Two marriages cross over a few days. Tristán is a source of energy, a professional achiever, a charming guy who, however, absorbed in the battery of activities that he displays, neglects his conjugal flank. Her wife, Lola, a philosophy teacher, begins to be saturated with the dispersion of her husband and increasingly keeps him at bay. She wants to relaunch and fulfill herself. Lola’s sister, Julia, is going through health problems that she chooses not to communicate.
Lastly, Felix, Julia’s husband, is… Mr. Perfect. Not at all levels: at work things are not going well for him. But in the rest he is the man without fault: friendly, always well disposed, handyman, focused on making life pleasant for those around him. To the overwhelming and imperfect Tristán, the proximity of Félix gets on his nerves, because he points out to him what he does not comply with.
Last Saturday, while Tarragona massively celebrated its carnival, we saw Javier Gomá’s comedy El peligro de las buenas compañías in the city’s public theater, which was full.
This is one of the pieces from the trilogy A Fifty-Year-Old Man, published by the Galaxia Gutenberg publishing house under the original title I want to get tired with you along with the Inconsolable monologue and the tragedy The Tears of Xerxes. Gomá is a followed and influential thinker, whose theory of exemplarity has had a wide sociopolitical echo, and a master of the short essay, where his reflections on issues close to the reader, addressed with irony and elegant prose, have a background of classical wisdom. They can be enjoyed in volumes such as Todo a thousand and Reason: goal.
In this same supplement, Gomá has exposed the reasons that led him to cultivate theatrical writing, linked to what he has called “the dirty secret” of his fifties -mature age- and the disappearance of the father figure (which was centered on Inconsolable and in the character of Tristán constitutes a fixation).
“Of all the things that the philosopher thinks, the playwright chooses only those few that can be expressed in public, in accordance with the strict laws of orality, and only to the extent that they favor the advancement of the theatrical action and give it strength.” , color and sound”, he wrote.
The danger of good companies premiered in March 2022 in Madrid and has toured around twenty Spanish locations. The director Juan Carlos Rubio modified situations of the original text and added music (the author has specially written the lyrics of the songs). In the wake of Oscar Wilde, the work also reminded me of El libertine , that “philosophical vaudeville” by Éric-Emmanuel Schmidt around the figure of Diderot, due to its tone of light depth -and worth the oxymoron-.
But unlike the Franco-Belgian author, Gomá approaches his key themes not through figures from the cultural world but through the broad social spectrum. The four protagonists are vitally concerned about the imagination, the couple, philanthropy, the effects of age, pain, health, dignity, the need to reinvent themselves… and of course the exemplary nature, which is conflictive here. With humor: Julia asks that if she dies, they spread her ashes “where I was happiest: in the shoe and accessories plant of El Corte Inglés.”
Having bad company helps the protagonist in his family prestige, because “an excess of perfection ends up being hateful”. The “Gomá style” remains alive and attractive when changing genres.
The function benefits from the vigor and comic vista of the actor Fernando Cayo, whom we saw with a very different register in Inconsolable. He is accompanied by Carme Conesa, Miriam Montilla and Oriol Tarrasó. The director chooses to print a nocturnal atmosphere to the work, which is bright.
The tour will have its farewell in Malaga in April, and it will be a shame if it is not represented in Barcelona. In exchange, the author has another project underway on stage: under the direction of Luis Luque, six actors will discuss the micro-essays gathered in the Filosofía mundana compilation. “It’s not a play but a stage design,” he explains.