Scene from Náufragos

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Náufragos

2000 · Theatre

Who has never dreamt of dropping everything and clearing off to a desert island? Let him cast the first stone who has not pictured himself surrounded by coconut palms, fanned by some beautiful woman, or man, and rocked by the sweet purring of calm waters… Our capacity to dream, to invent paradises — tax havens included — and, in the end, to escape into a dream of prosperity, whether financial, sentimental or simply playful, has no limits.

Escape, utopia: beautiful words, seeds of dreams to which the passing years have given meanings that are — grandiose? The cliché takes shape and, as such, empties out; it fills with itself, which is to say with nothing, and is repeated from mouth to mouth, chewed over. Words shut in cages of ignorance, stripped bare, broken.

Imagine… calmly, just for a moment and with a fourth wall to protect you, that our longings come true. Imagine that the desert island, far from being a paradise, is only a desert island, with its mosquitoes, its storms, its lovely bright sand working its way into every one of our pores… Imagine our dreams turning into sea foam, four thousand kilometres from the nearest civilisation.

The cliché becomes flesh and the dream becomes real. That is what happens, which is not little, but not much either. By now it seems that none of it matters, and yet we go on dreaming; there must be a reason… A production written by Jorge Picó and directed by Andrés Beladiez

Review of the production in ABC, 31 January 2001.

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Photographs: Vértigo Teatro