Tiresias is a journey through the life of the myth of the Greek man/woman and soothsayer, Tiresias, based on fragments of classical tragedies and other stories in which his prophetic vision [which consisted of nothing other than knowing how to see the darkness of the present that no one wanted to see] confronts the power of tyrants and their interests: we will find ourselves before key moments of the Bacchae, Oedipus Rex, Antigone and Ulysses at the gates of Hades. Myth and tragedy, story and drama, merge in the text written jointly by Joan Espasa, Carlota Ferrer and me; and in which we encounter the great classical figures who requested—often in vain—Teiresias’s services as a soothsayer: Zeus, Hera, Narcissus, Echo, Agave, Creon, Oedipus, Ulysses, Antigone, Jocasta… and I say “in vain” because no one likes to hear the hard truths, especially if those truths shake the very structure of our existence and upset vested interests. Is there, then, anything more rabidly contemporary and sadly relevant than this eternal dilemma?
Teiresias not only addresses this classical dilemma—the blind pride of the seer in eternal conflict with the clairvoyance of the blind man—but also places a marginal character from classical tragedy—this soothsayer—center stage to question us about the meaning of pain in our lives; and here, pain is not the fruit of sin and, therefore, a punishment deserving of the Judeo-Christian condition; but rather an invitation to delve into the mistakes of our lives and their potentially dire consequences. “Before thinking about repairing the world,” Tiresias tells his daughter Manto at one point in the performance, “we should learn to accept ourselves. Otherwise, we would only be contributing to the continued growth of suffering around us. We must learn to rebuild ourselves.” But these would only be words if it weren’t for Carlota Ferrer [along with the performers and creative team] who cements the edifice of her creation—with a heartfelt touch—at the crossroads where the text becomes a transformative image, a subtle song, a celebratory dance, or a funeral lament.
When the characters discover their mistakes, it’s already too late… but if it’s also too late for all of us, the audience, at least we can enjoy that twilight beauty that pain and the passage of time sometimes leave behind and… why not?, tell ourselves that it’s never too late to shed our skin and be a little more Tiresias.