Theater review Allá lluny hi ha una booth Author and director Jordi Casanovas Scenography Paula Bosch Lighting Guillem Font Costumes Bernat Grau i Moré Original music Lluís Robirola Performers Cristina Arenas, Mercè Pons, Meritxell Yanes with the special collaboration of Òscar Muñoz and Lluïsa Castell Venue Room Béckett, Barcelona 4 Jordi Casanovas, one of the most established authors of Catalan theatre, is identified by his acidic approaches to sociological and political reality. Among around thirty titles, let’s remember ‘Dinner with Battle’, ‘A Catalan History’, ‘Vilafranca’, ‘Immunity’ or the recent ‘Conspiranoia’. The latter, in a comedy style and written with Marc Angelet, satirized the flat-earther preachers and the alternative versions that have multiplied on YouTube channels and WhatsApp groups. In ‘Allà lluny hi ha una caseta’ (There is a little house far away), Casanovas directs his gaze to the myths of the Noble Savage, the animism of Mother Earth and “natural” births that demonize the intervention of conventional medicine. The author presents us with a poor girl, without family and mistreated by the man who impregnated her, who believes she finds refuge from her precarious emotional situation in two midwives with whom she intends to give birth in harmony with Mother Nature. The young woman ends up in a cabin in the middle of the mountains in the Gerona region. In that lost hut, deprived of her mobile phone under the pretext of preventing the evil magnetic waves and without running water that she will have to look for in a nearby stream, the woman in labor is at the mercy of those two women who take advantage of the isolation to intimidate her with legends of the spirits of the forest. The supposed benefactors will be revealed as two kidnappers… If in ‘Conspiranoia’ Casanovas satirized the prophets of disaster, the millenarian and anti-scientific visions, this time he opts for the horror genre to deploy his critical plot. The claustrophobic set design by Paula Bosch with its twilight lighting by Guillem Font, the appearances of those spirits – rather evil – that the midwives invoke, or the references to a disturbing past make up the precise atmosphere for the viewer to metabolize the fears of the protagonist . Meritxell Yanes and Mercè Pons play the midwives who camouflage evil with their environmentalist neo-hipism and Cristina Arenas is the poor girl subjugated by those sadistic hostesses. To know the outcome of this terrifying birth without an epidural, there is nothing better than watching the play.
#shed #shed #terrifying #birth #epidural
