“Toni Roca does not accept just anyone in his courses and chooses them because he thinks they can do something. His conviction is that they end up making good bread, but to make good bread you have to be good with yourself”. It is Abel Folk who defines his character, a guru of self-help therapies, in his case making bread. “I was a pastry chef for four years when I was a teenager and I have kneaded bread,” he adds.
Cristina Clemente and Marc Angelet, authors and directors of the comedy Una teràpia integral, discovered that therapy is done by making bread and they took a course, “to get comedy out of the house”, she explains.
Thus, on the stage of La Villarroel, the public will find a bread workshop, with all the necessary elements so that, during the performance, the guru and his three select students, Àngels Gonyalons, Roger Coma and Andrea Ros, submit to flour therapy.
We wanted to make a comedy to talk about self-help and the new spiritualities –explains Angelet–, such as beliefs, faith, the lies we tell ourselves. The play moves between drama and comedy.
The director of La Villarroel, Tania Brenlle, adds: "It is an intelligent comedy with a lot of bad drool, which invites you to let go and laugh at yourself".
"The response from the public is that, towards the end, they are willing to go into therapy," he points out to Gonyalons. It is not a pretentious work, but it is not superficial”.
Coma, who confesses that she makes bread at home, “is the most spiritual thing I can do”, describes the comedy as “a fine line between the pathetic and the ironic, and the everyday and the important. I feel like playing the clown and, at the same time, putting all the meat of the truth that I can”. In the bread guru's workshop, "some come to do therapy and bread is the excuse, and others are deceived into thinking that they will only make bread."
Ros details: “We have worked on the fly, with a text that evolves. Because of my physique, they always make me look pretty and here I play the clown. The play is about what we believe in and, if we don't believe in anything, what vertigo!”
His previous success, Lapònia, "was more about magic and this one touches more on faith," specifies Angelet, who details that it is now being performed in Argentina, and will go to Madrid, Croatia and Greece. The new proposal, Una teràpia integral, arrives at La Villarroel (until June 26), after some thirty performances on tour, produced by Velvet Events.
"A lot of the public feels identified and asks what we do to seek happiness as much as we can," concludes Gonyalons.
Catalan version, here
