La Casa del Dolor (The House of Pain) is an entertaining Catalan/Valencian play created by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez. Its focus is on an absent son, the talented Juli, whose family gather for a celebratory dinner after his successful graduation as a pianist, but who never shows up for the meal. Juli is a target for the expectations and low self-esteem of his parents and sibling, and the play as a whole thrives on missing detail and unreliable connections. Jealous sister Julia feels stunted in Juli’s shadow, and takes Valium to feel better. Juli’s mother loves him to the point of intrusion, while Juli’s father teaches him to kill beasts with a crossbow.
According to the director, the desire was to scrape the surface of a superficially ‘perfect’ family, one encompassed by art, culture and poetry, to see the suffering beneath. Yet while clearly wealthy, neither the setting nor their behaviour suggest genuine literary leanings: the art on the wall is terrible, the conversation is less than elevated, the source of the family money is never made clear, and the siblings seem too grown up for their family roles. This is a clan that seems frozen in time, or actually from the past: 1990s, 1980s…?
If so, the play, which offered subtitles in English on one night, appears to introduce the seeds of today’s discontent, without giving them much water. The sirens of a great escape into the metaverse is provided through the golden age of cinema, films such as the groundbreaking Imitation of Life (1959) turn into distractions themselves, despite their once critical message. The symbolism seems poignant yet, like a David Lynch movie, its seduction fades with its lack of meaning. References to a fantasy dress-up world of glamorous gender-bending icons offer little enlightenment on the serious issues surrounding gender today.
