When a good part of the body barely functions, the functional part takes on greater importance. For Telmo Irureta, who has very reduced mobility in his arms and legs due to childhood cerebral palsy, thought, words, affections and sex are a substitute for freedom of movement. “Telmo disarms me when he tells me: “I can’t even cover my face when I cry,” explains Aitziber Garmendia, his co-star in Sexpiertos, the comedy that they are performing these days in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and next week in Madrid, at the Teatro Fernán Gómez. Kepa Errasti and Irureta himself composed it for four hands: it is a saying, because he suffers from dystonic contracture of his fingers and has a deviated wrist.
After today’s performance, Irureta and Garmendia opened a discussion, to which all of us stayed, except for one spectator. I have rarely seen a talk of this type arouse such widespread interest. Irureta, who won the 2023 Goya for Best New Actor for playing the paralyzed young man who hires the services of a sexual assistant in the film Spring consecration, She then sparked a heated controversy by revealing that on occasions she had resorted to prostitution, the use of which she defended in statements. “What I said is very scary, because it is understood that whoever prostitutes suffers exploitation. But in all jobs there is abuse. Everything got mixed up and they called me a woman rapist. ‘But what women, if I’m a sissy?’, I responded then. And they were silent. I was pleased, because I know that his speech was a little lame than mine,” Irureta responds to a viewer’s question.
In Sexpiertos, Nico (a character who has the same uninhibited and politically incorrect sense of humor with which Irureta ended up winning over the audience during the post-performance dialogue) stays locked in an elevator with Ana, a 38-year-old single woman who is going through an existential crisis. Within this unique, intimate situation conducive to a conversation in which both soon express themselves open-heartedly, the authors of the comedy open an endless number of metatheatrical windows: three years after that claustrophobic episode, Nico and Ana dramatize it, but Every now and then they interrupt their performance to answer phone calls, to tell the audience what has happened to their lives or to ask them a rhetorical question. With agile direction by Mireia Gabilondo, Sexpiertos It is court theater, without a fourth wall, oral, naked and synthetic, like the dialogues of Franz Joham with Gustavo Re or like those of Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt, which so impressed Bertolt Brecht.
The function, in short, is a dialogue of clowns in which Garmendia leads the speech and his partner He comments, adds and finishes head-on the jokes that she serves him. The sex they both talk about is, in reality, the cover for their failed search for a deep, unsatisfied affection. The text, casual, direct, humorous and sharp, has a serious undertone. The actress is also the puppeteer who carries her partner’s wheelchair from here to there, who places him in the spotlight, who puts the phone to his ear… Garmendia, whose character acts motivated by successive emergencies, puts soul, heart and life in his performance and illuminates everything with radiant energy and attitude.
‘Sexpiertos‘. Text: Kepa Errasti and Telmo Irureta. Director: Mireia Gabilondo. The Gran Canarian palms. Cuyás Theater. May 31 and June 1. Madrid. Fernán Gómez Theater, from June 4 to 9.
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