Pep Tosar has a particular style, which he knows how to apply to each of his shows. His specialty has been “creating a genre in which he takes the soul of a specific author and creates a show”, says Josep Maria Pou, director of the Romea theatre. Guillem d’Efak, Blai Bonet, Lorca, Thomas Bernhard have passed through his stage distillation, and now the Mallorcan creator and actor presents El pretender, based on the figure of Fernando Pessoa. And Pou reveals that he also has one in mind about Miguel Hernández.
With his company Oblideu-vos de Nosaltres, Tosar incorporates on this occasion the voice, music, tightrope walking and projections with testimonials from Pessoa’s acquaintances and specialists.
“For El pretendidor I had Pessoa in mind, waiting on the shelf to put on a show,†explains Tosar. Everything skyrocketed seven years ago, when I saw a show at the Circ d’Hivern in Nou Barris, Invisibles, by Hotel Iocandi, with tightrope walkers who defy gravity, and I thought it had something to do with the heteronymic world of Pessoa, poets who they did not exist but to whom he gave life. Pessoa writes a life without facts, as he does in The Book of Disquietâ€.
The feigner “is an idea to solidify this liquid poet, who is like sand that slips through our fingers,” he continues. “Pessoa was 17 years old when he settled permanently in Lisbon after returning from Durban, in South Africa. He arrives in Portugal at a time when the country is small, it hardly appears on the map, there is a certain delay… As this literary cosmos does not exist, apart from Camões, he thinks: ‘Well, I will create them’. Like children who create invisible friends, he creates this world and goes beyond with his heteronyms.
“Of the show, beyond the text part, the hard part, here 80% of the work is immersing ourselves in the character, getting to know him, and then with Evelyn Arébalo we created a script. We make a musical selection that has to do with the episodes that we want to represent, with lyrics that have to do with it. So the show is scored. We rehearsed it for 15 days and, although we make some changes, it has already been built from homeâ€.
On stage, next to Tosar, the pianist Elisabet Raspall, the singer Joana Gomila, and Griselda Juncà and Tomeu Amar, the tightrope walkers from Hotel Iocandi, perform.
The pretender is a co-production of the Teatre Principal de Palma, the Grec festival and the Oblideu-vos company from Nosaltres, and can be seen at the Romea theater until June 25. As Pessoa’s niece, who offers her testimony on video, says, we all have heteronyms, because “I’m not the same when I talk to you or when I go to the dentist.”
Catalan version, here
