Our journey heads to a new continent, as Argentina takes to the stage at the Lliure. In 2009, Claudio Tolcachir swept us off our feet with La omisión de la familia Coleman. This year, he’s back with a new piece that will make us question the role childhood plays in shaping our emotions.

This is the tale of a man who suffered sickly through childhood, was painfully rejected by the world and only found affection from his nursemaid.
For a man whose only love was hired, is paying for affection part of the normal rules of love?
This man is Walter, who has painstaking and laboriously fabricated his adult life. His is a past peppered with lies, the kind we paper over so the family will survive. Some of my other characters have been overwhelmed by denial, but these beings are different. They’re aware of their lies, victims of them. But they’re too frightened to upset the fragile edifice they’ve erected.
“Nobody can be so pure. There’s no such thing as unconditional love,” argues Walter as he tries to stop his wife from leaving him. Everyone loves for a reason. And this reason isn’t always love.
Love can be bogged down by our habits, convenience, exhaustion, guilt, the fear of solitude, lost hopes and the looming specter of death.
Walter gave his all for his family, and everyone here knows that not loving someone who has given you everything can be heartrending. And accepting lies and seeing ourselves stripped to our essence, even more so.
Perhaps Emilia, the nursemaid, embodies the undying fidelity of love: it’s part of her very being and will bring her to the verge of tragic sacrifice.
Or perhaps this is the story of childlike men who need nursemaids.
A tale of losers, shocked by and all too aware of their losses. A grating social structure that has left behind its very essence, yet nevertheless hangs on for dear life to the image it has constructed of itself.
Claudio Tolcachir