posits the principle of observation as an international virus that threatens humanity. The professor and teacher are separated parents of a daughter who disappeared ten years ago, whose anniversary is approaching. She is joined by a Spanish-speaking army general, a priest, a mother in a wheelchair, a police inspector, the mother's lover, a theatre student, and a president who doesn't arrive... characters who inhabit a well-posed story but not so well resolved in the construction of a dramaturgy that is a victim of the same flexible and intuitive structure with which it is presented to us.

Certainly, there are some scenes, three in particular, that are very comical and in which the clown takes over the scene; there are also flashes of Jordi Oriol's natural wit; the humor that runs through the performance effectively contrasts with the pathos of the situations; there is constant movement well orchestrated by the direction, and Joan Carreras builds a delightful professor who seems to come out of a comic strip, but the whole, in our opinion, is irregular and I don't know if it will resonate much with the usual Goya theatre audience.