‘Perfect Strangers’ pushes the boundaries of intimacy in the mobile age
In the Poliorama Theater no one can hide anything. The dinner prepared there starts from a disturbing premise: leave the mobile phones on the table and allow everyone to listen to the calls and read the messages out loud during the meal. What begins as an innocent game quickly turns into an experiment that dynamits the intimacy, trust and personal relationships of a group of friends. This is the starting point of perfect strangersa co-production of bito, The Brutal i misogynists that challenges the viewer with an uncomfortable question: would I do it?
The show is based on the film Perfect unknownwritten and directed by Paolo Genovese in 2016, which is already the film with the most remakes in the history of cinema, with versions in 25 countries. “Each adaptation reflects the culture of the place where it is made: the Korean one incorporates the passage through the army, the Icelandic one is much more violent and the Spanish one fromAlex de la Iglesia it is deliberately grotesque and turns the characters upside down”, he points out Látzer Garciaadapter of the Catalan version from the translation of Yannick Garcia.
For staging, the director David Selvas he has taken as his main reference the Italian version, which is also the most realistic: “There is comedy but there is also drama, the characters build an emotional tower of cards that ends up falling”. Despite recognizing that the tragicomic mechanism of the original text is very effective, the team has chosen to bring it closer to “current Catalan idiosyncrasy”, incorporating the social evolution of the last ten years in issues such as homosexuality or gender roles. It also broadens the view on privacy, focusing on the rights of the third person who calls or writes without having consented to be part of the game.
Another key element of the assembly is the casting, made up of Marta Bayari, Biel Duran, Eduard Farelo, Julia Molins, Albert Prat, Vanessa Segura i Cristian Valencia. “We needed performers with a lot of truth, with comic ability but also who could go very low”, says Selvas, who considers that the company has the chemistry of a real group of friends and hopes that this will make the public empathize with the fate of the characters.
The proposal also symbolically develops the eclipse that Genovese already hinted at in his feature film. According to the director, this element has opened up possibilities in a scenic space led by Alejandro Andújar that runs away from customs and evolves towards The exterminating angel (Buñuel1962) as the characters feel trapped: “The eclipse speaks of what we show and what we hide, like the two faces of the moon.” It is in this distance between appearance and truth that Garcia places the core of the work: “Social masks are perhaps a necessary evil to survive among others, we all have small or catastrophic secrets; it is a question of whether we can assume them”. When the game is over and the cellphones are back in the pockets, the matter is already in the hands of the public.
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