We continue with the pleasant surprises what awaits us Season 2024-2025 of the Teatre Principal de Palmaof which we currently only know the programming of the first part which extends from September 2024 to January 2025. And during this period, we experienced a series of unique features which, in addition to answering simply pragmatic questions, at the same time contain a sort of magical halo that makes them unique.
This time we attended the performance of Amb la claredat increases freda lounge comedy (rather satire) with Pep Tosar, Evelyn Arévalo and Inma Colomer. This is a production by El Grec, based on a dramaturgy that they shared Tosar as Thomas Bernhardtthe Austrian writer and playwright – icon of existentialism of the second half of the 20th century – and Arévalo as the journalist who interviews the writer throughout the show. Colomer closes the file, like the writer’s aunt. It could have been a monologue since it is a free adaptation of My rewardsBernhardt’s posthumous work, which contains his speeches of gratitude after receiving a series of literary prizes, “nine, twelve or thirteen”, according to the writer’s manuscript.
But the option is to feature three characters, perhaps without any particular intention, even if in the eyes of the spectator it fits perfectly with the video that presides in the background of the scene, where we see Glenn Gould in his third approach to The Goldberg variants (1981)a year before his death. It is also the ideal pretext to incorporate fragments of The unfortunate (Spanish title of Der Untergeher, (Thomas Bernhardt’s best-known novel published in 1983). Fragments of the novel’s content are present in the on-stage interview and serve as an alibi for Tosar to delve as deeply as possible into Bernhartd’s intensity and obsessive boredom, taken into the territory of satire. The unfortunate It was published a year after Gould’s death, becoming here a silent character although with a strong presence, knowing the content of this novel.
It can also be interpreted as a clever nod to the fact that Thomas Bernhardt was a student at the Mozarteum (this is part of the setting of the novel), a circumstance which will make him an inveterate music lover all his life, taking him to the point that his work contains a musicality that must be kept in mind to appreciate what so much banality hides in the text. It is the severe nuances that adorn his verbiage that give meaning to his story, sometimes opaque, and always calculatedly vulgar.
As usually happens in comedies We’ll have to wait until the end to know the ultimate intention of the story.sometimes in the form of a moral and other times – this is the case – as the culmination of a presentation here specified in the speech given by Bernhardt, in 1965, when receiving the Literature Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City from Bremen, which is the fragment used at the end of the work – now as a monologue – with the Pep Tosar firm in his confrontation with the audience in the seats and he became another listener, from that distant evening in 1965, with a fed-up Bernhardt.
Tosar, in this last moment of the play, addresses the audience directly; in the same way as Thomas Brenhardt had done sixty years beforethen using theater seats as laboratories for self-examination.
