16 de juny de 1944. És de nit. Trenta resistents antinazis estan sent executats en un descampat prop de Lió a mans de la Gestapo. Entre aquell grup que espera la mort, un home sembla fora de context: té quasi seixanta anys i aspecte de professor despistat. Es tracta de Marc Bloch, historiador fonamental del segle XX, defensor d’una història més humana.
Setanta-un anys més tard, el 2015, un jove estudiant universitari s’enamora d’una noia, que resulta ser la filla del seu professor d’història. Els tres personatges que componen aquest triangle intenten comprendre una mica millor les relacions que viuen entre ells.
Podem arribar a conèixer les il·lusions, les ombres o, fins i tot, els silencis dels altres?
Jan Vilanova Claudín, finalista en la categoria de text. Premis de la Crítica 2016
A small format contemporary theatre production brought to Barcelona's Espai Lliure after a successful run at Sala Beckett, hISTÒRIA champions the study of the past to understand the present and offer guidelines on approaching the future. Or does it...? For, as 2016 proved, the course things take can be unpredictable.
Taking up his tutor's challenge to investigate the facts behind the death of Marc Bloch, hero of the French Resistance, University of Barcelona Master's student Gerard finds his source material persistently compromised, and he is led to question the veracity of any single claim to truth. Were that not enough, he must also navigate the confusing world of intimate relationships: in his romantic pursuit of Sophie, the directionless daughter of his trendy history professor, Gerard is drawn into a family feud, one that seems symbolic of a wider discourse between the past and the present, hypothesis and reality.
hISTÒRIA treads on slippery territory, dealing artfully with the continually shifting landscape of perspectives through a range of theatrical devices: screen, camera and props. Characters are archetypes yet swerve from cliché: Professor Daniel Vinyals is the inspirational old-school leftie, yet his command over the past is upset by his failure to deal with the present. His daughter Sophie accuses him of an addiction to the idealised notions of social history books, and she dismisses his analysis of motivations and meanings as pointless, blinkered romanticism. Sophie, meanwhile, lurches indignantly from one decision to the next. Informed yet reactive, she seems to represent the fickle forces of our contemporary age. And while Gerard tries, he fails to keep up with her and makes an impotent diplomat between she and her father. Sympathetic he may be, but Gerard is - as many of us feel - infuriatingly powerless.
This play offers no easy answers, although, in our age of image, perhaps the clue is in the costumes, where convictions have been converted into the contemporary language of logos: Gerard's cuddly brown jumper features the violently-born blood tracks of the Catalan flag; while the red cross of denial on the front of Sophie's t-shirt shouts a definitive 'NO!' – but to what?
