“Master Eckhart said: there was never greater virility, greater war, nor greater combat than forgetting oneself and losing oneself. I want to invite you, just for the space of an hour, to win that fight: to forget ourselves (in order to find ourselves)”. Lluís Homar starred on Thursday night in the inaugural show of the new edition of the Almagro International Classical Theater Festival with a production against the current.
With El templo vacío, a proposal as bare as its feet on the stage of the Corral de Comedias. Sober theater, not suitable for all palates, accompanied by the transfiguring lights of Pedro Yagüe projected over the centuries of the Corral de Comedias and by a vocal quartet that sang music by Bach that separated the public a few centimeters from the ground. With them, Homar, almost a holy man, a spiritual guide, sometimes on his knees, made a journey through great mystical texts. From Master Eckhart to Teresa de Jesús and from Angelus Silesius to Ramon Llull and Jacint Verdaguer, the latter two authors to whom he declaimed in succulent Catalan.
A trip produced by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico that he directs – it will be seen, in addition to the weekend in Almagro, in March at the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid – and that with dramaturgy by Brenda Escobedo, who directs the show together with the Homar himself, it is a very personal tour from the first minute. It responds to the path taken by the artist in recent times and which is undoubtedly a gift from the actor to his audience, in front of which, rather than emptying himself, he undressed in the first person.
“Theater, among many other things, has been a way of escaping from issues that I have not been able to resolve. Theater helps because it gives you a ground, a space, a character, what to know how to say with the words of others... and one, with all that, can act. But if later, in real life, one does not solve their shortcomings, it is useless to go on stage; acting is useless because it is not possible to transmit to the public, from the soul, the truth of a character. And the truth of a character is nothing other than the truth of a person, ”he pointed out at the beginning.
And he confessed that, “after many years of experience, I realize that being an actor has been, for me, taking a journey towards oneself. This person – that I am now – is the one that appears before you. I do not come here to hide myself in characters, nor do I come to recite melodiously, I come to show myself through mysticism. The mystics say that every journey is really a journey inward. A journey in which, perhaps as the verses of the doctor and poet Angelus Silesius that he recited say, "one has to taste hell, at least once one must have been in the jaws of hell: if you don't go to it in life you will enter it dead.”
