★★★★ “Looking at me all over/so well carved and polished/a thousand times I have presumed/that it was my turner father”, says Don Diego, the presumed protagonist of this amusing play written by Agustín Moreto (1618-1669). Faithful representative of the glorious Spanish Golden Age, that period that actually extends much more than a hundred years, approximately between 1492 and 1659, and which meant a flourishing of art and the Castilian language, this playwright reflected in “El Lindo Don Diego” , which could be considered one of the first advances in the gender struggle between women and men.
The plot of this swashbuckling comedy, written in clear and mocking verse, features Don Tello (Gabriel Virtuoso), eager to marry off his daughters, Doña Leonor (Ana Yovino) and Doña Inés (Mónica D’Agostino), with his cousins, Don Diego (Francisco Pesqueira) and Don Mendo (Gastón Ares). To add entanglements, a third man, Don Juan (Andrés D’Adamo), is in love with Inés and weaves a ruse with the faithful Mosquito (Pablo Di Felice), so that Diego rejects his fiancée and feels attracted by a false Dowager Countess, (Irene Almus), who is actually a gossipy maid of the house.
The Adonis of the title, neither dull nor lazy, will also plot a deception that we will not reveal here, but that makes him end up as a kind of trickster, tricked. Although the sum of these tricks seems complicated, the members of the Compañía Argentina de Teatro Clásico, under the firm and experienced hand of director Santiago Doria, make everything seem crystal clear by adding rhythm and clarity. In the cast, which will go to Spain in July to perform at festivals in Valencia, Valladolid and Almagro, Yovino stands out for his candid innocence that conceals a subtle manipulation; Almus, in his amusing parody of the noblewoman who expresses herself with supine extravagance, and especially Pesqueira, for his provincial hidalgo, arrived from Burgos, inordinately vain.
One question remains: how come the official Buenos Aires theaters, with their generous budgets, do not program these classics? With the exception of the centenary of the Cervantes, where scenes from “La dama boba” were performed, the absence of these works is absolute.
