The project

A Car is a dialogue between a performing arts creator and a Renault 21. It is a meeting between two old friends in hard times. The R21 represents the lost paradise of the creator's childhood but, at the same time, it is an icon of the economic growth of the late eighties and early nineties and a clear example that the private combustion vehicle has shaped the social and economic imagination since the mid-20th century.

Credits

With: Pau Masaló Llorà, Xavier Masaló and Mª Àngels Llorà
Director: Pau Masaló Llorà
Dramaturgy: Ferran Dordal Lalueza and Pau Masaló Llorà
Set and light design: Marc Salicrú
Sound design: Adrià Girona
Costumes design: Laila Rosato
Production: Helena Font
Set design assitant: Judith Vila Pàmies
R21 voice: Jordi Oriol
A co-production by Contenidos Superfluos and Centre de les Arts Lliures de la Fundació Joan Brossa
With the support of El Canal, centre de creació d’arts escèniques.
Thanks to: Luis López Carrasco, Mariano Soto, ATRESBANDES, Albert Pérez, Martín Torres, Melcior Casals, Magí Coma, Aleix Melé, Irena Visa, Clàudia Robert, Ivan Cascon, Sammy Metcalfe and La Brutal.
Winning project of the Hermann Bonnín call of the Fundació Joan Brossa — Centre de les Arts Lliures, Barcelona Crea 2023 grant, and OSIC research grant.

Download the dossier.

Press

With Ferran Dordal, Masaló has created a complex dramaturgy with a simple mechanism. An impeccable red thread between reflection and emotion. […] As was already the case in Ciutat dormitori, there is always a poetic element in his projects, so deeply rooted in documentary material. An element that unsettles the facts in order to venture into metaphysics.
Juan Carlos Olivares – La Vanguardia

Masaló offers a tender, yet not nostalgic, at those years of euphoria, accompanied by his parents, who are perfect playing themselves on stage.
Magí Camps – La Vanguardia

It is not merely an exercise in nostalgia, but a life lesson that, at forty-two, Pau explains with crystal-clear lucidity: we have not managed to sustain the same levels of happiness that existed during that “childhood paradise” which encompassed much of the 1980s and 1990s.
Martí Figueras – Núvol

A rich stage reflection revolving around a Renault 21, a family vehicle that transports us to the distant paradise of childhood. Un cotxe is a simple and tender act of insubmission against the mantra of Thatcherism: “is there no alternative?”
Manuel Pérez i Muñoz – Entreacte

One of the qualities of this remarkable proposal lies in its intergenerational ability to build bridges between a present that often finds itself subjected to a disenchanted gaze and a past that is frequently regarded as the imaginary account of what seemed possible for a brief moment, only to end up becoming a more or less resigned impossibility. […] Masaló achieves this with talent, sensitivity, insight, and a sense of humor, consistently relying on the stage complicity of parents who, without biting into any Proustian madeleine, also know how to go in search of lost time… and bring it back.
Ramon Oliver – Recomana.cat

Masaló’s happiness lies in looking back and seeing that his parents are still there. Yet this, in turn, makes him look toward the future with anguish and bitterness, finding nothing in it that brings him comfort. That American dream of self-making is a slogan; that idea of education as a social elevator should be taken in for its roadworthiness test, because for decades failures have been piling up like the number of deaths on the highways.
Jordi Bordes – Recomana.cat

Un cotxe is a generational show —of those born in the 1980s— that I would say delights its contemporaries and holds up a mirror to those who were young in training back then and who now walk the tightrope of their seventies, like Pau Masaló’s own parents. In a gesture as moving as it is risky, he places them on stage as two supporting performers who, within the Conver13 production —under the voice from beyond the grave of Felipe González, yes, indeed, the same PSOE myth who now finds it more legitimate to brush aside the far right of Vox than to come to terms with the left of EH Bildu— transport the audience to one of those campsite stays and to a dinner under the stars, complete with the promise of a future dream which, so as not to break the spell, I will not reveal.
Andreu Sotorra – Recomana.cat