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Testament
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Grown in the bosom of a Christian culture, we have daily lived surrounded by religious symbols. Colm Toibin has focused on one of them: The Virgin Mary. He wants to show us that behind that icon there is a human being. Mary of Nazareth. A simple country woman whose only son is taken away by a divine decision she doesn’t understand and by a terrible human hatred that inflicts the greatest pain by nailing him to a cross. Our character, already in old age, relives moments of her life. Some are beautiful, others are terrible. She recreates them as if in her solitary and long nights, she draws the ghost from the past letting us discover the woman that she really is, and not the one society has made of her.
- Based on the work “The Testament of Mary” by Colm Tóibín
Direction: Agustí Villaronga
Translation: Enrique Juncosa
Scenography: Frederic Amat
Lighting: Josep María Civit
Costume: Mercè Paloma
Actress: Blanca Portillo
Executive Producer: Javier Pérez Santana
Production: Testament in co-production with the CDN and el festival del Grec 2015. With the collaboration of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Catalonia).
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“Tóibín, Villaronga and Blanca Portillo allow me to fully enter into the mind and heart of that pagan Mary who lives her last days in Ephesus, tormented by guilt, by the hatred unleashed against Jesus, trying to show her own truth”
El Pais, Marcos Ordoñez. July 23, 2014
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“(The piece) offers a human, warm and unholy point of view about events that have determined our time, interpreted by an actress who runs through the whole performance as if almost out of breath, like a professional athlete”.
El País. Javier Vallejo. 23 November 2014
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“(Blanca Portillo) grows, with barely a noticeable transition, to the pure glow of tears, blood, fear and stupor, with a vibration of classical Greek heroine.”
ABC. Juan Ignacio García Garzón. 21 November 2014
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“Portillo dodges the danger of every great interpreter, to become a copy, sometimes a caricature of themselves, and she does not forget to compose, to breathe her own breath into her caricature”
La Razón. Miguel Ayanz. 21 November 2014
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“Agustí Villaronga has marked a kind of precise choreography for the actress, while providing effective support in the scarce furniture -the table is an excellent invention- and in the beautiful costumes”.
Madridiario. Antonio Castro. 27 November 2014
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“The most surprising thing about Toíbín’s text is that process of humanization of a history that we all know: the virgin appears before the human spectator, hurt, broken, doubting … Maria could be any woman, any of you.”
Butaca en Amfiteatro. H.A, 29 November 2014
Blanca Portillo: Premio Max best actress 2015.
Nominated better theatre actress, Fotogramas de Plata.