Juan Mayorga is not exactly an accommodating man, when he could be perfectly accommodating from his vantage point as 2022 winner of Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, academic of the Spanish language, and director of Teatro de La Abadía. Mayorga is above all a fable-creator and a theatre lover and of all its possibilities, which he never ceases to explore through writing and directing. He has collaborated with none other than English actor Will Keen, who has a strong connection to Spain for personal and professional reasons. Keen has worked with the likes of Declan Donnellan, Peter Hall, Michael Attenborough and Tim Carroll and has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has performed on London's most prestigious stages at the National Theatre and the Royal Court and on others in New York, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Edinburgh. Alongside Keen and Mayorga, Elilsa Sanz takes charge of the set design with Pedro Yegüe on lighting. They are all gathered around a theatrical experience that explores the expressive and artistic possibilities of the coexistence between the soliloquy and the arts of movement.

La gran cacería is a project from Teatro del Barrio that has its world premiere at the Festival de Otoño. It is a project that starts with a question addressing all of you: Do you know what keeps you awake at night? It all starts one night when insomnia is alive and kicking on board a boat in the Mediterranean which departed from Sicily. It is perhaps a journey in time rather than space because the Mediterranean is much more than a witness to the history of Europe. It has been a protagonist, a jailer, a gravedigger, a character builder, a nourisher of passions, a god and a devil, a myth, and a reality. Crossing the sea to which so much literature looks out on all its shores, a man cannot sleep in his cabin at night. Images of other ships, of other voyages, come back to memory repeatedly.

The traveller crosses a sea that stretches the length of Europe, as the cradle of a culture capable of the best and the worst. He has been finding those images that come back to mind as he travels around the island of Sicily: the mosaics that depicted the story of Noah's ark in the Monreale cathedral and those of the Roman villa in Casale entitled Great Hunt ( La gran cacería in Spanish), a mosaic that depicts the capture and transportation of animals from Africa and Asia to be made to perform in the Imperial circuses. Noah wanted to save them from the torrential downpour, according to the Bible. The Empire paraded them in their amphitheatres and circuses to the delight of an audience eager for strong emotions.

Images that keep him awake and lead the traveller to think of the animals travelling with him in the ship's hold. Together they cross that sea and watch society grow with its foundations in culture but with a belligerent face, conquests, and revolutions, often depicting other civilisations as common beasts. The traveller is sailing through these thoughts when, along with the other passengers of the ship, he must take part in a disaster drill. He is forced to leave his cabin. Is it real? Is he awake? It seems to be real but maybe it’s not. Maybe he is dreaming. Aren’t dreams a poetic simulation of what has been lived and what is yet to be lived? Perhaps lived, perhaps dreamt, the animals take control of the ship.