The unmissable humor of La Calòrica in television format

Perhaps there is no other theater company in our country that in recent years has generated as much cult as La Calérico. A follow-up that is not limited to the most dedicated theaters, and that has to do with a committed and risky conception of the performing arts that, however, is situated at the antipodes of any elitist aura. There is a popular vocation in the company's works, in the humorous records that they work (in the audience, sometimes they laugh with a spontaneity more typical of the Paral·lel than of the Lliure), in the people who claim it, and in the themes always related to problems that affect the great majority, even from the climate change to the crisis of Europe with a political project passing through the furor for entrepreneurship.

The transplant to the television format should not have been strange to them. In fact, some of its members (the scriptwriter Joan Yago as co-creator, the actress Esther López as protagonist) are co-responsible for possibly the best Catalan series of recent years, It never snows in the city. But the title they are now releasing, Multipurpose room, It does not fit into the codes of typical fiction but rather adopts the freer format of the anthology, which allows for experimenting with different settings and characters in the six episodes set in the same space.

La Calórica adapts the scale of its works to this smaller format in every sense. Instead of tackling a large theme as is usual in pieces such as What do we talk about while we're not talking about all this shit?, Fairfly either The congress does not march, here they confront the various imbalances generated by ephemeral contexts of socialization. The different acts that take place in the room of the title become the excuse to explore, from humor, the drift towards the absurdity of politically correct language, the discomfort (the cringe, they would say now) of certain fan conventions or the dark dimension of hypermaternity. The series remains faithful to one of the constants of La Calórica, the taste of the actors to change characters, here in a more categorized way through the six episodes. The core of the company, Xavi Francés, Aitor Galisteo-Rocher, Esther López, Marc Rius and Julia Truyol, saves spaces for some guest actresses, such as Roser Batalla and Francesca Piñón.

Television formats

Joan Yago and Israel Solà, directors and scriptwriters, show an awareness of the television format, so each episode gives off its own personality through its production. Puki's time, for example, is partly presented as a report on the progress of a former children's television star; Introduction to ceramics, a single sequence shot allows an intimate discussion between a couple to be turned into a group debate; and in Playroom for children and families, the shot/reverse shot confronts two ways of understanding parenting before leading to a monologue for the splendid brilliance of Júlia Truyol.

Perhaps because they want to reach an audience beyond those of us who are a faithful audience, La Calórica seems to have given up on some of the most stimulating challenges of their works, such as giving play to figures located at the other pole of their political spectrum, while playing on the more emotional and obvious connection with some protagonists. However, in Multipurpose room should be able to follow a more ambitious production in every sense.