Broken mask
So said André Breton, definer of the surreal, heavy-weight of the weightless, halitosis of the breathless: to love is to see our reflection with utmost clarity. Thus most of us prefer to look for what we have in common, to avoid any criticism. They call it love and jut leave it at that. Tantarantana Theater in Barcelona brings us ProtAgonizo born from a personal break up that will soon show us what our lives always are - a farce. Not many escape her because not many have the courage to face up to the abyss, without unpleasant and preconceived notions of what it is. So, courage to discover, from one to another, if there is any difference between the two, and if there is, to enjoy that difference as the immediate and changing answer. Ester Bellver, author and actress, breaks and tears.
Ester Bellver introduces us to the work as a play “basada en un texto nacido de la rotura personal que, por unos y otros motivos, un día le acontece a cualquiera. La vida pareciera detenerse y entonces se puede contemplar con asombro el personaje que le ha tocado representar en esta farsa. El descubrimiento de que uno no es uno. Su desmoronamiento. El abismo de no saber.” The experience is devastating, but the magnificent Bellver’s performance might suggest us that the text falls short to her enormous resources as an actress. Still, the breaking the mirror that she offers us is always uncomfortable, like a rawer vision of Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Billy Wilder stripped the game of vanity mirrors.
In the work of Bellver we get the horror of breaking her own farce letting out her breath on our faces. “Una actriz contempla extrañada su imagen frente al espejo del camerino. En él se le irán apareciendo, como en una película, los diferentes escenarios transitados en su vida, reviviendo con ello los papeles representados en el teatro y en la revista de los años 80, género en el que debutó como artista… el resentimiento, los miedos, el éxito y fracaso del personaje que representa su vida y las múltiples caras que ha interpretado en la escena le hacen poner en cuestión su propia identidad. La actriz, enfrentada a si misma sospecha, “esa no soy yo”. Una rotura del espejo en mil pedazos, en mil caritas, anuncia su ‘última representación’.” And it hurts, believe me, it hurts to see someone being honest with a value that no one has. Breaking our own schemes is considered as a social defeat and not as an advance, so that turns ProtAgonizo into a break up catharsis if one understands that the conventions only lead to social success if we pay a high price, the self-denial. To applaud Esther Bellver is to applaud the talent, the value of doubt and love for which there is no breaks or ties, but vital stimulus.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero