Theater review ‘Cortázar in play’ Dramaturgy José Sanchis Sinisterra and Clara Sanchis, based on texts by Julio Cortázar Direction Natalia Menéndez Scenography Mónica Boromello Lighting Pilar Valdevira Costumes Laura Ferrón Music and sound space Mariano Marín Performers Pablo Rivero and Clara Sanchis Venue Teatro de La Abadía , Madrid 4It is not easy to bring Julio Cortázar’s universe to the stage. But here it is in the hands of Natalia Menéndez, Sanchis Sinisterra and Clara Sanchis all this game of imagination that we appreciate so much in the Argentine narrator. Using some of his most famous texts, which dialogue with each other, making Cortázar’s words underlined by two characters and a setting that mutate, the viewer is immersed in that world where reality engenders other realities, the texts other texts, where everyday life and the transgression of rational logic are replaced by a poetic experience. In this sense, it is comforting that a work like this has been mounted, this tribute to this break with the predictable, with space, time and the feelings of what happens on the street. What is happening on stage is what Cortázar bequeathed us: that the ambiguity of the world is not only the most important feature of his writing but also the most characteristic feature of our time. Through fragments of ‘House taken’ or ‘ Grafitti’, from ‘Instruction Manual’ or ‘Hopscotch’, going to little-known radio works such as ‘Goodbye Robinson’, a kaleidoscopic montage is created, full of strength and beauty, density and playful lightness. Here is, as Ramón would say, “the unseen bias of reality”, the crack through which in this scenario reality turns to its hidden plots to become poetry. The interpretations of Clara Sanchis and Pablo Rivero make Cortázar that author who subjects us to continuous perplexity, the voice that made his literature that of a vitalist, that of someone who was so enthusiastic about life that he wanted to expand it through of his writings. Everything in this montage, therefore, expands towards the luminous, towards the celebration of creating and inventing, of having fun with the imagination and with man’s capacity to achieve new dimensions of what is already known. That is the challenge for the spectator, who must accept that escape from theatrical realism so in vogue to reach an experience of the other, because the other is a way of illuminating the ordinary with the wonderful, the ordinary with the extraordinary.
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