‘The most beautiful body ever found in this place’, subversive beauty

For the closing of the edition of its 30th anniversary the high season festival he had an ace up his sleeve. Since its publication, the audacity of the new text of Josep Maria Miró, a compendium of seven voices or characters designed for a single interpreter. A gift and a declaration of love to the acting profession according to the author’s words, which in the flesh of Pere Arquillué, painstakingly directed by Xavier Albertí, becomes a theatrical event.

Only one spotlight has been arranged by the director, there is nothing else that helps shape the terrible story of a murder in rural Catalonia. Albert, a 17-year-old boy, is found dead and mutilated in a field. The event revolutionizes the typical town where apparently nothing ever happens. The reactions form a polyphony of testimonies, a Rashomon effect based on the revelations of the corpse itself, his mother and other villagers. There is nothing new in what he explains to us, ‘Twin Peaks’ on known landscape, the metaphysical cruelty of Faulkner applied to the ritual sacrifice of a beautiful ephebus, a not innocent Tadzio.

Miró’s dramaturgy leaves the city this time, but not the portrait of communities that are suffocating and disturbing, apparently threatened by the foreign, shaken in their inner heart by the instincts that desire unleashes. There is nothing more subversive than beauty, one of the characters reminds us, and that is why it must be removed, so that everything can remain the same. As in the monologues of Antonio Tarantino, echoes of mystique resound that Albertí wanted to read in a baroque key. Little by little a curtain that seems to be painted by Caravaggio lights up, as in his painting the body and its mystery are the question and the answer.

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Of the first magnitude

Body, voice, instrument. The word becomes flesh thanks to tremendously accurate work by Pere Arquillué, who just needs a gesture, a voice flex, a few steps, and jumps from one character to another like a demiurge. Containment and economy of movements, goldsmithing of breaths and intonation. It is worth falling into the first rows to taste each gestural nuance by which the argument is engulfed. A theatrical ritual of the first magnitude that only very at the end receives new layers such as music, which when it arrives compromises the tranquility achieved and even the hearing. Hopefully ‘El cos més bonic & mldr;’ soon find the room close to you and you need for your – deservedly successful – season in Barcelona.