On 6 and 7 April, actor Luis Bermejo returns to the Teatro del Barrio (Calle Zurita, 20) to perform the play El minuto del payaso (The Clown’s Minute), embodying perplexity and an icon of gestural humour.
The play places the spectator on the day of the Festival de Homenaje al Circo, a benefit performance in which circus acts are performed on the stage of a theatre. There, a clown, an eternal traveller, waits his turn in the pit. They are going to make him come out onto the stage through a trap door. In the solitude of this wait, he makes himself up, concentrates, builds himself up. There are words, gestures and an enormous poetic charge. The clown understands himself. He evokes moments of his past, of a profession that is in profound change. He talks about his family, about the adventure of being a child born in the circus. But without drama, with laughter. He talks about the audience, he thinks about them, about how long his good body will last when he leaves here. Besides, a TV producer has come to ask him to go on TV to do his act: the same one every day, at one o’clock in the morning, in a late show. One minute.
El minuto del payaso is a one-man play by José Ramón Fernández (National Literature Award 2011 in the category of Dramatic Literature) directed by Fernando Soto, and is presented a few weeks after the actor won the Award for Best Supporting Actor in the 2023 edition of the Unión de Actores y Actrices awards for Los santos inocentes. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
