| Theatre
‘Desbarats’, by Llorenç Villalonga

With this production by the Teatre Principal in Palma, the most caustic Villalonga returns to the stage, with a great comedy between the grotesque and the theatre of the absurd.

In the 1940s, in the midst of the Spanish post-civil war, Llorenç Villalonga wrote several short plays. He read a different one each year at the Christmas Eve dinner that Dona Maria Coll i Roca organised at Can Ferrandell on la calle Sant Jaume in Palma, where Vilallonga and his wife were guests.

He wrote them as a “diversion” to pass the time and they were based on real events that had occurred during the year at the same tables and after-dinner conversations. He had no intention of one day having them published, much less performed.

In these pieces, Llorenç Villalonga transformed Can Ferrandell into Can Serralta and Dona Maria Coll into Dona Catalina, widow of Pax, better known as Mumare, surrounded by a court of sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, a priest, Father Florejat and the writer friend Minos and his wife Amaranta, a group of frivolous people who turned their backs on the reality that the country was living in at that time.

Twenty years later, Jaume Vidal Alcover - a great friend of the writer - took the initiative to publish the set of these pieces, convincing the author of their high literary value, despite their costumbrismo, the similarity with the Valle-Inclanesque grotesque and the insinuation of the approaches of the theatre of the absurd.

In 1965 they saw the light for the first time under the name Desbarats, a title proposed by Vidal Alcover himself.

It is in the family court that surrounds the widowed Marchioness of Pax and her stage future that the playwright Marc Rosich has based his version, transforming the various pieces of the Villalonga world to make it flow into a single play.

Directed by Rafel Duran, it stars: Aina Frau (Mumare, Catalina), Miquel Àngel Torrens (Minos, writer), Caterina Alorda (Amaranta, Minos' wife), Pedro Mas (Felip, Mumare's son), Apol lònia Serra (Hortènsia, daughter-in-law), Alícia Garau (Pilar, Mumare's daughter), Albert Mèlich (Pampango, Spanish-American consul), Héctor Seoane (Martí, Mumare's son / Rubio, republican guerrilla), Pat Aguiló (Amanda, Mumare's daughter), Joan Manel Vadell (Pare Florejat, chaplain), Xim Vidal (Gasparot, servant), Lluqui Herrero (Infana, Marie-Gertrud de Baviera-Borbon / Mistingett, Parisian showgirl), Enric Garcia (Site supervisor / Guerrilla leader / Saint Peter). Language: Catalan.