Josep Maria Pou stars in Giant at the Teatro Bellas Artes in Madrid. The play places the writer Roald Dahl in 1983, after publishing an article with antisemitic statements that generated a public scandal. The drama narrates the tense encounter between Dahl and his publishers, pressured to retract. Pou describes the piece as a small precursor to cancel culture, exploring freedom of expression and public responsibility.
The dramatic engine: real-time rendering of conflicts ⚙️
The play functions as a powerful narrative conflict engine, where the script acts as source code that compiles emotions in real time. The stage direction designs the space architecture to isolate the characters, forcing a dialectical debugging of their positions. The actor, as the central processing unit, must execute a complex emotional algorithm: maintain the humanity of a character whose ideas are reprehensible, without falling into binary simplification.
User manual for being canceled in the 80s 📞
The function offers a historical tutorial on how to ruin a reputation before social media. Step 1: Write a controversial article in a physical newspaper, where the retraction takes 24 hours to print. Step 2: Wait for calls from your publishers, who instead of bots are people with landline phone numbers. Step 3: Defend your position face-to-face, without the option to block the interlocutor. An artisanal and slow process, where the crossfire was only rhetorical and the only thread that burned was everyone's patience.