REITERAT REI TARAT

The playwright, director and actor Jordi Oriol has written a new version of Shakespeare’s King Lear based on the one he made for the Lliure during the lockdown. It’s a minstrelsy about verse and the taste for language.

A king loses his head when he realises that he does not know how to distinguish real from feigned love. And in theatre, can we distinguish what is real from what is feigned?

Reiterat Rei Tarat is inspired by the decomposition that all characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear live, and focuses on his two contrasting archetypes: Lear and Cordelia. The king-father who personalizes authority and the younger daughter who connotes obedience and sincerity. It is with them that the power imbalance which gives rise to the plot originates, and with them ends. From the time a father gives his daughters the word until the word itself loses its meaning. When the daughter rebels against the imposed order and demands it with personality, the father begins to lose his temper and ends up disauthorized. It is a journey towards the awareness of death, of the function of death, and it is being peeled from rhetoric that rushes into madness. From sanity to madness. From reality to speculation.
The desolating madness of a father who has lost authority over his daughters is reflected here in the disturbing moment that sons experience in the impasse experienced during adolescence. In both situations it seems that their perception does not fit with the rest of humanity. Understanding is not understood in nonsense. And language itself encompasses everything: also confusion.
The worst thing we can do, however, is to belittle the word. Putting words to what happens to us is a step to save ourselves from desolation. And allowing ourselves to deliriously become aware can awaken debate and imagination.
— Jordi Oriol Canals


On the critic's...
"A little gem that invites parents with teenage children to enter a high-quality theatre." (Andreu Gomila, Time Out)


COMPLEMENTARY INFO ↓

Jordi Oriol at the Arxiu Lliure
Nao Albet at the Arxiu Lliure