Theater critic ‘Bartleby’ Author’s Herman Melville Adaptation and direction Llàtzer Garcia from the translation of Carme Camacho Scenography and costumes Sebastià Brosa Lighting Laura Clos Closca ‘Sound Space Guillem Rodríguez Interpreter Albert Prat Place The Beckett, Barcelona 3’Bartleby The clerk’, by Herman Melville, is, as a ‘ Dick ‘, an example of what Umberto Eco called “open work.” Since its publication century and a half ago, it holds the most diverse interpretations. The persistent “would prefer not to do it” of the clerk in a dispatch of Wall Street could transmit the nihilism of those who do not believe in anything or fear anything; the alienation of the proletarian in capitalism by exercising tasks that they contribute to him; existential loneliness; mental disorders; or the literature of no that Enrique Vila-Matas categorized in his celebrated novel ‘Bartleby and company’. It is not the first time that Melville’s ‘Nouvelle’ takes to the stage. In 1989 José Sanchis Sinisterra put it in the Beckett room. And it is in the Beckett where Llàtzer García represents her again. With a difference: instead of the two characters in the original version he has decided that he is just an actor – Albert Prat – who embodies the lawyer. With all the spotlights on himself, a wide desk and files, the narrator supports the tornadic characters of his subordinates and travels from the perplexity produced by Bartleby’s negatives towards a compassion for the writer who refuses to obey the orders. Prat marks the tone of that stranger who prefers not to obey and verbalizes the restlessness of the superior who is unable to respond to a non -violent rebellion. Since we are facing a text paid to polysemy, we will say that the director of this assembly has set aside the Kafkian interpretations (Melville, precursor to the theater of the absurd) or Marxists (Bartleby, ambassador of the class struggle) to bet on humanity. The lawyer who dramatizes Albert Prat transits from the inquina to the rebel subaltern to the concern for the fate of an existence in solitude: before working for him, Bartleby was in charge of a department of “dead letters”, those that do not reach anywhere. The “letter” that Melville sent there by 1853 when he imagined the character of the enigmatic scribe remains alive and disturbing: it serves as a test that at the end of the Beckett function we continue to go around his message.
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