Una bufetada a temps (Villarroel theater, until May 17) is a comedy that hits left and right, but also gives us a timely slap to the audience. Specifically, it awakens us from a sweet dream in which many thought that discipline had gone out of fashion, that authority was a retrograde concept and that new educational methods should prioritize care over the child's freedom. The infant, excuse me. "In this school we call them infants."
The title already warns, it promises no subtlety. It doesn't sell contemplation, nor nuance, nor that kind of theater that you've just seen and you don't quite know if you've understood it but you applaud anyway. Here we go straight, things clear and direct debate. Written and directed by Marta Buchaca, the play places us before a family conflict that is a first-order social conflict: a child has been hit by his grandfather, as a result of an argument in which he disrespected him ("son of a bitch," he told him), and now the school wants to report the grandfather for the violence exerted. Yes, it is a crime to hit a minor. But. The play is in the "but."
Ramon Madaula takes the epicenter of almost all the humor of the play, but also Montse Guallar, the grandmother: unlike what might be thought, they are the center of attention because it is in them where the generational (and educational) conflict becomes most present: it is not that the grandfather is in favor of hitting children, but there are times when... And the whole play, developed in a modern, open, peaceful and tolerant public school setting, asks us (us, the audience) if we haven't taken things a little too far. If we haven't lost too much the sense of respect for elders (and for parents, and for teachers). If wrong behaviors should be punished, and how. In short, a timely slap perhaps not, but... but perhaps also yes.
What is most surprising, then, are the audience's laughs. One does not have to be very observant to see that what provokes the most laughter and applause is… the modern school. The gentle methods, zen, the little turtle, avoiding at all costs that the child (the infant) gets hurt. An audience that until recently surely rejected authoritarianism, and old methods, and the need for memorization and a sense of hierarchy, now laughs at precisely the opposite: at family circles, at anger management, at the ironclad protection of infants' sexuality (if they have any) and at the multiple and fluid options that must be allowed to flow spontaneously in the free growth of the student. All this, now, makes us laugh. Now this is what seems retrograde, excessive, absurd to us. And it's good that we laugh, of course: the question is what we offer, as a response. Not a slap, that's clear. But are there other things we can present, in time, to prevent a child from irremediably going astray?
Then comes the hypocrisy. The neatness of values defended by the school director (Eudald Font) and by the mother (Sara Diego), in contrast to the father's (Marc Rius) naively conciliatory attitude and the grandparents' stupefaction (every small gesture from Montse Guallar and every manifest exasperation from Ramon Madaula are an invitation to burst out laughing), turns out to be a false neatness of values, stained by the eternal human plague of infidelities. Misunderstandings accumulated like dirty laundry explode on stage, white lies stop being so white, and the dramatic house of cards trembles but never falls.
A highly recommendable play, technically and artistically, but also for this mirror effect: the play does not take sides but, as I said, the audience's laughs do. Unconsciously, the laughs betray. They show us how the general consensus is that we have stretched the rope of child protection too much. We see ourselves as ridiculous, we confess ourselves as a ridiculous society. That's a lot. I only wonder if, once at home and at work, we will continue to laugh at these clamorous excesses (and act accordingly, in school and outside of it) or continue to be obsessed with looking good. Because this time we have been slapped in time, and these kinds of slaps must be taken advantage of.