Let’s start at the end. When the applause dies down and the spectators prepare to leave the theater, the actress Petra Martínez pleads for silence and explains that the director of the show, Juan Margallo, is going to come out to chat for a while. It is a rite that this couple (artistic and sentimental) has been practicing for years, long before the custom of regularly holding “meetings with the public” around scheduled plays was established in theaters. But they don’t talk about the play they just performed. They tell of their battles against Franco’s censorship, anecdotes of actors, stories of their time on television, jokes, hobbies … Nobody in the stalls leaves: it is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a delicious celebration of the theater as a space for “meeting ”, Which is especially appreciated in this time marked by isolation.
That same ambition to “meet the public” permeates the staging of Miss Dona Margarita directed by Margallo and starring in Martínez at the Spanish theater in Madrid. The actress, who plays an authoritarian and delusional teacher, introduces viewers into the play as if they were her students, so that everything she says challenges them personally. “I’m in charge here” and “you don’t know anything”, he repeats frequently. The satire and fierce criticism of totalitarianism that underlie the work, written by the Brazilian Roberto Athayde in 1975, in the midst of the military dictatorship, is amplified by the closeness imposed by the interpreter. And it goes without saying how fluently he does it: Martínez moves around the stage as if he were at home. He also manages to fully exploit the comic part of the text, underlining the surreal moments to the point of absurdity.
Miss Dona Margarita. Text: Roberto Athayde. Direction: Juan Margallo. Spanish Theater. Madrid. Until March 28.
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