The fabulous acting work of Diego Lorca and Paco Merino, who create a powerful dramaturgy as powerful as the physical effort that endows BÚHO with a masterly compactness and a rhythm where the actions move cadenced, as if floating across the stage turned into a cave.

Hands up anyone who does not have someone close to them who has not suddenly or gradually lost their memory in a cruel and irreversible way: agonisingly painful, in any case, at whatever rate. Neurological studies speak of an epidemic in recent decades of ailments linked to this journey of no return that is a precipice to nothingness not only for those who suffer it in the flesh, but also, and in the form of vicarious helplessness, for those close to them who sink in the face of the evidence that someone who was once able to move forward, to fight and care for themselves is now a person who has become a person of no return, and care for himself is now a lifeless body, with his memories drowned in oblivion, vulnerable and dependent, and, as a result of this hecatomb, devoid of the identity that was the backbone of his existence and which is no more and no less than the some of the experiences of a whole journey placed one after the other: we are because we were and, without awareness of our past, it is not possible to sustain the present or build any future.

To convert this anguished loop into art, to sublimate this cesspit to the point of elevating it to the category of a shareable aesthetic product without falling into the tearful, the melodramatic or the most reprehensible pathetic fallacy is a merit of very few, and Titzina Teatro achieve it in full, the prestigious Catalan group that performed on Saturday the 13th of April on the stage of the Teatro Pedro Muñoz Seca in the second season of its spring season to present ‘Búho’, which has been touring Spain since last year, garnering enthusiastic reviews.

And this is no coincidence, because the result is a suggestive, original proposal, with an immersive vocation, now that immersive is so fashionable, but not in the most celebratory or mild sense of the term, but as an experience capable of trapping the spectator from the first minute of the production to push them without condescension into the depths of the blind, deaf and claustrophobic womb into which Pablo, a forensic anthropologist in his mid-forties after suffering a stroke, is dragged. We accompany Pablo in his particular investigation of ‘personal anthropology’, as he himself says at one point in the play, and we get to know him through his broken evocations in scenes of discontinuous linearity, as could not be otherwise, The fabulous acting work of Diego Lorca and Paco Merino, who create a powerful dramaturgy as powerful as the physical effort that endows Búho with a masterly compactness and a rhythm where the actions move cadenced, as if floating across the stage turned into a cave.

And as the credits of some films say, this solvent project would not have been possible without the technical direction of Albert Anglada and the effective costumes of Ona Grau. And, of course, without the simple but powerful set design (less is more) built by Albert Ventura and La Forja del Vallés based on Rocío Peña’s design, which we could not enjoy without Jordi Thomás’ successful lighting: everything is imbricated in a miraculous balance. Joan Rodón’s poignant projections enrich this scenography, renewing this resource, fashionable twenty years ago and which ended up breaking down due to exhaustion from so much use. But here it is by no means a mere addition, but part of an organic whole where the sound space devised by Jonatan Bernabeu and Tomomi Kubo is also a nuclear element, contributing so much to making the spectator feel enveloped in an unsettling, sticky nightmare from which, nevertheless, very few would want to wake up, such is the scorching magnetism of this luminous fall into the most sombre forgetfulness.