Agata Roca stars in an existential drama at the Teatre Lliure
Free Theater regains success The categorical imperative, a text where the playwright and director Victoria Szpunberg It makes a social portrait that proposes what is ethically appropriate when the system drowns you. With doses of irony, the text addresses topics such as access to housing, the precariousness of the professor associated with universities and the invisibility of women from the age of 50. The assembly also has a philosophical slope in which the principle of thecategorical imperative fromImmanuel Kant plays a key role, and there are also numerous references to Frank Kafka and Walter Benjamin. The show returns to the Lliure Theater billboard until June 22,
The actress Agata Roca He plays a teacher of ethics associated with the Faculty of Philosophy who is in crisis. After the fifty, just separated, without being able to get stable place at the university and the point to run out of house, it begins to suffer strange attacks. Szpunberg It was important for the protagonist to be a 50-year-old woman who has always been part of the system to be able to portray how he begins to feel invisible, alone and cornered by society. “It is at an age when feeling out of the system is a dangerous thing because it no longer has the strength or energy that someone has younger,” he says.
One of the obstacles with the protagonist is the difficulty of finding a flat on his own, after receiving a notification that informs him of the sale of the building where he lives on a vulture background. A few months ago, Szpunberg was immersed in the search for a flat in Barcelona and experienced the problem of access to housing. “When you visit floors alone, the situation is not pleasant. To entertain me, I started to record some of these visits with audio,” says the playwright, who has recreated fragments in some scenes of the play.
In parallel with this experience, Szpunberg knew the conditions of precarious work of the university associate professor, and wanted to talk about it through his protagonist. Specifically, she wanted to be a professor associated with the Faculty of Philosophy. “It is a discipline that, in general, is discredited by the values of our current affairs,” says the author, who had also studied philosophy and, above all, remembers ethics classes.
At stage Agata Roca shares prominence with Xavi Sáezwho interprets the different male characters who believe in the life of the protagonist.
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