The Girona and Salt High Season Festival kicks off with the adaptation of a ‘true crime’ by Emmanuel Carrère directed by Julio Manrique with his usual attention to detail.
long before the revival of the black chronicle via podcast and fashionable television programs such as ‘Crims’, another French regular in the Nobel pools, Emmanuele Carrere, published a novel that would mark a milestone in his career. Following the trail of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’, the writer devoted seven years of his life to trying to understand the mind of notorious assassin Jean-Claude Romand, a man whose life was based on a lie. For 18 years, Romand posed as a top doctor, a job as a senior official at the WHO that never existed. In reality, he wasted his hours wandering and reading in cafes. In 1993, when the cake was about to be discovered, he bought a rifle and murdered his wife, his two children aged 7 and 5, his parents and even the dog. Later, attempted suicide burning the house, but he did not succeed, and when he woke up from the coma he was arrested, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment from which he was released in 2019.
Carrère attended the trial, soaked up the summary and had contact by letter with the murderer. All that obsession was transformed in 2000 into the novel ‘El adversario’ (Ed. Anagrama), with a subsequent film by Nicole García and two theatrical versions by Sylvain Maurice and Frédéric Cherbœuf. Now another one is added to the list. new stage adaptation in Catalan by director Julio Manrique, a declared fan of the writer who won the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters last year. Yesterday, the theatrical production marked the beginning of the 31st edition of the Temporada Alta Festival, inauguration at the Municipal Theater that acts as theatrical soiree of the year in Girona. The after party, yes, was a bit marred by the rain and had to be relocated inside the venue.
It’s not the first time Manrique inaugurates the sample of Girona and Salt, he already did it in 2020 with ‘Bouvetøya’, a work conditioned by the pandemic at all levels. This time, the personal bet of the director has more travel. To begin with, we find the adaptation signed by Manrique himself together with Cristina Genebat and Marc Artigau, an accurate dramaturgy that catches the literary time and plays with the subtlety of the original. The tension depends on it, because both in the work and in the book we know from the beginning how the story will end. The information is dosed and that game of mirrors between the writer and the murderer is carefully explored, a high-voltage interpretive ‘tête-a-tête’ that expands like a waltz, with two actors in very good shape but who strangely never they had worked together.
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Pere Arquillué resolutely delves into the literary voice of Carrère until confused not only with the narratoralso interprets the sample of secondary that he executes, in some cases, with a point of mannerism. Well directed, Carles Martínez carries the weight of the murderer, with the path that goes from the bland man to the unexpected monster that we try to understand without success. The role seems tailor-made for his unmistakable poise and that characteristic precision to act on the border between the ordinary and the unsettling.
Everything unfolds in a room neat in details of the nineties, a scenic space by Alejandro Andújar that drives tension with its density. As in the best Ostermeier theatre, cameras hidden around the stage project close-ups of the actors. Search in the expressions, between lies and appearancesome answer that does not arrive.