Les maleïdes

A text born from an unconscious impulse. A tragicomic tale. A fable of action. A theatrical road movie with aromas of the most hyperbolic Lars Von Trier and some Hitchcock. A story about the Christian myth. A work of adventures. A hooligan comedy. A formal cocktail shaker without barriers that reveres the classics from postmodernity. All that and possibly more. This is Les maleïdes, by the Mallorcan playwright Sergio Baos, directed by Marga López, a play that invites us to travel with three women from three generations. Three women somehow abandoned who flee from their complicated lives but with the feeling of having no control over their own existence. Pilar is Águeda’s mother and Águeda is Anna’s mother. Anna is a grown woman and shows up at her grandmother's house to try to meet her mother, but they haven't heard from her in a long time. That’s where the adventure begins.

This work won last year’s Pere Capellà de Teatro Award during the Premios Octubre held by Editorial Tres i Quatre. Its production has also been supported by Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics with the Teatre Principal de Palma, along with Barcelona’s Sala Beckett, being their main performance spaces. The play’s playwright, Sergio Baos, is a Mallorcan, too. He is also an actor and founder of the theatre company Teatre de Vellut. We have the exceptional opportunity to see a work in Mallorcan Catalan (with Spanish surtitles, of course) at this year's Festival de Otoño.

In today's theatre community, Sergio Baos can be described as someone who goes against the wind. As someone who trained in television scriptwriting, he bets decidedly on fiction and strives as a builder of stories almost to the point of obsession. Les maleïdes is complete fiction and the characters are highly polished in search of a connection with the audience that comes more from their complexity than from a flat expression of feelings.

All this fictional eagerness and the number of references and styles that come together to tell this story do not make its staging easy. Marga López, the director, states: "the characters are multifaceted and the adventures in which they find themselves immersed go from normal to the unexpected in a matter of minutes. There are even magical moments in Les maleïdes : a ghost that doesn't understand why she’s a ghost and a woman who believes she’s been touched by God. The rhythms are slow and frenetic at the same time. Everything happens at breakneck speed. Lucid and crazy characters. The same life.” They say it is a play about recovering family bonds and that this recovery is quite an adventure. Whilst it is a work of fiction, it is easy for anyone to connect with the trials and tribulations of looking after such bonds in trying times. Maybe for this reason everyone in the audience can connect with one of the three female protagonists quickly, who are also seeking each other and themselves.