The idea is very good, more than the idea, the concept, the invitation, the portrait that wants to be immortalized: the generational leap in a family of minstrels (to say clowns would be too simple) such as the Pla-Solina family itself, artistically known as the "Travy family". I can't think of a better way to bear witness to the difficulties of adapting, or not adapting (who says adapting is the only way?) to new times for a very fragile artistic discipline.
The parents ask each other if they are still funny, the children are dangerously lost in a world that asks them to break away from the classic pattern and at the same time know how to say something interesting. The result: an anxious son, scared to death, full of contradictions and unable to direct anything because he doesn't know how to direct himself, and a daughter who strives to find absolute transgression through body language and contemporary dance.
The circus, the clown show, is no longer what it was and doesn't know if it is in agony or evolution. Travy is a work that speaks, basically, of death. Of the death of a world, which does not have to be definitive, but can lead, as Maragall would say, to a "major naixença". The problem is that perhaps not. Perhaps it is a slow and definitive death.
Since this is not new, as hanging by a trapeze artist's thread has always been the dynamic of this art, it seems clear that death is only apparent and has nothing definitive about it. But the most conclusive proof of this conclusion is the theatrical show Travy itself, under the medieval arches of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, directed by Oriol Pla (the son) and written by himself and Pau Matas, an original production of the Teatre Lliure, invited by La Perla 29, entered through stage curtains and a backdrop that lead you to your chair. Then, everything begins and everything ends.
The work is a poetic act and a suicidal act, but also a resurrecting one. To sublimate the crisis, the grimace, the bewilderment. Almost the first appearance of Oriol Pla, getting confused with the current world and with supposed serious jobs and with himself, to the point of becoming a diabolical facial bundle that becomes frightening. Then, the family. The parents, who wonder if they are funny and talk about a dead Italian clown. Of what? Suddenly. And the father who constantly drags a watermelon, mysterious and metaphorical, Shakespearean and absurd.
The touches of genius: Oriol Pla stumbling three or four times over the same chair, in the same dialogue, in the exact same and precise way; the well-found touches of humor from Diana, the sister, scared and unrestrained before the challenge of the most radical innovation; the serious actor's airs that come over the father, Quimet Pla, who knows Shakespeare by heart even while cooking an omelet; the delirious imitation of a dialogue in macaronic Italian between Quimet and Núria (mom); and, above all, the dreamlike dance of rolling tables across the stage when everything gets out of control and turns into an infinite, cosmic, dark abyss like the worst nightmare. We are dying. We are dying and we don't know how to see it, and the audience sees it perfectly but they still don't realize it. They are dying and they try to save the dead ball with all their strength, and it's not the characters who are dying: the family is dying. The real one. And the world of the jesters, the real one. And the whole world, surely. Fortunately, as we said, to be reborn.
"We are dying. We are dying and we don't know how to see it, and the audience sees it perfectly but they still don't realize it"As weak points, the dialogues are not always funny and not always sad. Sometimes they are too flat, too indifferent, and that not going for the jugular at all times ends up being noticeable. I suppose the groundbreaking, contemporary, intellectual reflection intention made one think that a certain coldness in the phrases was necessary. But no, it could have been a much more tearful and ruthless work, less surreal and more tragic or comic or more tragicomic, in short less psycho and more drama.
But the virtues of the idea and the result far outweigh any shortcomings that may be observed, and word-of-mouth is working impeccably, and tickets are selling out, and the fact that in the end there is almost an entire museum dedicated to the family's past allows us to realize where we are. What we are talking about. What is the grace and the sorrow of the story.
I had never seen such a naked work. So hara kiri, so S.O.S., so brave, agonizing and at the same time hopeful. No, it doesn't make you laugh. It could have made you cry more, but in any case it doesn't make you laugh. It's not funny. Answering the Travy's question, no: you're not funny anymore. Now you have decided to move, and you have succeeded.