In ancient Greece, Sisyphus was considered the most cunning because, on a few occasions, he managed to fool his contemporaries. He even found the stratagem to cheat death, but the penalty he had to pay in hell has gone down in the history of mythology as one of the most absurd: in Hades, Sisyphus is forced every day to push a sloping stone up a steep slope, until he fails and the stone rolls and he is forced to start all over again.
There have been many interpretations of this myth, which from a current point of view could be useful for people who go to work every day to do exactly the same thing, for those who every day raise and lower the blinds of the shop, and even for the performers who have to repeat the same role day after day.
This is the premise that the playwright Jordi Oriol has now taken for his new show, Sísif fa no fa, which premieres at El Canal de Salt, on December 3, as part of the Temporada Alta festival, and will be presented at the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia, from January 25 to February 11, 2024.
After dazzling the public with the Trilogy of Lament (The Fall of Hamlet, L'Empest, La mala diction), based on three Shakespeare texts (Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth), and surprising with the ambitious Europa Bull, now Oriol returns to a simple proposal but, he says, "different from the previous ones". Sisyphus fa no fa takes the protagonist of Albert Camus's essay, based on the myth of the man condemned to eternally push a stone.
The new proposal from the company Indi Gest talks about a modern-day Sisyphus who perversely tries to manipulate his history to make people believe what everyone knows is impossible, such as the human effort to hide fragility and self-deception to continue living a "painful life", says the playwright, who has always been interested in this myth.
The work starts from the fact that we are all "increasingly aware of our fragility, of the expiration of man and the no longer so apocalyptic idea of an imminent end to the human being", declares Oriol, to whom contemporary events increasingly prove him right. Despite this, "we do our best not to think about it, to continue pulling the rope without looking back. We try, like Sisyphus, to deceive Hades, to convince others and ourselves that nothing happens, that we are invincible."
Oriol also transfers the myth to the theatrical fact: "Theatre, moreover, is to lift a stone and lift it again. And realize that, when you get to the point where you had to get to, what matters is the path and that you have to pick up the same stone again".
And on this occasion it leaves Carles Pedragosa alone in the face of danger, pushing this metaphorical stone that he pushes every day. The public has been able to grasp a kind of epiphany in the evolution of Pedragosa. As a pianist, he began by simply playing the keys of his instrument with mastery, but little by little he took center stage. In La mala diction, his presence was key, and in Europa Bull his facet as an all-terrain performer made the original pianist disappear.
Now Jordi Oriol gives it all the prominence in this piece where he looks for new poetics. Co-produced by Teatre Lliure, Indi Gest and Temporada Alta, Sísif fa non fa "is a kind of manifesto to claim art from a suffering", concludes Pedragosa.
