Els miserables

You may remember the first two plays in the trilogy, in which Miquel Mas Fiol shunned misunderstood optimism through Voltaire’s Candide; or Optimism and analysed the commercialisation of sadness through Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Now it’s time to reread Les Misérables, a famous novel about injustice and the corrupt social system of humankind. Set in an era marked by political backwardness and social inequality, by extinguished and silenced revolutions, the story it tells has become, through musicals and films, a kind of pop phenomenon, romanticised and devoid of content, and thus deprived of its revolutionary power. Does revolution have to be cool and mainstream to be successful today? This is the question posed by this three-actor show. The main character, an egotistical director, wants to create a reduced, commercial version of Victor Hugo’s novel. To this end, he gathers a group of actors who are tired of the fraught world of alternative theatre and prepares a flawed production in a second-rate theatre. But in this play-within-a-play, the social rebellion the text speaks of may actually come to fruition, sparking a revolt with outrageous consequences. And the effects won’t just be felt by the actors, but by the entire theatre world.

This is the latest creation of the playwright and director who, in addition to the two plays of the Millennial Condition Trilogy mentioned above, has also written works such as CR#SH (Tothom pot caure) and Primavera de bèsties, which won the Pare Colom Literary Theatre Award in 2020.

Produced by Teatre Tantarantana and Àtic.