Desbarats By Llorenç Villalonga, with dramaturgy by Marc Rosich and directed by Rafel Duran

Between Valle Inclán’s ‘esperpento’ and the ‘teatro del absurdo’ (absurd theatre), Villalonga’s most cutting facet returns onstage. 

In the forties, during the Spanish civil postwar, Llorenç Villalonga wrote some short plays. He read a different one every Christmas Eve in the dinner parties organized by Donya Maria Coll i Roca in Can Ferrandell, in the street of Sant Jaume in Palma, where Villalonga and his wife were invited. He wrote them as a form of entertainment based on real events that took place in those same tables. He had no intention of publishing or performing them.  

In these pieces, Llorenç Villalonga transformed Can Ferrandell in Can Serralta and Donya Maria Coll in Donya Catalina, widowed marquis of Pax and best known as Mumare (my mother). She was surrounded by a series of sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, a priest known as Pare Florejat, the writer Minos, and his wife Amaranta; a group of frivolous people who turned their face away from the dominant reality the their country lived during that period. 

Twenty years later, his great friend Jaume Vidal Alcover decided to publish these texts, convincing the author of their literary value in spite of their ‘costumbrismo’, their resemblance with Valle Inclán’s ‘esperpento’, and their approach to the features of the ‘teatro del absurdo’. 

In 1965 these works came to light under the title Desbarats, which was proposed by Vidal Alcover himself. 

It is indeed within the family court that surrounded the widow of Pax and its representation onstage where the dramatist Marc Rossich has based his version, transforming the different pieces of Villalonga’s world to converge them in a single play. 

Produced by Teatre Principal de Palma