'Expulsion': We all need a nest

Two sisters and a brother meet at their family's summer house near Barcelona after the death of their father in unclear circumstances. The reunion will lead them to talk about the relationships between them and with their parents. It is a fairly classic theatrical situation for childhood memories and old jokes to surface and, finally, for each one to reveal who they are now.

What distinguishes Pau Miró's work from others with such similar approaches - such as, for example, Sisters by Carol López (Sala Villarroel, 2008) – is not a work about fraternal and father-son relationships. Well, yes, it is, but it is above all (and that is its value) a work about the need of human beings, and also of animals, to have a nest, a refuge, a place to call home. We already know that Pau Miró uses animals as metaphors for human life (Giraffes, Buffaloes and Lions). This work begins with the story of a bird (a blackbird, to be exact) that the parents found wounded in the field and wanted to cure. There, later, they would build the summer house. Not one house, many houses, because his father made hundreds for the birds.

A supportive architect father and a mother who wrote stories. Two absent characters that I would say are more interesting than the three siblings dissatisfied with life. The eldest (Montse Germán), also an architect, has been fired from the City Hall for defending some tenants from eviction; the other (Anna Alarcón) is a lawyer for a large real estate corporation, and the boy (Xavi Sáez), separated with a teenage daughter who sneaks into the house, has serious money problems and imagines what he would like to do with the house. The daughter (Mia Sala-Patau) sums up the violence of society. She will finally claim the nest she has not had until now. And this is how Pau Miró connects with the most current reality of the big cities that expel citizens from their homes and turn them into refugees.

As often happens in Miró's works, what is obvious hides what is important under a breath of magical realism that distances it from naturalism and covers the function with a certain mystery. I don't know if as much as Pol Roig's conceptual stage space suggests, which I think conditions the movement of the performers. The actors are well directed by Toni Casares in a staging that, in the end, exhibits theatrical effects with thunder and storms that monopolize everything.