Expected return of a great actor

Authors: Tirso, Lope, Calderón … Director and performer: Pedro Mari Sánchez. Corral de Comedias, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid). 20-VI-2021.

Looking only at the information provided in the hand program, it was not easy to get a clear idea of ​​what the nature of the show was. “The word of gold” and what was the main issue around which such disparate poems and fragments of works from the Golden Age were agglutinated a priori. What one could have very clear is that the function, in the format of a monologue, supposed the return of such a seasoned and reputed actor in classical theater as Pedro Mari Sánchez, who had barely been seen on stage once or twice in the last 15 years.

There is no doubt that there was certain morbid among some, including the one who writes here, to see first-hand if his “retirement” could perhaps be due to professional exhaustion and, as a consequence, to a loss of form and interpretive excellence. But nothing could be further from the truth: after seeing the performance, what one is not at all clear now is why such an actor has been away from the stage for so long. Simply, it is a real delight to see you and, above all, to hear him say the verse: what clarity in diction, what handling of the tempo, what precision in tone and what measurement in the intensity of the voice, what skill in adapting the verses rhythms to the semantic logic of the discourse. … In short, what a technical domain.