In ancient Greece, Sisyphus was considered the most cunning because, on several occasions, he managed to deceive his contemporaries. He even found the stratagem to cheat death, but the penalty he had to pay in hell has gone down in the history of mythology as one of the most absurd: in Hades, Sisyphus is forced every day to push a pending stone up a steep slope, until he faints and the stone rolls away and he is forced to start again.
There have been many interpretations of this myth, which from a current perspective could be useful for people who go to work every day to do exactly the same thing, for those who raise and lower the store blinds every day, and even for the interpreters who day Every day they have to perform the same function again.
This is the premise that the playwright Jordi Oriol has now taken for his new show, Sísif fa no fa, which premieres El Canal de Salt, on December 3, within the Temporada Alta festival, and will be presented at the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia , from January 25 to February 11, 2024.
After dazzling the public with the Lament Trilogy (The Fall of Hamlet, The Attack, The Bad Diction), based on three Shakespeare texts (Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth), and surprising with the ambitious Europa Bull , now Oriol returns to a simple proposal and, he says, “different from the previous ones”. Sisyphus does not take the protagonist of Albert Camus’ essay, based on the myth of the man condemned to eternally push a stone.
The new proposal from the company Indi Gest speaks of a modern-day Sisyphus who perversely tries to manipulate his history to make people believe what everyone knows is impossible, such as the effort of human beings to hide their fragility and their self-deception to continue doing a “painful life,” says the playwright, who has always been interested in this myth.
The work is based on the fact that we all “are increasingly aware of our fragility, of the expiration of man and the no longer so apocalyptic idea of ??an imminent end of the human being,” declares Oriol, to whom contemporary events give every once again the reason. Despite this, “we do our best not to think, to continue tightening the rope without looking back. We try, like Sisyphus, to deceive Hades, to convince others and ourselves that nothing is happening, that we are invincible.”
Oriol also transfers the myth to the theatrical event: “Theatre, furthermore, is climbing a stone and raising it again. And realizing that when you get to the point where you had to get to, what matters is the path and that you have to pick up the same stone again.”
And on this occasion he leaves Carles Pedragosa alone in the face of danger, pushing this metaphorical stone that he pushes every day. The public has been able to appreciate a kind of epiphany in Pedragosa’s evolution. As a pianist, he began by limiting himself to masterfully playing the keys of his instrument, but little by little he took center stage.
In La mala dicció, his presence was key, and in Europa Bull his role as an all-round performer made the original pianist disappear. Now Jordi Oriol gives him all the prominence in this piece where he searches for new poetics. Co-produced by Teatre Lliure, Indi Gest and Estación Alta, Sísif fa no fa “is a kind of manifesto to reclaim art from suffering,” concludes Pedragosa.
Catalan version, here