Couples, marriages… a dangerous game in Barcelona’s theatrical spring

There is no doubt that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee is one of the most iconic works of the 20th century. And it talks about nothing but a marriage: the all-out battle starring Martha and George is legendary, with some mythical lines. Like when she, after hearing him say he can’t take it anymore, shoots back: “You can take it! That’s why you married me!”. Ingmar Bergman delved into the subject with the masterful series Scenes from a Marriage, staged a thousand times. Right now, at the Maldà, the company El Eje is performing a quite successful version of the classic, Scenes from a Separation, with a script by Eva Pauné Martínez. It turns Marianne and Johan into Alba and Joana, a lesbian couple trying to survive in present-day Barcelona. They love and hate each other at the same time, but they can’t live without being together. Mar Pawlowsky and Patrícia Bargalló know how to push their characters to the limit, with the mirror of the creatures created by the Swedish genius as a reflection. An excellent performance.

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The Barcelona billboard has decided that this spring we will have couple lives by land, sea, and air. Dramas and comedies. Of all kinds and from all angles. A good example is Perfect Strangers, by Paolo Genovese, directed by David Selvas at the Poliorama. The original film was a huge success and has been adapted for the theater in 25 countries. On stage, we have three quite different heterosexual couples, with children, without offspring, middle class, bourgeois, more or less well-off… And one who comes alone. Before starting dinner, the youngest member has an idea: to leave the phone on the table and read aloud all the messages that arrive. Surely no one has a secret? It becomes clear that yes, because, as they say during the performance, everyone has a public life, an intimate one, and a secret one. The dialectical game between the characters is intense, and they will discover many things they would have preferred not to have to reveal.

Genovese weaves comedy very well, just as Cesc Gay mastered the tempo of the performance in one of the most successful comedies of contemporary Catalan theater, The Neighbors Upstairs, which he himself adapted into the film titled Sentimental. It has been staged in about fifteen countries worldwide. If the Italian makes two of the men exchange their phones to prevent one of the wives from finding out she is being cheated on, in A Brilliant Idea, by Sébastien Castro, the jealous one is a husband who suspects his wife is having an affair with the real estate agent looking for them an apartment. One day he meets an actor who looks a lot like the alleged lover of his partner and hires him to impersonate him at a dinner. Until the two meet the impersonator’s twin brother.

At the Romea we will have The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with version and direction by Rakel Camacho. The German director premiered the title first in the theater than in the cinema and we have a relationship even harsher than in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? First, because Petra consciously mistreats her third partner, Marlene, who is also her secretary. And when she meets Karin, a young opportunist, sparks fly. Fassbinder portrays power roles in couples like few others, just like Bergman in Scenes from a Marriage and Pauné Martínez in the version he made at the Maldà: Joana is the expansive one, the artist, who always has a project on hand, while Alba is shy, family-oriented, too cautious.

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In The Son, Jon Fosse plays with time, because the main couple is no longer in the prime of life. They are older and expect their son to come home after many years without seeing each other. It is directed by Ferran Utzet at the Lliure. Father and mother believe the boy has been in prison, but they really know nothing about his life. The distance that separates them is enormous. And the son is a kind of Godot, but he ends up appearing. The Norwegian Nobel laureate demonstrates here the relevance of his theater, very Pinteresque in nature. Eu Manzanares, in turn, has sought in For Love (Sala Flyhard) an unconventional couple to also talk about power roles. Their characters, Sandra and Mateo, she Catalan and he Chilean, are married, but their bond is purely administrative. Before, they were very good friends. Now, the new relationship will put everything to the test.

And maybe the wise phrase that Martha spits at George was not at all off the mark. In Greek tragedy, husbands and wives stab each other mercilessly. Nowadays, in theatrical fiction, they insult each other, fight, and often put up with each other, without exactly knowing why.

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