There is a somewhat laughable Yankee tradition of applauding legendary actors when they make their first appearance on stage. A few days ago, watching Josep Maria Flotats burst onto the Teatre Romea stage, I almost had the audacity to do so (for the first time in my life). I will not be the one to praise a living legend of our culture, a man of theater who – at eighty-five years old – is still capable of sustaining a performance overflowing with a sufficiently demanding text for an hour and a half. I wanted to applaud not only for all that has been said, but also to thank an actor whom I cannot dissociate from the love for my language. Just hearing him in the first sentence, with his well-known singsong and that pattern of pronouncing esses so close to the x, I disconnected from the world for several seconds to recite from memory some fragments of Cyrano, Per un sí o per un no, Lorenzaccio, or Ara que els ametllers ja estan batuts.
"Aggressive: I, sir, if I had such a temple, I would instantly want someone to amputate it! Friendly: do not dip your glass in your excess, to drink I advise you to use a test tube. Descriptive: it is a rock, it is a peak, it is a beech. What do I say a beech? It is a whole mountain!". And so continued the eternal string of metaphors about the nose with which Cyrano mocked himself before defeating the prince (apart from the linguistic thing, I also owe our actor the joy of having dedicated myself to the art of fencing). But it was necessary to chase away nostalgia and return to the present. Voltaire/Rousseau. La disputa, by Jean-François Prévand, is an interesting recreation of the opposition of work and character of two major men of letters. For staunch Voltaireans like myself, it is a joy to see how its protagonist subtly insults the author of Émile, accusing him of being sentimental, of idealizing human goodness and, alas, of being a scoundrel.
Prévand somewhat caricatures the philosophical positions of both authors, although the dispute gains more weight precisely when it enters the discussion of thought on performing arts and literature in general. Despite having cultivated them extensively and with his usual cynicism (the man who wrote The Social Contract ended up exercising himself in contemplative solitude and embraced only trees and pigs), Rousseau cursed the moral vices of theater and the depravity of human inventiveness. Voltaire, on the contrary, thought that art helped to face life with a necessary irony, thinking that the world, more than perfect or perfectible, is above all a universe of comicality. The dispute was real, very fierce and, unfortunately, I would say that the cretin Rousseau has ended up imposing his law, if we look at a world (and, specifically, a country like ours) where sentimentality always ends up imposing itself on reason and where the right to offense always wins over the freedom to mock.
We are facing a showpiece without too much risk, but it does the trick and gives the viewer a good handful of questions.The author of this dispute shows his blatant love for Voltaire (he presents his opponent ridiculously dressed in a laughable costume made of Armenian coffee) and Flotats takes advantage of this with a display of signature gestures while he squanders his beloved rival, "Doctor Setciències" (brilliant translation by our Salvador Oliva!). But his rival defends himself very well and Pep Planas –who already debuted in the mythical Cyrano that I remembered before – does not act as a foil and gives us a Rousseau of an often over-the-top impetus but with a remarkable flow of resources. We are facing a showpiece without too much risk (it will be difficult that, as philosophy is in our land, someone leaves wanting to read either of the two authors), but it passes muster and gives the viewer a good handful of questions. I went to the Romea to reaffirm myself in Voltairianism, of course, but also to do justice to an immense actor.
As I was returning home, I recited to myself: "Paris fades with the misty air, the moonlight glides between dark blues, the city dresses for the terrible scene, asleep down there, the gentle water of the Seine, like a mysterious mirror that sees everything and trembles, reflects! It already sees what you will see. At the Nesle gate! At the Neeeeeesle gate!" Thus I walked along La Rambla, happy and wielding an imaginary sword, after attending the theater, a few meters from the Poliorama, where Flotats taught me that –in my language– resides the core of my freedom.
PS.- The acting work of Flotats and Planas has even more merit if one takes into consideration the oceanic rudeness of the Barcelona audience, who not only contaminated the performance with an execrable symphony of coughs, but also perpetrated a monument to rudeness with a mobile phone that interrupted the dispute by ringing for almost ten minutes of the performance. We hope its owner has a terrible end, the more painful the better.