Extended

PalmaThe programme of Calidoscopi, the latest creation of Estudi Zero, says that “the characters are moved by absurd, violent or profoundly human situations”. True, but it would be even more so if the conjunction were copulative instead of disjunctive. If the situations are absurd and violent, it is clear that they are indisputably very human. The caricature does not distort reality but accentuates it, in such a way that this daring, irrational and bizarre point makes the metaphorical drawing of the human condition arrive with more effectiveness. That the play is composed of different short stories brings the Sans seal, in such a way that it transports us to that journey that Karl Valentin was piloting in this very room. For the occasion, several authors are on the payroll of Calidoscopi –Esteve Soler, Juan Mayorga and Joël Pommerat–, which makes the spirit of the different sketches raise the heat of each one a great deal. There is no white humour. They all contain a high dose of venom, in the same proportion as caustic wit and sarcasm, and without fear of crossing red lines.The first story, that of the man run over by a bus, about which I will say no more because it would be a spoiler, sets the tone of the performance. Black humor in its purest form. Human cruelty or the lack of humanity, which in this case is the same, shine with all their splendor. The one about the couple who confess to their twenty-year-old son that he was not a wanted child, exponentially increases the portion of inhumanity. The one about the seller of anything you can imagine is a mirror directed towards the stalls. And so on. All in all, rounded off with a musical number performed by Dominic Hull, a "My way" in the purest crooner style, accompanied by the rest of the cast and dressed as Fortunio Bonanova and the Glamouramas were in their glorious American years. Naturally, in such a diverse ensemble, it is not easy to find the ideal point of homogeneity, but, even so, the performance treasures enough uniformity, both in the different stories and in the interpretation of the seven protagonists, who in such a marathon performance become an immense number of characters, always dressed very differently. Only a small but, the wigs are not very necessary. With the different changes of register, which are there, it is enough.