After the different "Le congrès ne marche pas", the company returns to its origins and shows us that, when it comes to comedy, they are pros.
We find ourselves in a small mountain hotel, a rural hotel in Vall Fosca where they organize events designed for tourists: to enjoy the natural spectacle offered by the deer rut. Because, nowadays, anything can be turned into a tourist tour in the purest Civitatis style.
At this rural hotel, we find different personalities who, lately, are abundant in these spaces: tourists who want to reconnect with nature, wealthy people with mercantilist purposes to exploit the land, and, of course, creators, artists, the culturetas, who from the villages show that culture is everywhere.
This peculiar team meets in the common areas of the hotels where everyone, after all, wants to live an unforgettable experience. And boy, will they live it!
Political theater? Committed theater? La Calòrica Theater!
One of the aspects I always like most about La Calòrica is the natural and authentic way they have of talking about "big topics". They laugh at everything, and we love that. On stage, we find characters typical of the theatrical world: the scruffy director, the complacent actor, the nonconformist playwright, and the new theatrical promise, full of projects and hope. They meet at this hotel to hold a symposium on political theater and how theater activates its mechanisms to try to change the world.
This big, enormous, and profound topic shows us the contradictions that exist in the world of theater and culture in general. Can it really change the world? Can a play really transform a person? Or, in the end, is it all just an act of "collective masturbation" where those who speak and those who listen, after all, are of the same opinion? There is no answer, the question remains in the air for everyone to answer as they see fit.
And, of course, after the "cultural debate," comes the artists' favorite moment: the party! A party that takes place in a karaoke, the least glamorous and most scruffy place you can imagine. Because, no matter how much we talk about Trotsky or Dostoevsky, in the end, who can resist a Raffaella Carrà?
A choral work with seven, eight or nine characters!
We lose count of the number of characters we see on stage. And all interpreted by the 6 performers who, on this occasion, do without Marc Rius (not without winking at him in the play) and feature two new additions: Oriol Casals and Mel Salvatierra. The cast is completed by the usual members of La Calòrica: Xavi Francés, Aitor Galisteo-Rocher, Esther López and Júlia Truyol, and we can't say who does it better!
To see them perform on stage is to see a group of friends who have a great time doing crazy things and speaking their minds. Because, no matter how many tickets they sell, no matter how famous they are, La Calòrica continues to curse everything and says it openly. In fact, in this play, there's even a scene with an anus... And I won't say more!
Very powerful start, a slightly chaotic ending
The first part of La brama del cérvol is brilliant. We find metatheatre, social and cultural criticism, surreal situations full of good humor... The explosive cocktail typical of La Calòrica. But the story begins to become a bit chaotic the moment we enter the forest and take a trance journey, with drugs involved, a rave and a surreal trip.
Although the scenes are very visually striking (the encounter with the rave people, as if they were UFOs, is excellent!), the truth is that the story gets a bit lost and becomes a bit confusing. Just like the ending: a lot of prominence is given to one of the stories that, frankly, wasn't that interesting to me either.
Even so, La Calòrica has done it again: with La brama del cérvol they have created a show full of comedy, where we see ourselves reflected, the city dwellers, who believe we control everything when, in reality, we control absolutely nothing of our lives.