RELÍQUIA

I would have appreciated a note’. Thus begins Relíquia [Relic], the autobiographical story by the young writer Pol Guasch, one of the most celebrated storytellers and representatives of his generation, who recounts his father’s suicide, his subsequent grief and the life that remains in himself and his family.

Some say that at times it’s difficult to forget. But Guasch shows us that the most difficult thing is remembering. Relíquia is an intimate, profound exercise in reconstructing memory through words and literature. With the help of his fellow author
and stage director Pablo Messiez, the novel is transformed into a show.


How is death represented? Is it possible to summon absence on a stage? Which theatre language can explain what isn’t seen, what has vanished? Perhaps the real distinction is not the one that differentiates between reality and fiction but the one that separates life from death. And that’s what this piece is about; it is a text, the text of Relíquia [Relic], which now takes on the dimension of the body, of the word uttered and the performers’ gaze: Can disappearance be enacted? These are the questions that weave the creative worlds of Pablo Messiez and mine, who have joined forces in this project with the goal of creating a play that does not dissolve literature, a piece in which literature does not dissolve the power of theatre.
_Pol Guasch