Keep on walking, Federico

Teatre

informació obra


Composició musical:
Max Pappenheim
Il·luminació:
Christopher Nairne
Direcció:
Alice Malin
Companyia:
Actors Touring Company
Intèrprets:
Carlos Vicente, Gerard Clavell
Sinopsi:

L’actor britànic Mark Lockyer ens va meravellar la temporada passada amb un monòleg autobiogràfic marcat pel trastorn bipolar. El seu viatge vital ha seguit en periple per l’Estat espanyol i ara ve a narrar-nos un peculiar camí cap a la llum.

Crítica: Keep on walking, Federico

30/10/2018

An attack of sincerity from a modern Meursault

per Alx Phillips

Like his first piece Living With the Lights On, Mark Lockyer's "love letter to Spain" is an intense, sprawling monologue of inner and outer experiences, realisations of recent and distant past delivered in an entertaining attack of sincerity.

Unlike his first piece, Keep on Walking, Federico is set in an anonymous "authentically Spanish" village on the coast, a superficially idyllic place that has been invaded by expats. Here, beneath the facade of soft sand and blue sea, sordid truths lie: veins of immorality and corruption (the men) and sorrow and deception (for the women). Deeper still, Spain's dark and violent past bubbles, not yet exhumed from earth too expensive to be buried in, but certainly For Sale when it comes to ugly and illegal luxury apartment blocks.

It was just before the rain and the atmosphere in the theatre was stifling. This contributed to the piece, in which Mark plays both narrator and all the parts: Pepe the amiable barman, Ramona the sultry gypsy, Dr. Bueno the local dictator, as well as Mark's own sweet, struggling mum.

At times it is a bit BBC melodrama, with Lockyer alone catching the chords and tying up their loose ends for us. Sudden shifts in direction and the heat building in the theatre left little breathing space for the audience; some alarming truths revealed were washed away with other stories that demanded a different emotional response.

Most effective for me was the sense of being a modern stranger, less Lorca, to whom the piece pays homage, than Camus (although I haven't read much Lorca, admittedly). There is a mother's death, an Arabic twist, Spanish accents that did sound a bit like French... Could Mark be a modern Meursault? Not indifferent, but an outsider: a guy who has lost his French cool in the persecutory Spanish summer sun?