The question is not trivial and is posed by the protagonist of Bèsties, the work of the English playwright and actress Monica Dolan, who in the original, The b*easts, plays with the words beasts and breasts. Actress Marta Marco plays a therapist who faces an extreme case: She is a patient whose 8-year-old daughter wants to have her boobs done.
Directed by Pau Roca and produced by Sixto Paz, Marco already presented this text at this year’s Grec Festival and now premieres this Saturday, September 16, the season of the Akadèmia theater in Barcelona.
“Bèsties allows you to explain things that question you and that show that we are in a very crazy moment as a society,” declares the actress, who adds: “What surprised me most was that, during the Grec, there were spectators who asked me if the work “It was based on a true story.”
“It is a story that opens many debates, such as virtual reality, the objectification of women and also men. Only with culture and education can we solve all these issues,” Marco concludes.
“The work talks about the hypersexualization of our creatures, pornification is increasingly marked by the predatory industry,” denounces the director, Pau Roca, who also participates in another show in the 23-24 season of the Akadèmia theater.
On this other occasion, Roca will be under the command of Sílvia Munt to perform Els Buonaparte (20/XII-14/I). Its author, Ramon Madaula, discovered that the Bonaparte brothers, Napoleon and Joseph, had a long nighttime discussion in a hamlet in Vitoria, following the defeat in the Battle of Bailén.
“What did they say?” Madaula asks. “We don’t know, but it seemed to me that I had to write a play fictionalizing that episode.” From word to deed, on stage Roca will play Napoleon and David Bagés will play his brother, José Bonaparte, “the famous Pepe Botella who, to begin with, was a teetotaler,” the actor clarifies.
“Of human relationships, the one that interests me the most and baffles me is the fraternal one,” adds Madaula. And Munt concludes: “It is a work that makes us understand the contradictions of great men. Why do such intelligent men screw up so much?”
With the recognition of the Quim Masó and Frederic Roda awards, after its premiere in Girona’s Temporada Alta, Els ossos de l’irlandès (15/XI-10/XII), from Teatre Nu, will arrive at the Academy. Víctor Borràs Gasch is the one who wrote this piece “of rural contemporary theater, but whose characters are not called John, but Llorenç”, declares the author.
Xavi Ricart directs Ivan Benet, Norbert Martínez and Ernest Villegas in this “rural, almost Irish theater, with a structure like Mamet or LaBute. There is a lot of violence and doing it with three men shows what men are like, that we don’t know how to express our feelings,” declares the director.
In the musical Victorina (18/X-5/XI), Eva Hibernia, with Gustavo Llull and La Barni, vindicates the memory of scenographer Victorina Durán, linked to Xirgu and Lorca, by Silvia Marsó and Gracia Fernández.
There will also be a premiere of the comedy El collar de la reina (24/I-18/II), by Ricard Farré and Arnau Puig; The truth of the lie, by Florian Zeller, directed by Guido Torlonia, who is the director of the Akademia theater; and Legacy (9/V-2/VI), by AKA author Daniel J. Meyer, with Àngels Gonyalons as the mother who embarks on a journey with her son, with whom she lives but who turn out to be two strangers.
