After a long vacation, the Lope de Vega Theater opens a director and resumes its activity with Mary’s room, a monologue performed by the great Concha Velasco and directed by another great on the scene such as José Carlos Plaza.
From a rather flimsy text by his son Manuel Martínez Velasco, Concha becomes Isabel Chacón, a successful writer who has been confined to the 47th floor of a Madrid building for more than 40 years due to her agoraphobia, and who has just turned 80 with a book yet to be published.
Alone, sitting in an armchair in the middle of an imposing library designed by Paco Leal, with his beautiful Valladolid diction that has offered us so many days of glory in this same theater, Concha tells us the memories, fears and prisons –Especially the internal ones- that inhabit the soul of the writer.
We miss the presence of other actors who cover her – the actress is already 81 years old – and make the story more credible, but in the absence of these, José Carlos Plaza uses a whole battery of gadgets to break the monotony of the monologue and connect the character with the outside world: two telephones, a live interview from a television program, a great fire that threatens to devour her and their corresponding firefighters, and even the sudden appearance of an old love that precipitates a forced and little credible end.
All of it with a mix of styles in which the most allegedly lofty literary references join those comedy gags how well the actress has mastered her entire life and that provoke, from time to time, the laughter of the public.
Mary’s room it will certainly not go down in history as one of his best montages, but it always appears the possibility that it is the farewell of a Concha Velasco that it has really been a great among the greats. An actress who embodies more than half a century of theater, cinema, television and history of Spain, with all its contradictions, and to which the public said goodbye with compliments and with great affection, standing, at the end of the performance.
With the sympathy and humanity that characterize her, she also recalled some of the moments lived on other occasions in the Sevillian theater and thanked with emotion the presence of the public in these difficult times for everyone.
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