The fourth summer of the Catalan bourgeoisie
The TNC programmes a new version of the play Vent de garbí, by Maria Aurèlia Capmany, which places this social class in front of a new precipice.
From 16 March to 16 April at the Sala Pequeña of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC), Albert Boronat and Judith Pujol's version of the play Vent de garbí i una mica de por, by Maria Aurèlia Capmany (Barcelona, 1918 - 1991). The writer published the play in 1968. It is an acid portrait of the Catalan bourgeoisie, with three summer destinations in the background: Cadaqués, on Costa Brava; Sitges, in Garraf, and Caldetes, in Maresme.
The play shows how several gentlemen from Barcelona enjoy their holidays in similar situations, but at very different historical moments: during July 1968, in the first act (after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and the May revolt in Paris); 17 July 1936, in the second act (on the eve of the military uprising against the Second Republic); and 30 July 1909, in the third act (shortly before the Tragic Week, in various parts of Catalonia).
Through this journey through time, the show becomes a mirror of the immobility and hermeticism of the Catalan bourgeoisie through the forms of courtship between couples, relations between social classes and political and moral discussions.
The author herself explained, on the occasion of its premiere at the Teatre Romea in 1968, that she had wanted to "talk about my country and its ills", with the desire to have made "an understandable, clear, funny, sad and ours play. That is all".
The piece presented at the TNC goes further and tries to imagine a fourth revolution, a fourth summer and a fourth and eternal immobility of these wealthy classes. A reaction that would come as no surprise at all to Maria Aurèlia Capmany, for whom "one of the attitudes that seems most harmful to me is the uncomfortable ostrich-like posture" that characterises the Catalan bourgeoisie, "because it is unstable, insecure, changing, agonising and self-destructive".
Tickets to see Vent de garbí i una mica de por range from 10 to 24 euros and can be purchased at this link. On 24th March there will be a post-show colloquium led by the journalist Carme Tierz, and on 31st March there will be a tactil visit that will allow you to touch the scenographic elements, as well as the costumes and props.