‘Travy’, a small theatrical miracle where Oriol Pla directs his entire family

Oriol Pla is one of the best actors to emerge in the last decade. Whoever doubts it has nothing more to do with it I, addicta six-episode series about the story of a character who falls and is reborn. The fight with his parents in the fifth chapter is good proof of the ability of this Catalan born 32 years ago. But this actor has also been working in theater for some time. Seven years ago he dared to direct his first work, Travy. He did it with his entire family. Looking for origins, nostalgia and small truths. It was a real success in Barcelona. Now, this little stage miracle arrives at the Teatro de la Abadía, in Madrid.

The work begins with a pantomime by Oriol himself full of vigor and circus knowledge. A little gem in which the actor tells us, with one eye on Charles Chaplin and the other on Jacques Lecoq, how the Teatre Lliure commissioned him to do a play and how he spent time alone, next to his computer, thinking, crumpling papers , racking his brain to come up with the idea that would drive the project.

“When the Lliure gave me that carte blanche, after thinking about what to do for a while, I realized that what I had legitimacy to talk about was family, art, generation, wanting to be disruptive and loyalties” , Pla reminds this newspaper. There, with that acceptance, the project began. He called his partner in stage battles, Pau Matas, playwright, musician and sound designer with whom he already collaborated on other works such as Odysseus either Ragazzo. And he summoned his entire family.

But his family is not just any family, but is crossed by one of the most powerful historical lines of theater in this country, that of the adventure of street and independent theater of the seventies, that of the new minstrels who dynamited bourgeois theater and accommodating of the dictatorship. His father, Quimet Pla, founder of the company Els Comediants. His mother, Núria Solina, musician and pioneer of street theater with companies such as Picatrons or the Germans Poltrona. And his sister, Diana Pla, an actress and dancer with whom Oriol began to participate at the age of six in their parents’ shows that they formed a company together in 1996, the Teatre Tot Terreny.

The truth is not in the word

In Travy, The space becomes the family’s rehearsal room. The public attends the creative process of the work. The game is metatheatrical and well plotted. You have to decide what to do. The mother proposes a parade, the father says that we have to do a play about minstrels, the sister doesn’t want to be a clown, she wants to break up. The vital positions of the characters are stated in a simple way. Núria and Quimet do a number in honor of the recently deceased clown Sivartini. Diana appears dressed as a Mexican wrestler, bare chested, she wants to improvise and blow it up, unite body and poetry, sharpen the proposal. Oriol becomes desperate.

There is no clear answer. Return to the theatrical essences that Diana calls a rotten, patriarchal and old plague. Or go for the modern theater that Quimet describes as something horrible, sour and ugly. Conflict makes it easier for the work to move forward. But it is a somewhat artificial conflict. The work is elsewhere, in the subtext. There begin to appear the lack of communication between parents and children, insecurities, the nostalgia of the elderly made of a mixture of memories and unrealized dreams, loneliness, the couple, the almost always ephemeral success or the identity so difficult to find within of a family structure. An imaginary that comes face to face with a present that is pure mist, uncertainty. Something to which the characters have only one response: continue together, do and share.

Travy he defends doing versus the speech, the poetics of action versus that of words. Something that is obvious when one faces the written text of this work. Following the text alone does not understand anything, the word without the scenic action seems hollow. “Writing comes through action, because it is not about what they say, but what they do and what happens to them. The unconscious of the work is broad, but it is not in the word, but rather it emerges through what they do, how they live it and react to what happens,” explains Oriol Pla.

Furthermore, the work is full of successes. The conversations between Núria Solina and Quimet Pla are full of spark, understandings, and knowing humor. The number in which Quimet Pla does making an omelet and reciting Hamlet’s famous speech (“To be or not to be, that is the question…”) is a true statement of imagination and arte povera with a lot of theatrical withdrawal in these times of repertoire. “Take texts from a dead man that everyone adores and put them together in three weeks. This is what we should have done: make Shakespeares,” says the actor at another point in the play.

And dramaturgically there are two wonders. The first, the use of the “loop”. The conversation about Sivartini’s death will serve to resume the work when what they try goes nowhere. The actors will return to the same dialogue and from there the play will take another direction. It is a simple mechanism, but it works like a charm. And the other success is watermelon. Quimet Pla carries a watermelon throughout the show. Nobody really knows why. At one point, Quimet will say that he is going to die. There the work confronts life.

a watermelon

During the creation of TravyQuimet Pla was diagnosed with colon cancer, something he himself explained publicly in an interview. When asking his son if it was difficult to face and introduce this element into the work, Oriol confesses that he does not know if the illness came before or after deciding that one of the characters was going to die. “My father is a totally vitalist person and that is how it is exposed in the work, but it is not something that was premeditated, but rather everything was mixing and coming to life,” he clarifies.

That great theatrical symbol of a tumor, the watermelon, will end up being the scenic culmination of this work full of life and stage knowledge. Theater has that, sometimes the necessary alchemy occurs so that memory, imagination, life and fiction come together and overwhelm the chests of the spectators. And during that small period of time that we call function, there is a communion between those who do and those who observe.

It is curious how in Spain two of the times that this alchemical conjunction has occurred in recent times have come from very close places: the circus. A year ago a production by the Italian company Circus Ronaldo visited us, Sono Io?. in it The conflict between generations in a circus family and the importance of transmission were also addressed. Both works addressed the Numantine war of a profession that does not want to be lost to a cultural industry that needs professionals. In both proposals, communion is possible due to the overflowing vitality of those who make it and their willingness to share and invent with others.

And in both, through the deep knowledge of the imagery and poetics of the Commedia del Arte, that tradition so often reviled for being old, moments of incontestable modernity and scenic poetry are achieved. The dramaturgy that is worked through the poetics of objects, the knowing how to be on stage without doing (here Núria Solina gives a master’s degree), the power of the mask… Travy It is full of components of a tradition that only exists in the performers, that are passed from hand to hand and that are one of the riches of European art. And it is very good news that Oriol Pla has managed to collect it in a theater that is as modern as it is effervescent.

Quimet Pla is one of the great harlequins of the Mediterranean, his son Oriol is not far behind, he says that he also has something of Il Capitano, another of the characters from the Comedy of Arte. “A character that I also want to investigate, but yes, I have the soul of a Harlequin,” he confesses.

Pau Matas and Oriol Pla have just premiered another piece, Golaat the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, a one-man show with Oriol on stage. Both creators confirm to this newspaper that the conversations to be able to see it outside of Catalonia, including Madrid, are already very advanced and that everything points to it being possible in 2026. TravyIn addition, it will be on February 8 at the LAVA of Valladolid and, starting June 4, in the Romea Theater from Barcelona.