“Dudo” is an individual play by “Teatro El Público” (The Audience Theater) based on an original French play. I do not know the original, but the creole version that got to us is quite plain in terms of signs for the stage. It is about a bored, upset, unsatisfied man, orbiting his wife. That man is played by Denys Ramos, an actor who recites a mere text on an appropriate stage. And no more than that. Oh! But the staging exceeds the simplicity of the text, the basic performance and it bursts the scene.
“Dudo” is another invention by “Teatro El Público”, a theater group of an aesthetic audacity that is unrestrained, directed by Carlos Díaz, who knows how to dare and creates a show out of nowhere. We might disagree with his stylistic and aesthetic tendency, but we cannot stop celebrating his creativity. Within his poetic, he always keeps an ace up his sleeve and when you are not expecting it: lo and behold! Everybody freeze!
Despite the deficiencies in the linguistic text and the basic performance, “Dudo” is a staging with a powerful immanence.
“Dudo”, as news of a scenic event, attracts the audience on the first hand because the actor is naked during most of the play. It is an absolute nude. No dissimulation.
Keeping the body in a total and sustained nude on stage requires a brilliantly designed gestures engineering, just like it is in “Dudo”. There are no psychological, moral or ethical components, not even dramaturgical ones, only aesthetic ones, and period.
“Dudo” is a resounding example of the hierarchy of a staging as a significant singular system. And we have to understand it just like that. It cannot be judged but in its own integrality. The elements of this staging could be analyzed separately, but that would not explain the work of the whole that is this play as a system, with its own complexity, which even exceeds the sum of its elements.
Separately, the also constituent systems of “Dudo” show a negative balance themselves. The performance, basic, does not generate, the regime in the acting action is OK, but too stable, it does not have any sustained notes on one side or the other; as for the linguistic text –which thanks to the expository conception of a show is not almighty and is dissolved-, “Dudo” does not have a lot to say; if we talk about the splendor of visualization, “Dudo” does not stand out with its single dominating angle –but enough to have the appropriate hierarchical organization ofthe elements of the play. Then, as a global spectacular text, “Dudo” is pleasantly bearable.
Carlos Díaz manages to insufflate synergy among the components of his staging. In “Dudo”, despite the insufficient linguistic text and the basic performance, he reaches a staging that is not boring, that grows in itself. And why? Maybe because of the expectations that emerge through the counterpoint in the successive
relationships between the materials on stage. There is a formalization of the show without any visual displays. The global composition, light at times, and charged with amazing shudders. We can even talk about a calculated role of the scenic space every time two characters of a foolish visitation, maybe carrying omens, appear in front of the actor and, without escorting him, they generate a certain affection, a linking oneiric progression that makes us, as spectators, disobey Brecht.
Then, with the actor, sharing the scenic frame, we have a Carlos Díaz girl and a boy whose reason to be there is unknown, but who provides strong impulse for the dramaturgical balance. They are not ghosts, but they are shown like visions. They adjust and offer disagreement at the same time. They create expectations, anxiety.
They are able to take the actor out of his scene. It seems like if, for a few seconds, they were going to shake his shoulders. They arrive. It is best to say they appear down the runway that is characteristic in the staging by Teatro El Público. That runway once more points out the theatrical ceremony while becoming a sudden door. Those two characters that do not need a definition enter fiction and position themselves sporadically.
Despite the fact that in the show the scenic tone of Carlos Díaz is clear, we have to say that in “Dudo” there is a dramaturgical director. The director of “Teatro El Público” is only the one inventing the staging. When there is a dramaturgical director, the dramaturgical responsibility is not only on Carlos Díaz. Fabián Suárez is the dramaturgical director and he writes in the programme a certain monologue:
“Babe, you will be my baby”. It was really pleasant to read that in the text Houellebecq is mentioned, one of the most captivating European novelists and whose plays I have always thought Carlos Díaz could use, I think it would perfectly fit both of them.
On the other hand, the graphic design of the programme was a little bit dispersed, it does not provide any concrete information for the audience in general. I can imagine the dramaturgical operation resulting from the adaptation, translation, creolization, incorporation, modification, etc. of the original by Marie Fourquet “Pour l`instant, je doute”, was made by the dramaturgical director himself, assumption I can make by reading the petit monologue that accompanies the programme, and even when it does not provide any concrete information, which is what a programme should do, it repeats the hesitating attitude of the character we will see on stage.
This being said, in “Dudo” decisions are shared, such as the direction the show was going to take, the ideological choices, the order of the textual materials, the staging itself.
The actor performs a strip-tease while he downloads a speech. The nude goes to one side and his words go to the other side. It is OK for me. The nude is out in the open, dramatically misplaced. The plastic fact of a beautiful body consumes any other scenic declaration.
An actor´s body might lose its efficiency as a human figure and become an entity or biomechanical form, responding to the orders of the scenic pretensions. In “Dudo” this happens in a remarkable way. Carlos Díaz´s expertise as the stager of a play has made the actor perform a series of body tasks with a tight economy of
We might also think it has been an unnecessary nude. The actor could have been drinking some coffee wearing his suit, just like he appears before his strip-tease.
Then, the dramatic text, the linguistic one, really poor, would have had an unnecessary sustained presence; and the performing effort would have had to be enormous while attempting a physical-dramatic transcription of a crazy existential tragedy like the one told in the literary text. But Carlos Díaz, who always knows which is the weak part in a play, never allowed himself to be tempted by anything else than the best offered thing, the supernatural, the mystery conceived in operations of a self-restrained composition, just like that, singular, without needing any borders.
The nude just happens on its own on stage; with a different wind they display different visible and invisible materials which take their own course. There is progression in the coming and going of the nude and the other substances composing the show. Progression that goes beyond the acts of the speech, speech that stops being a subject thanks to the act of global enunciation itself.
We have to analyze “Dudo” as a staging. Even when I did not applaud or stood up, because I did not see the show integrally, the next time I will add up, for the reasons I have already mentioned, to the unanimous applause the audience, maybe for other reasons, gives this clever staging by “Teatro El Público”.
Translation by Alberto Morales