The perseverance of La Maldita Vanidad is admirable, company, production company, school and theatre in Bogotá that has been working to carve out a space for itself for over a decade. It has a contemporary vision of the stage and struggles so that vanity – always lurking – doesn’t dissolve the dreams of the artists that they are. Under the direction of Jorge Hugo Marín, they presented their production El Palmeral (The Palm Grove) at the Bogotá International Theatre Festival in 2021, a performance that was possible thanks to the Cruce de Pensamientos project driven forward by municipal institutions in the Colombian capital, with the idea of opening another bridge between their and our worlds of theatre. Marín describes Albert Tola’s work as ‘symbolic, metaphorical and poetic work that is based on narratology, or the exploration of text. It is a huge change for us. We are reinventing ourselves: we have moved on from works centred on action to a piece based on words’.

To sketch a synopsis of the work, we’ve got to travel 1000 years back in time. Spain didn’t exist and what was on the Iberian Peninsula at that time was called Al-Ándalus, a territory strife with civil wars that culminated in the dismembering of what we know as the kingdoms of taifas. In that era, a civil servant from a small court, historian and poet Abu Hâssan, fell in love with a soldier, Tahir. As a consequence of their passion, both had their throats cut in a palm grove. This reveals their perseverance, in this exercise to look behind a simple synopsis to verify everything that the Colombian company’s attempt puts into play in staging the text of a Catalan author writing about something that happened over a 1000 years ago. Something that continues to be valid to induce cathartic reflection.