“A man who lied for 18 years, pretending that he was a doctor and researcher at the WHO, as well as being very humble and affable, when he was about to be discovered, he killed his entire family and attempted suicide. He is in a coma for three days and, when he wakes up, everyone already knows that this man is a fraud”.
With these words, the director Julio Manrique summarizes the plot of L’adversari, the novel by Emmanuel Carrère that, with Cristina Genebat and Marc Artigau, the three have adapted for the theater.
On Friday, L’adversari will open the 31st edition of Temporada Alta, and in March it can be seen at the Romea theater. The director of the Girona theater festival, Salvador Sunyer, explains the origin: “It was a proposal from Manrique, which was welcomed, and when the cast told us, it was doubly welcome.”
The performers are two greats from the Catalan scene, Pere Arquillué and Carles Martínez, who, although they have known each other for forty years, is the first time they have worked together.
On stage it is Martínez who plays the role of Jean-Claude Romand, the fraud who shocked the world with his story, while Arquillué assumes the role of the writer.
“With Genebat and Artigau –recalls Manrique–, we had a hard time finding how we would do it, until we decided to establish a dialogue between the criminal and the writer. Carrère unfolds into a lot of characters with whom Romand meets”.
Arquillué expresses admiration for the dramaturgy: “The work that the three have done is very good, they have found a very high theatrical game, which challenges the viewer in the first degree. We went through many spaces and I play many characters again”, he recalls, referring to the piece by Josep Maria Miró that premiered last year, El cos més bonic…
“Lying and self-deception are the worst thing we can do to people. To deceive ourselves is to deceive those we love and the society in which we live. I don’t know if today, with cell phones, such a story would be possible.” And Martínez clinches: “When you see that, you realize that hell is much closer. By the edge of a duro, it shows where any of us can go.”
Manrique confesses that he is a reader of Carrère, whom he discovered with this book: “He makes literature based on a real event that raised many questions, and we have made a play of his book. What happens in these cases is that he opened even more questions. L’ adversari is a tragedy about fear: she is so afraid of disappointing, that it ends up messing her up to the extreme”, he concludes.
Catalan version, here
