What happens when a friendly couple breaks up and he, the lifelong friend, shows up at home with a new, much younger partner? This is the starting point of La veritat de la mentida, the work by Florian Zeller that premieres at the Akadèmia theater, with its own production, and which is performed for the first time in Spain, announces the director, Guido Torlonia: “And not It is a drama, like most of Zeller’s works: this is a comedy.”
The French playwright Florian Zeller is already known on the Barcelona stage. A year ago, Josep Maria Pou performed El pare at the Romea theater, with Rosa Renom and directed by Josep Maria Mestres. And now this piece is released, with four characters played by Enrico Ianniello, Concha Milla, Frank Capdet and Aida Llop. The scenery is realistic, a rare resource in the Buenos Aires street theater: it represents a house of a wealthy family, with all kinds of accessories that make it cozy.
The work, on the other hand, has an element that makes it not so realistic: “The characters, in the asides, speak directly to the audience,” explains the director. I Enrico Ianniello comments: “I find it a very interesting resource for actors, because we can say what the characters think and then say what they say in the play. Are the viewers inside my head?” The Neapolitan actor goes further and explains how, at some moments, the audience does not know if what one of the performers is saying is expressing it out loud or if it is his thoughts, but in the end everything becomes clear: “It’s part of the game ”.
Ianniello, a regular at La Perla 29, continues: “The great theme of La veritat de la mentida is: Where does youth end? The character played by Frank falls in love with a young girl and that makes him reflect on his youth.
Regarding her character, Concha Milla states: “She doesn’t think so much about her youth, but about the presence of Emma, ??a young girl,” which is the character played by Aida Llop. “You are in your fifties – she continues –, you have a good job, a partner, a house, and someone comes along who begins to destabilize all that.” And she says: “If you don’t like your future, maybe you are not living the present that you should be living.”
For his part, Frank Capdet considers that “the basic issue is the desperation that someone can feel to recover their youth.” And regarding Zeller’s work, he declares: “We will all at some point find ourselves reflected by the considerations and desires that the characters express. And that is terrible because there are none of the characters that are good, they all break somewhere.”
“Emma is to blame for there being a show, otherwise there would be no work,” explains Aida Llop. She comes willing to meet her partner’s friends, but she has to play her cards very well to be able to win them over.”
The performers confess that, when rehearsals began, they tried to justify their characters, “but in the end I had to surrender to their manipulations,” says Milla. And Torlonia concludes: “The work presents a very common situation, but full of reflection.”
