A love poem for two voices with Joan Carreras and Marta Marco

Lovers' Heart (2007) is the first play written by the Portuguese author and director Tiago Rodrigues, now director of the Avignon Festival and one of the great personalities of contemporary European theatre. A work inspired by his life experience, conceived as a lyrical narrative, in which we can already glimpse the taste for formal play that we know from his other works (By Heart, Blow, Catarina already beauty of killing fascists). However, it is a more intimate and less political proposal than the later ones, which is now recovered as a small theatrical gem that the audience at the Lliure applauded enthusiastically. A real treat. And it is that in this Lovers' Heart The formal play is the primary and differentiating element that dresses up a story that, otherwise, would be much more conventional.

The director imagined a fairly traditional and happy marriage with a daughter who recounts her life and her love over the years (although the performance only lasts an hour). But he does so through two voices, those of Marta Marco and Joan Carreras, who deliver the same text, the same words—except for a few deliberate contradictions that seek and find laughter from the audience—in a difficult polyphony of extremely high demands on the performers who, fortunately, display a delightful and complete rapport. Two voices and one score for an emotional journey of short phrases, everyday memories, and years that fly by because it seems there will always be time.

The oral synchronicity of the performers is essential, but so are the attitudes from which they deliver the text and the interplay of small gestures and glances of the couple while watching an Al Pacino film on television or having tea. A play also seen in drama, which begins with the woman's respiratory crisis. The visit to the emergency room. The unbearable probability of death. Death. Or not. Finally, a love poem with a final naturalistic ode. Fantastic.