On one occasion, the actor Ricard Borràs received a curious assignment: to act as a lecturer. It was not about interpreting the role on stage, from a learned role and before an audience that participated in the theater convention. That is to say, the one who claims to be a lecturer is not; he is an actor who plays a role, in this case an expert in judicial expertise.
But this was not the case that led Ricard Borràs to interpret that role, because he was not acting before a theater audience, but before an expert audience, interested in the content of his words. The person who commissioned it did not dare to give the lecture and Borràs assumed the role of an “à la carte lecturer”. As a result of the success of that experience, the actor received more commissions, but he confesses that he cut it in time, because he did not want to become that character.
After this introduction, Borràs explains: “In the time of Cervantes, Alonso de Barros composed a game called Courtly Philosophy, which was inspired by the game of the goose and became so popular that even Cervantes praised it”. That variant was the game of the court and had an initiatory aspect, of how to thrive within power.
“It was believed that no board was preserved, but José Manuel Lucía Megías found it,” continues the actor, who mentions the doctor in Philology from the University of Alcalá as the guarantor of all this history. Lucía Megías is the author of three books on Cervantes and asked Borràs if a theatrical piece could be made of this recovered game.
Borràs was attracted by the topic of post-truth: “What interested me was how Cervantes, a man who was born poor, lives poor and when he dies he ends up in a mass grave and here it is over, 120 years later. the English discover his work and since no one knows who he is, they create a biography of him and turn him into a hero, when in reality he was a loser”.
The actor compares this situation with the present: “It is a very current story, because power is interested in you not being able to think for yourself, but rather it makes things easier for you and says: think what I want you to think. And Cervantes is one of these cases”.
With all this material, Borràs and Lucía wrote Cervantes and the Game of the Goose, which premiered at the Corral de Comedias de Alcalá, directed by and starring Borràs. And this week, in four performances only, it is presented in Catalan at the Gaudí theater in Barcelona. “We combine the legacy of Cervantes and this court game”, concludes Borràs, who recovers that à la carte lecturer, converted, now, into a theatrical character.
