After seeing The Seagull with which Julio Manrique has inaugurated the direction of the Lliure in the Fabià, one has the feeling of having attended a well-crafted show but without any contribution of minimal transcendence. This initial appreciation is not entirely fair, because the director himself (and adapter, along with Cristina Genebat and Marc Artigau) gives us a clue through a metamorphosis of the original text in which the dramatic magma of the Russian genius is updated with expressions from millennial culture and where the plot is practically reduced to its Wikipedia skeleton. This gesture, added to the prototypical space of a very well organized moderniqui second residence by Lluc Castells and the mainstream-baroque sound of Damien Bazin mark the way; we will attend a seagull where the existential anguish of its characters does not matter so much, but rather the fact that their ravings could happen in any corner of the world.
This initial proposal to democratize tragedy (to show, in short, how aesthetic conflicts, conceptions of theater, and sexual exchange between different generations occur in all homes of the prosperous West) could be interesting if Manrique explained how the resulting disseminated drama affects our lives. Far from doing so, this seagull shows characters who have transformed misfortune into a kind of wandering existence, where even suicide ends up being perpetrated with a certain slowness.
There are laudable exceptions to this approach, especially in the younger sector of the cast; Nil Cardoner and Daniela Brown put all their will into the process of rebelling against the apathy of the adult universe that bores and tempts them at the same time, but their love story goes unnoticed among actors who wander indifferently on the immense stage of the Lliure, slaves of a null direction.
At the limit of all this, the elimination of the tragedy from this proposal (and the fact of isolating it from a very specific cultural environment without offering an alternative that does not fall into television cliché) causes the work to end up floating in the realm of decaffeinated comedy. It is surprising that the Lliure audience, far from feeling slapped by Chekhovian philosophy, is relegated to laughing at Irina's overacted eccentricities and that an actor as competent as the great David Selvas is forced to resort to typical gestures of a Borràs play to defend his Sorin. In the absence of ideas, the production ends up looking for oil in a quota of actors with a foreign taste and accent (Andrew Tarbet and Adeline Flaun) who are placed there with a shoehorn of political correctness that even causes a bit of vicarious embarrassment. In short, the new Lliure begins this path with a profoundly mediocre and, above all, exasperatingly anodyne show.
Precisely for this reason, and given the appallingly conservative spirit of the Barcelona theater audience, it is to be expected that this seagull will have guaranteed public success. Democratizing tragedy not only has effects on stage; it also gives small doses of misfortune to the congregation, who leaves the theater delighted with themselves and well aware that the disputes they have at home are endorsed by a totem of universal literature like Chekhov. Everyone can be forced to suffer a mother so overprotective that she ends up being somewhat murderous, just as every good father must have the patience to put up with teenagers who smoke joints and a brother-in-law who smokes like a chimney and spouts brother-in-law phrases at gin-tonic time after a barbecue. The problem with this proposal is not that it desacralizes the text, which I would find perfectly fine, but that it removes any cathartic weight from the moral shock we ask of good theater.
The curious thing about this new version of The Seagull is that, after two hours of strolling through this display of everyday middle-class tragedy, we are neither interested in what is hidden in its famous lake nor, in fact, do we give a damn about the shadows and spirits that survive in the pond in question. We are just at the beginning of a new Lliure. We hope that soon we will be able to see something new there. Nothing would make me happier.