Josep Maria Pou is Roald Dahl, a giant on the loose rope
“It seems written to me,” he thought Josep Maria Pou When he saw Giant At the Royal Court Theater in London, last fall. The giant is almost two meters high and is a famous and eccentric intellectual, the writer Roald Dahlwhich is in an ideological dilemma that can compromise his career. “For some time now he had not found such a smart and wonderfully built function,” says the actor, a regular at English theater. The playwright’s work Mark Rosenblatt He excited the critic, the audience, received three Oliver Awards and has already been transferred to a commercial theater in the West End. The play can be seen in parallel with London and Barcelona, because Pou ran to negotiate his rights to bring the show to the Teatre Romea, where he will premiere within the framework of the Grec Festival, from July 5 to August 3. “He has what I like most about the theater: he causes debate on stage and the audience goes out asking questions, because the function all the time makes you question what you think,” says the actor, absolutely absorbed by rehearsals, under the direction of Josep Maria Mestres.
The work is based on real facts. In 1983, the author of Matilda and Charlie and the chocolate factory was about to publish The witches When, in an article, he compares the Jews with the Nazis following the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. “In history, a race had passed so fast to be a victim of becoming murderer,” says Dahl. A major scandal broke out in the Anglo -Saxon world and was accused of anti -Semitic. Rosenblatt imagines a real -time crisis committee in which Dahl’s wife places, Felicity (Pagan victory); His famous English publisher, friend and Jew, Tom Maschler, the creator of the prestigious Booker Prize (Xavier Ricart); his trusted man, Wally Saunders, who inspired The great giant friend ((Enric Arquimbau) and a young publisher representative in the United States (Clàudia Benito). Some try to convince him of retracting himself, receiving his arguments and warning him of the commercial veto he could suffer, and he defends freedom of opinion above all.
After getting into the shoes of a man who loves a goat, of a captain who wants to take revenge on a whale and of the same Jordi PujolJosep Maria Pou does not worry about the controversy, nor embodies such an unfriendly and filterless character. “ I am having fun to make risky characters, place myself on the loose rope. I do not want to do accommodation functions, ” I say.- Giant It shows how someone so strange and unpredictable can become sympathetic, when he is a fat and a racist. “
The show addresses totally contemporary dilemmas such as the Israeli conflict, anti -Semitism, where freedom of opinion, self -censorship, cancellation, tolls that have freedom, separation of the work and artist. Dahl defined himself as anti-Semitic before his death, in 1990. Thirty years later, it was his heirs who publicly apologized for the writer’s words, which the writer never wanted to do. Roald Dahl is still the best -selling English author in the world, after Shakespeare and before Dickens.
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