It is a showpiece, of course. You go to be dazzled, to be enlightened by two characters who sometimes seem as enlightened as they are illuminated. Voltaire and Rousseau speak on the stage of the Teatre Romea until February 9, following an anonymous pamphlet against the latter, accusing him of having abandoned his five children. Based on the text by Jean-François Prévand (translated by Salvador Oliva), who published the play Voltaire vs. Rousseau in 1991, the show does not move from Voltaire's mansion in Ferney, a French town bordering Geneva that today has adopted the name Ferney-Voltaire. Like many spectators, when they come to see the play, they have an almost unconfessable Romea-Flotats association in their minds.
Flotats' Frenchification is attractive, it has power and brilliance, to the point that the embodiment of Voltaire seems mimetic. Pep Planas seems to be a more universal character, almost more contemporary, less illustrious and even less divine. He is the one who visits the palace to complain to his friend, admired and envied opponent about that injurious pamphlet, and what he receives in response is an often unbearable condescension (Voltaire even calls him "angel"). The fact is that from the beginning Flotats/Voltaire seems to have many other things to do, other priorities and things on his mind, than to listen to the childish, egocentric and contradictory laments of a pre-romantic Rousseau determined to believe that man is good by nature.
The virtue of the text is, therefore, the contrast of ideas. From the stalls you end up thinking that the differences are very nuanced, whether it's fanatical Catholicism and even more fanatical Protestantism, whether it's democracy or divine providence, whether it's reason or romanticism, whether it's social or capitalist ideas, whether it's nature or civilization, whether it's guilt or forgiveness. And it is that guilt would be, precisely, the climax of the confrontation: if we are good by nature and it is society that makes us bad, my angel, you surely are not guilty of anything, right?
We attend a duel that serves us on a platter the great debates of the modern era, decorated by an immobile tapestry and period furniture that also seem to be the cradle of our civilization. That Rousseau goes to Voltaire to find out who was the author of the pamphlet does not prevent, of course, the sudden suspicion that Voltaire himself was the author. Rousseau appears as a wounded man, in need of protection and answers, who doubts whether to fight the pamphlet or leave it be (also as a response). Voltaire is that paternalistic tone that tries to calm him down and make him see reason, and reflect on good and evil and truth and lies. All this, of course, while he gesturally invites him to shut up or leave with that grace Flotats has for acting surprised, interrupted, busy. In fact, the conversation has a couple of slammed doors and two returns, as if they were two dead ends that never really are, because both philosophers argue but ultimately need each other.
It demands concentration. It demands putting on a wig, because the text tries to be faithful to the language and ideas of the time and that gives it a somewhat exhausting formalism. Nobody talks like that, here's the thing. Not even the two writers must have spoken with such a rational tone, filled with great universal ideas. Of course there is humor, and irony, and sarcasm, but the stomach doesn't churn at any point and all the gastric fluids accumulate in the spectator's brain. Placing his palace on the border between France and Geneva allows Voltaire to feel somewhat safer from so much persecution of ideas, so much death for a cause, so much religious (or political) fanaticism. There is space for a long interpretive solo by Flotats, impeccably playing Flotats, and for dialectical persecutions and the push and pull that sometimes end up configuring, more than a duel, a kind of verbal vaudeville.
Voltaire wins, Flotats wins, too clearly from the beginning, from when we see Rousseau dressed in Armenian attire and so wounded in his vulnerability. I really like that, nevertheless, Rousseau has prevailed in our contemporary world, taking down the arrogance of rationalist pedantry (Gaudí will always be superior to Cerdà) and introducing feeling as a form of knowledge. After all, when we leave, what we talk about among ourselves is what we have felt, much more than which of us is right. And if the work has any problem, even if it is the only one, it is this: I still wonder what it intended for us to feel.