Three good actresses for a story about normal people

Although the audiovisual imagination moves extensively around traumatic and violent stories, most people have a normal life. And this means a family, work, and romantic life with sweet and bitter moments, with jolts but without other earthquakes than those that may shake one's health. And Charlotte, the protagonist of Morning sun, is part of these normal people. The show takes its title from the Edward Hopper painting of a woman sitting on a bed watching the passage of time.

In fact, the praise for this play by Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Heisenberg, Pornography) speaks of the virtue of building a sentimental drama about the everyday life of normal people. And, like the woman in the painting, the spectators will see fifty years of the life of Charlotte –who wants to be called Charlie–, her daughter Tessa, and her mother Claudette pass before them. It is a fifty-year story told in the manner of a long flash-back. From the maturity of a Charlie confronted with illness and invisibility, the work takes an emotional journey through the sentimental jolts and the protagonist's confrontations with her mother, daughter, and her close friend. The story is sprinkled with events in the United States, which serve mostly as temporal markers, since they do not modify the narrative.

The great discovery of the play, however, is not so much the emotional journey of the women –a bit predictable– as the way of telling it. The dramaturgical device consists of having two of the actresses (the older mother and the daughter) enter and exit the characters to play themselves at different ages. They also embody other, more secondary characters without any change, not even in voice, and with perfectly linked temporal leaps. This requires great concentration and precision in the lines, such as that exhibited by Míriam Iscla, Anna Güell, and Raquel Ferri under an impeccable direction by Pau Roca.