About theatre

This Saturday I had the good fortune to see in Lloret de Mar I count every step I take on the ground, a monologue that Lluïsa Cunillé wrote especially for the actor Oriol Genís, directed by Xavier Albertí. The play is of a delicacy that we only find at the highest levels of art, performed by three top personalities of Catalan theatre. I am very grateful for the idea of a Xavier Albertí cycle in Lloret, his city, and I hope more towns would program theatre with this ambition.Now that it is Saint George's Day, few people will buy theatre books, even though theatre is perhaps, together with poetry, also little sold, the most rigorous form of literature. What can we do if culture (which in Latin means cultivation) involves burying and watering a seed that is not seen but is there, and with much more life inside than the plants already grown and ready to be consumed. Theatre has given us tragedy, the most essential form of human consciousness.And, therefore, few people will buy, and I'm sorry, a recent book from Arola Editors (an editorial harmed by the scandal of denied subsidies for Catalan books, but with an impressive catalog, of incalculable importance for our theatre),  Ansietats teatrals reunides, by Esteve Miralles.

“No other artistic manifestation demands clearer answers to the inconsistencies of a time”, says Miralles, at the beginning of the book. From its birth, theater is linked to politics, and any minimally cultured society channels its discussions through it. Miralles has the merit, so necessary and infrequent in these gray times, of raising the bar. In times of war and robotization, he vindicates humanism through two pillars that need each other and perhaps are the same: pity and consciousness. He speculates from theatrical pieces of Catalan and foreign authorship in small essays where theater, cinema, song, literature, psychiatry, and TV series relate and mirror each other. Some writings on theatrical language are very interesting but also very specialized. When Miralles talks about The Good Person of Szechwan or Macbeth you have the impression of reading first-rate European essay. Sometimes, in his reflection, Miralles invokes his intimate experience, and then the pages become memorable, because he reinforces humanism there. He is brave, and I highly recommend going to the internet and reading a recent article of his, published in Atzucac and titled "The Colonial Consensus against Catalan Literature". It is very much worth it.