Barcelona (EFE) , at 87 years old, continues to have the same courage as always and has once again chosen “the most dangerous offer”.
“I had less dangerous offers – he acknowledged this Wednesday at the Teatro Romea in Barcelona, where he will premiere on March 25 – but it seemed to me that where I could get something was in this complex character and in this work with a tone of tragedy that, As is well known, it is the superior genre in terms of feelings”.
“La Isla del Aire” is the theatrical adaptation that the author himself, Alejandro Palomas, has made of his homonymous book and that Mario Gas directs in this production, with a luxury cast led by Núria Espert and made up of Vicky Peña, Teresa Vallicrosa , Miranda Gas and Candela Serrat.
At a press conference at the Romea, Espert recalled that she started in this very theater and that, as a teenager, she did a test in one of its offices to qualify for a role in a play based on a children’s story.
“Josep Maria de Sagarra told me, with great affection, that he had balls like a bull. At that time I was a teenager who didn’t like to be told those things, but now I do like it and I hope you think that I’m still in my line, ”he commented.
The courage that Espert showed in its beginnings has marked his entire career because, as he has confessed: “my life revolves around those difficulties that are experienced in the theater. I have always walked towards a theater that I don’t know what it is, but that some nights I catch a glimpse of, and that is the axis of my life”.
“The shows you choose define who you are and mistakes are stuck with thumbtacks,” said the great lady of the theater, who has agreed to star in “La Isla del Aire”, despite the fact that “with classical authors you are always more protected than with contemporaries”, because it is a work that has allowed her “to access a memory of life so well explained and developed that we all feel that we are telling our own story”.
“La Isla del Aire” narrates the experiences of a family made up of a matriarch (Núria Espert), her daughters (Vicky Peña and Teresa Vallicrosa) and her granddaughters (Miranda Gas and Candela Serrat).
Five women isolated in their own pain that the grandmother tries to get out of reverie by inviting them to go to Isla del Aire -an islet with a lighthouse located off the coast of Menorca-, in an attempt to free her daughters and exorcise demons.
A female world in which, if the female characters were replaced by male ones, “it would become another work, as is the case with ‘La casa de Bernarda Alba'”, according to Espert.
“It is the story of a saga that is close to the gaze of the dramaturgy of northern Europe -the actress has clarified- and, as in Greek tragedies, there are moments of good humor, to help bear what has to come”.
The director Mario Gas has admitted that the text is “difficult to handle material, because it has a complexity that betrays its literary origin”, for which he has chosen to turn it into a “symphonic-theatrical poem”.
Linking to this definition, Vicky Peña has been encouraged to describe the show as “chamber music for five instruments”, because “it is not a discursive and Aristotelian theater, but seeks to touch the fibers of feeling and thought through vibrations of the soul”.
“I hope that we know how to cross the space between the stage and the audience and the spectators take home the light and hope that shines at the bottom of this work”, Espert wished.