Rafael Spregelburd makes his debut as a playwright on the Corrientes Street commercial circuit

One of the most interesting names in contemporary Argentine theater is that of playwright, actor and director Rafael Spregelburd, who on 7 September arrives with one of his works in via Corrientes.

Spregelburd, who already has a long tour of the official circuit as well as the independent one, now it also lands in the commercialwith Hell, with only four performances on Wednesday in September at the Astros. The famed director shares a cast this time with Violeta Urtizberea, Andrea Garrote and Guido Losantos.

As on other occasions, Spregelburd writes, directs and acts. In this case, Hell is a text commissioned from Rafael Spregelburd by the Vorarlberger Landestheater Bregenz of Austria to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of the painter Hieronymus Bosch, author of the garden of delights.

Inspired by the eternal wonder of that colorful, playful, moral, prophetic paintingthe author draws a complex labyrinth on sin, guilt, virtue and torture of the soul.

In this way, a kind of heptalogy in seven short asymmetrical ridges that push the expressive possibilities of those on stage to the limit, in this case Garrote, Urtizberea and Losantos together with Spregelburd himself.

Starting from this starting point, the work is about a tourist columnist who, after a drunken trip to Santiago de Chile, wakes up a little confused. Two catechists get him out of bed to bring him urgent news: the Vatican abolished hell.

Now that the specific place of the condemnation of souls no longer exists as a place in itself, but becomes only a word, it turns out that hell is everywhere. It is in the language. The only way to escape hell is with seven keys by which you must learn the seven virtues: faith, hope, charity, temperance, justice, prudence and strength.

For the author, as hell was organized in circles, so was virtue: it seems impossible to exercise the seven virtues at the same time because they are decentralized and incompatible, they are poorly defined and evil inexorably calls harm.

Like this, Hell It is a kind of moral fable within anotherwhich is itself the plagiarism of a vain writer who has copied a topic from an idle literary supplement based on beach genres.

And, in that swarm, now everyone will have to pay for the simulacrum: the author, his lawyer, his critics, his victims, his secondary characters, his angels and his tormentors. And no one is stupid enough to appear in his stories with his real name.

According to Spregelburd, Hell it allows you to work on certain obsessions once again permanent. “The world as a creation of language, chaos, catastrophe, guilt, fraud,” she says.

“Faced with the proposal to reinterpret the symbolic hell of Bosch’s painting, I have decided to bring hell as close as possible to our real experience“he explains.” We are a country crossed by an infernal trauma, that of the dictatorshipand we’re still trying to figure out how to chat outside of that taboo. “

And he adds: “I’m accompanied by a dream team of crazy comedians to paint the darkest hours of our hell with unpleasant humor Common. The Astros Theater embarks on the enormous adventure of framing this ambitious project with grandeur “.

With live music by Nicolás Varchausky (which moves between electroacoustics and performance), the costumes by Lara Sol Gaudini and a space designed by Santiago Badillo (who intervened for the occasion from the photography of Marcos López), the work has the production by Carolina Stegmayer for El Patrón Vázquez, the company founded by Garrote and Spregelburd in 1994.

The functions of Hell it will be there Wednesday 7, 14, 21 and 28 September at 20:30 at the Astros (Corrientes 746) and tickets can be purchased online through EntradaUno or at the theater box office.