Calórica has established itself as one of the most prestigious and successful theatre companies in the country. With their own stamp, they have made comedy a tool to create ambitious, well-crafted theatre, with discourse, political commitment and a social outlook. This intelligent and heartbreaking combination has allowed them to fill theatres and sell out. It is logical that their impact has led them to television. The 3Cat platform has just released their first series, Multipurpose room, a comedy of six twenty-minute chapters that takes place in a room in a civic center where different activities take place. Each episode is an independent story: a workshop on survival techniques, voguing classes, a playroom for families with children, a ceramics workshop or a meeting of fans of a cartoon are some of the situations that cause the meeting of anonymous people, very different from each other, who must live together in the same space. This is the trigger for unusual circumstances that allow us to address current issues such as loneliness, aggression, prejudice, intolerance, injustice or fear from very everyday approaches. The most personal becomes universal.
On TV3 there are several examples where the most relevant theater companies have been able to develop notable projects in the history of the channel. La Cubana with Teresina S.A., the T of Teatre with Jet Lag, or Dagoll Dagom with Oh, Europe!, Oh, Spain! either The memory of the snails among others. However, theatre and television are different genres, with their own languages, and it is no guarantee that success on stage can be translated into good results on the screen.
To enjoy Multipurpose room It is essential that the viewer connects with a very specific type of humor. This is the first step. On the other hand, it is difficult to enter into this fiction because it requires the viewer to accept a certain narrative artificiality, a somewhat histrionic imposture, which is not easy. You have to give up certain codes of verisimilitude that the audience is not always willing to concede. Because the pact and the links that are established between the public and what happens on stage are not the same as those woven between the viewer and what they see on the screen. On the other hand, the theatrical register and the potential of La Calórica is very limited on a television level in this series. It is as if the project were left half-finished. Its discourse, its talent when it comes to delving into the central idea, its incisive capacity, in Multipurpose room All of this is left without a head, as if it could not be fully developed, both at the level of message and interpretation. The result is a rather absurd and implausible comedy, easily forgettable, very trivial, which neither impacts, nor moves, nor invites reflection on anything in particular. Although it may seem so, television is not exactly the multipurpose space that many attribute to it.
