‘La nit del peix kiwi’: being halfway to everything

10/24/2024

Updated at 6:31 p.m.

Popular sayings say that an aquarium with small fish at home brings bad luck. The protagonist of ‘The night of the kiwi fish‘(The Night of the Kiwi Fish) was already accumulating bad luck before the day he invested seven hundred euros of his depleted finances in some little fish to surprise a couple who, in any case, were going to abandon him. Our man is a failed actor who is going to gamble in a casting for ‘Titus Andronicus‘ directed by a famous Russian director. If things don’t go well, he won’t be able to bear the high rent for the apartment he previously shared and which is now falling on him with eviction on the horizon. A lie, making him believe that he has been accepted to work on Shakespeare’s work, will push him to flee forward from the moment he sees one of the fish in the damned aquarium perish in his hand.

Josep Julien, author and director of this Night of the Kiwi Fish, presents his piece as the “adventures and misadventures of a liar” with traces of thriller, comedy and melodrama. The beginning of the plot is promising, but in its second section – it lasts an hour and a half – it declines and becomes muddled. What begins as an ironic approach to the miseries of the theatrical profession, becomes a kind of ‘road-story’ in which the character combines his lies with criminal adventures.

The result gives a story with too many ups and downs of rhythm, despite the efforts of the leading actor, Santi Ricartto maintain narrative tension. The problem with ‘La nit del peix kiwi’ is that its author combines several themes and does not end up resolving any of them. When Julien, who is an actor, talks to us about the theatrical world, he does not provide the necessary acidity for his approach to go beyond the descriptive. By pushing his character to flee, he also fails to make the viewer feel like a participant in the comings and goings of this man eaten away by failure. Our protagonist stays halfway through everything and ends up getting nowhere. Neither thriller, nor comedy, nor melodrama.