A hilarious excess

“Excessive” is not a bad adjective when excess and hyperbole are precisely what you’re going for. Joel Joan, as we know, is that familiar character (or persona): hyperactive and as electric as a lightning rod, driven by passion, self-consciously Peter Pan-esque and openly narcissistic. He keeps reappearing in many of his works, to the point where we can no longer quite distinguish the man from Barcelona’s working-class neighbourhoods from the fictional character he has created. In Bons i dolents, his authorial signature is unmistakable, as is his masterful command of situational comedy, social satire and breakneck pacing. His distinctive voice is particularly evident here because this is, above all, a comedy about the midlife crisis of one’s fifties. There are no babies this time, but children from broken marriages; and if twins are on the way, it is because of an affair with a young woman who unexpectedly turns up at a dinner party among couples. All of this unfolds against a backdrop of financial debt and a shared, accelerating sense of personal decline.

Ricard (Joel) confuses names and dates and his own actions because he is accelerated, shot up, high as a kite. Everything in him is an evasion, a constant vital escape room that automatically leads him to disappoint his commitments and his people. His partner, Clàudia (Agnès Busquets) also seeks refuge in alcohol but maintains a rather impeccable moral trajectory, and as for Jesús (Oriol Casals), for me the interpretive discovery of the work, he is the weak and insecure one (that is, the one who would most resemble the audience) who ends up turning everything upside down due to an internal, sudden revolt, caused by his own pressures and his timely liberation thanks to the drug offered by Joel. Ricard.

An act, this one of snorting coke and amphetamines throughout the play, which for me now is indeed excessive: obviously, a warning is intended, because Ricard ends up sprawled on the floor and receiving a strong punishment, but I would say that a script based on equivocation and comic situation should not need an extra alteration of reality such as drug consumption. If coke distorts Ricard's (and Jesús') behavior, unfortunately it also distorts a little too much the strength that the contradictions and misunderstandings of a dinner with friends already have. Yes, I suppose that last point may have been considered too cliché: but resorting to synthetic substances, as such a central element, rather than humanizing the plot, dehumanizes it. When the issue is that you are not in control, your dilemmas are less dilemmas.

The interpretative level is high in all the actors, the set design is impeccable and the rhythm does not allow attention to wander. You laugh, a lot, and you also suffer a lot for all of them. No one is saved, would be the conclusion, including the innocent young woman whom Ricard has left pregnant with twins. Debts (monetary and of other kinds) with friends, sentimental infidelities, open relationships, separations and divorces, stress, potential vulnerability and contemporary job insecurity, all of it, as I said, very much a mid-life crisis in an urban environment where social decadence and lack of hope reign. It's not just that everyone has things to hide, but also that nothing is going well for anyone. For Ricard, especially, who is the protagonist and the scapegoat, and to whom this thing happens that is so difficult to explain in Joel Joan's case: when he appears, something important lights up on stage. And no, it's not the TV face effect. It's having presence.

There is something of resentment, of constant self-flagellation, of a masochistic sense of guilt in this plot and in other plots that have Joel Joan at their center. In this case, we are faced with a constant moral judgment, but relativized and gradually filled with nuances: "We are all good until it suits us not to be." There are white lies, lesser evils, saving traps and small escapist tricks that we have all used. All of us, without exception. But this lightning rod vocation that Joel has, and which he already pointed to superlatively with El Crac, besides always working, ends up revealing itself as a classic. A central theme, a philosophical reflection, a human trauma to analyze. If we also do it through a comedy, and we all end up tired of laughing, mission accomplished.