If you are melancholic and listen to Mr. Bojangles, Nina Simone's song, your melancholy will be accentuated. But if you are euphoric, you will feel even happier.” With these words ended the interview that Xavi Ayén did with Olivier Bourdeaut (Nantes, 1980), in February 2017.
The French author had just achieved great success with his second novel, Waiting for Mister Bojangles (Salamandra, in Spanish and Catalan), which was the first success in a life of failures, as he himself declared at the time. The novel was translated into many languages and was an international success.
Paco Mir explains that his wife bought it at an airport: “It was a small book, with an attractive cover. The whole family liked the novel so much that the pressure at home was very high to make a play. Then I saw that Victoire Berger-Perrin already had the rights in Spanish and I have adapted it to Catalan, moving even further away from Bourdeaut's novel.”
Mir also directs the play Esperant Mr. Bojangles, which is performed at the Poliorama theater from February 2 to March 24. Sílvia Abril and Lluís Villanueva play “a couple who are really crazy,” explains Mir. “From so much love, a daughter is born, although in the novel she is a son. Maybe it's a prejudice, but I think that at this age there are better actresses than actors, because she has to play a 30-year-old role and also a pre-adolescent one," she declares in reference to the character of Lua Amat, a Barcelona actress born in 2004.
“Lighting and sound are very important, they are two more characters,” highlights Mir, who praises the music composed by Jofre Bardagí, the soundtrack by Marçal Cruz and the set design and lighting by Mariona Ubia. “There are many changes of scenery, based on minimal changes, which are possible because we have the complicity of the viewer.”
“This marriage creates a parallel world, much funnier and much more interesting than reality, but there is a moment when the mother gets out of hand,” says Abril about her character.
And Villanueva adds: “When reality is sad and boring, it is better to invent a good story. He meets his wife at a conference and quickly realizes that she is a peripheral woman. All of this is colored by a mental illness that she has and that she will discover.” And Amat explains the character of her daughter: “she is the link between the story and the public. We go directly to the public, in a very cool connection.”
Mir considers that there are three levels of reading: “The daughter is the puppeteer who tells the story and moves the characters. Within the memories, there is the diary that the father wrote. And the third level is to see what happened, which is a mixture of the two. "I don't think it's based on a true story, but there are always little biographical notes that appear."
The adapter and director calls it a drama. “It starts as a comedy and it goes around and around, and it ends up making you laugh, but it also makes a little tear fall,” he concludes.
Catalan version, here
