2024-02-06 10:15:45
The deserted island
Authorship and direction: Marc Artigau. Interpretation: Miki Esparbé and Maria Rodríguez. Theater of Salt, February 4.
It’s a classic “boy meets girl”., one of those random things that unites us and at the same time separates us, as could a romantic comedy signed by Nora Ephron in the nineties or, going further back, one by Leo McCarey, if instead of the Empire State Building the thing there are elevators. It’s a classic boy meets girl, though he is aware of it and that’s why he plays, and he does it very well, with the clichés, with the shared references, with the “what if?”, with the fourth wall. “Has anyone here ever been very, very, very happy? But really happy, to lose control and become an idiot,” one of the protagonists asks the audience before starting.
This part of the game is entirely due to Marc Artigau, author and director of The deserted islanda sad comedy, as he defines it himself, with classic airs, because it is very well made and the public likes it – two premises that do not always go together.
He is Miki Esparbé and she is Maria Rodríguez, a home delivery man and a bank worker who meet by chance in a damaged elevator. They spend two hours together, understand each other and in the end it remains to be seen if things will go further. To help us find out, Artigau puts together a montage with vivid dialogues, repeated scenes, alternative realities and split characters without the viewer losing a moment or losing interest.
And here, again, it is to Artigau’s credit, but also to the impeccable work of the two performers, he so endearingly pathetic, she more histrionic and with a touch of hooliganism. They also sign up to play, challenge the audience with questions – including the one about the desert island, of course – and deploy an unbeatable chemistry. You take them home, even when the good times give way to the most emotional moments and the fear of death and loneliness.
It’s a lifelong “boy meets girl”, but he laughs at what we’ve always been sold: the ideal of the half-orange and the romantic flame that burns inside you pales in comparison to everyday life. “Everything went within the parameters of normality”, it is said at various moments of the show that, yes, once the claudication has been assumed for a more earthly love, a last turn is allowed to remember us, with a smile , that one thing is life and the other is fiction.
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