The soft rhythm, almost of minimal vital signs, a constant and almost annoying whisper. Lluna plena is the theatrical adaptation that Àlex Rigola has made of Aki Shimazaki's novel of the same name. One would say (and it is said) that the cadence is like a haiku, but a haiku is less mundane: the tone, yes, the volume and delicacy, like the pink flowers of a sakura (the majestic cherry tree that accompanies the entire work, leaving the rest of the set design to the imagination). The room is small, as is known, Heartbreak Hotel, a theater and company created by Rigola that fights a kind of heroic scenic resistance (it used to be a warehouse and workshop) on the border between Sants and L'Hospitalet. "Proximity" theater would be an understatement: the actors, very close. The whispers, almost inevitable.
Memory and amnesia, and the problem that arises when, in a marriage admitted to a residence, one (Andreu Benito) largely retains memory and the other (Lluïsa Castell) believes she is speaking with her young fiancé. It could be a plot more given to poetry, to raw emotions, but this exasperating Japanese serenity transforms this potential into a premise, in my opinion, too flat and rational. I cannot give spoilers, nor do I intend to: I can speak of a somewhat cold prism of the story given the emotional load of the situation. You don't whisper when your world is crumbling, you don't remain hieratic like a porcelain figure when your heart breaks and your partner's memory melts... and even less when, between memories and forgotten things, clues about infidelities and children who are not who they should be appear.
That said: if the intention was this, to take a serene stroll through the dramas of the end of life, Benito is of an exquisite serenity and Castell is somewhat more moved, more expressive, despite being the one who suffers from the mind (or perhaps precisely because of that her soul is infantilized). Pep Munné, the third party, is for his part somber like a private investigator and loaded with an unsettling tenderness, the man who can remember everything, but who doesn't have to tell anything. Miranda Gas, for her part, acts as an omniscient narrator and a crutch in the form of auxiliary characters that complete the picture. Mercè Ubach's translation is direct and raw, no longer like a haiku, but like the conic of events that unfold before us like onion layers. A collected show full of intimate confessions that makes you forget you are in a theater, rather it seems like you are in a confessional or in a hospital waiting room where you can listen to the story (the soap opera) of each family.
If there's something I regret about the text (not its adaptation, direction, or interpretation) it's that a situation with so much potential as the reconstruction of life's paths, which allows Alzheimer's to be considered more than just a drama, but a possible light on a path of reconstruction, an open ending that could be full of "what if...?", a erasing and starting over, instead leads to a kind of theater of entanglements where things like who the father is or how much you loved me take too much prominence (I insist, the fault lies with the text). I would be more interested in seeing how you love me now, how I can make you fall in love again even if you don't fully remember me: digging into what happened, however important it may be, is not as important as the mysterious light in the eyes of the young/old Fujiko. Everything is there.