Pep Tosar has a particular style, which he knows how to impress in each of his shows. His specialty has been “creating a genre in which he takes the soul of a certain author and turns it into a show”, says Josep Maria Pou, director of the Romea theatre. Guillem d’Efak, Blai Bonet, Lorca, Thomas Bernhard have gone through its stage distillation, and now the Mallorcan creator and actor presents El fingidor, based on the figure of Fernando Pessoa. And Pou reveals that he also has one in mind about Miguel Hernández.
With his company Oblideu-vos de Nostalre, Tosar incorporates on this occasion the voice, music, tightrope walk and projections with testimonies of acquaintances and Pessoa specialists.
“For El fingidor I had Pessoa in mind, waiting on the shelf to make a show of it – explains Tosar-. It all started seven years ago, when I saw a show at Hotel Iocandi’s Nou Barris Winter Circus, Invisibles, with gravity-defying tightropes, and I thought it had something to do with the heteronymous world of Pessoa, poets who didn’t exist but he gave them life. Pessoa writes a life without facts, as he does in The book of disassociation.
The pretender “is an idea to solidify this liquid poet, who is like sand that slips through our fingers”, he continues. “Pessoa is 17 years old when he permanently settles in Lisbon when he returns from Durban, in South Africa. He arrives in Portugal at a time when the country is small, almost not on the map, there is a certain delay… Since this literary cosmos does not exist, apart from Camões, he thinks: ‘Well, I will create them’. Like children who create invisible friends, he creates this world and goes further with his heteronyms.”
“In the show, beyond the text part, the hard part, here 80% of the work is immersing ourselves in the character, getting to know him, and then we create a script with Evelyn Arébalo. We make a musical selection that has to do with the episodes we want to represent, with lyrics that have to do with it. So the show is scored. We rehearse it for 15 days and, although we make some changes, it is already home-built.”
On stage, next to Tosar, the pianist Elisabet Raspall, the singer Joana Gomila, and Griselda Juncà and Tomeu Amar, the tightrope walkers from Hotel Iocandi, perform.
El fingidor is a co-production of the Teatre Principal de Palma, the Grec festival and the company Oblideu-vos de Nostalre, and can be seen at the Romea theater until June 25. As Pessoa’s niece says in her video testimony, we all have heteronyms, because “I’m not the same when I talk to you or when I go to the dentist”.
