Teatro Español y Naves del Español

El mal de la montaña

by Santiago Loza
Theater
El mal de la montaña ©Jose Alberto Puertas
Date
February 10
April 3, 2022
Price
18€
Time
Tuesday to Sunday / 7:30pm 
Duration
1 hour 30 min
Post-show talk

El Mal de la Montaña is the intersecting story of four young people, who seek each other out in a yearning for solace. It begins with the anguish of Manu, who tells his friend Tino about his break-up with Pamela, the only female character in the play, a break-up that was going perfectly well (the setting was just perfect: the gentle rain falling, the silent and detached walk down the street...) until they were confronted by a beggar urinating on the opposite pavement. What torments Manu is not the fact of the break-up itself, it is the appearance in real life of something that escapes the confines of his story, something that makes it vulgar, something that spoils the perfect image of a break-up that was going so well that it was straight out of a novel.

The characters in this play deeply want to control reality through their own narratives. It is reality that should adapt to the story and not the other way round. We could say that this play’s sensitivity is ahead of its time, a time when social networks shape individuals who have taken on the role of narrators of their own experiences in a virtual framework that only admits whatever passes the filter of their discourse, of their elaboration. There’s no room in the Instagram photo for the beggar urinating. And that’s what haunts Manu, the fact that the beggar may have registered on Pamela’s retina, that this other has infiltrated his controlled vision of the world, his own private frame.

The voices of the other characters spring from this same essence: Pamela’s obsession with her ex-boyfriend hating her name, for example, Tino’s account of a failed relationship in which he had to hide his total lack of desire, or Ramo’s aggressiveness towards anyone he considers a threat: the others, the poor. All four characters are self-absorbed, they relate to one another from a place that is sometimes superfluous and sometimes brutally sincere. They flaunt the honesty of those who don’t stop to think about whether they are hurting anybody else, those who couldn’t care less about the consequences their words may have on others. From this exchange emerges a crude portrait of our days, of us, of the darkest part of our daily lives.

Cast and Creative Team

By: Santiago Loza

Directed by: Fernando Delgado-Hierro y Francesco Carril

With: Luis Sorolla, Ángela Boix, Fernando Delgado-Hierro and Francesco Carril

Scene and costume design: Paola de Diego

Lighting design: Paloma Parra

Sound design: Sandra Vicente

Assistant director: Raquel Alarcón

A production by Teatro Español and Buxman Producciones

Teatro Accesible

Audio description

Magnetic loop

Subtitling for the deaf

Amplified sound

Iconos de accesibilidad proporcionados por Teatro Accesible