Sergi Belbel continues to play – Revista Teatre Barcelona

This winter, for Sergi Belbelit is not characterized by large rooms, but by diverse spaces. He started the season leading supersapiensan immersive work that combines theatre, technology, digital arts and exhibition and will end its run at Christmas. He will follow The toasterco-written with Rock Esquius —also author of the first— in the Versus Glòries room, with the aim of repeating the success ofdead anglecomedy that has enjoyed enormous success. That will be in mid-December. And he will start 2026 with a piece he has written and will direct The cottageat the Teatre Gaudí, which promises to be the key to being scared in a theatre.

Alternative spaces and new experiences. “I was, from the underground,” laughs Belbel as he remembers that, at the end of the eighties of the last century, he was one of those who painted the walls of the Teatro Fronterizo, the offspring of the Sala Beckett, when it opened in Gràcia. He says that it is not at all unusual for the winter to be spent in small-format spaces. so much The toaster com The cottage they are the result of the relationships he has forged over the years and of his desire to continue playing, which he does in earnest both in the theater and in the Peripècies laboratory he coordinates at Sala Beckett. The assembly of the Versus Glòries comes from the demand of the room to try to repeat the good reception ofdead anglewith a similar cast: they repeat Antonio del Valle i Ramon Godinoand joins it Laura Paul.

‘The Toaster’

Belbel and Esquius form a tandem on the way to consolidation. The toaster it is the second piece they wrote together, this time about the “smart” household appliance that gives the work its title and that suddenly appears in the life of one of the characters. “It’s a comedy-comedy with our nieces,” confesses Belbel, who has directed three productions of his former disciple.

“Terror is something that I had a lot going on”

Gaudí’s proposal is born from the harmony that Belbel maintains with the managers of the room, Gemma Deusedas i Anna Carrenowho at the same time star in the show. But The cottage it is much more than that. Belbel explains that “terror is something that I had a lot to do”, because he has not yet found any work that comes close, even remotely, to what cinema is capable of provoking. He is an absolute fan of the genre, of The Shining in the works ofAri Asterlike Midsummer. He also remembers that, around 2000, he directed The incomplete woman of David Plana a la Beckett, where he devised an immersive montage. “People were jumping on the chair”, he remembers.

A few years later, he sketched a piece based on the horror of the 1950s and 1960s, near What has become of Baby Jane?starring Bette Davis i Joan Crawford. That was left in a drawer that he opened again when he left the TNC in 2013, and that, during the 2020 confinement, he thoroughly reviewed.

It wasn’t, however, until he directed the attempt to Borràs Jordi Galceran to approach gender, Rural tourismwho knew how to finish it. He knows that the experience at the Teatre Borràs was closer to comedy than to terror, although there were a couple of moments when the audience got a good scare. In the same vein, There is a little house in the distance of Jordi Casanovasa la Beckett, i Great things will happen of Jordi Casado i Silvia Navarroin the Flyhard – like Galceran’s, premiered last season – they also didn’t quite achieve that point of true restlessness that he is looking for.

‘The cottage’

Belbel does not give up. To move forward The cottagehe first spoke “with some great actresses”, but soon realized that he needed a small theater to achieve the atmosphere he wanted. Deusedas and Carreño appeared as the ideal actresses and Gaudí, as the perfect space, he points out, to create “something gothic, dramatic, dark”: two women locked in an old house, far from the rest of the world, who remember the classic that Robert Aldrich directed in 1962.

The low ceiling of the theater, the even blacker walls and the audience inside the scene. This is Belbel’s recipe for trying to reach in three dimensions where the cinema does in two. And, of course, to keep playing.

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