‘The Alibi’, by the young American playwright Christy Hall, is a dark work or, rather, a work full of shadows. The protagonist of it is a middle-aged woman, alone, who, when the curtain rises, maintains a tense face-to-face with a man. He pressures her so that the story that she has to tell, she guesses that before a court, she has coherence and lacks errors.
It is difficult to enter the work, conceived as a mysterious puzzle, as a psychological thriller that illuminates, as the minutes go by, the different moments of the story until it offers the viewer the complete story.
The work is fundamentally based on the work of its three performers and, especially, of its female protagonist, in this case María Castro, whose role demands a painfully extraordinary emotional intensity. The Galician actress, who has regularly traveled through comedy and another more ‘friendly’ repertoire, surrenders to her character and dives into this woman, Ana, without oxygen bottles, at full throttle. His is an abysmal performance and, at times, moving. Dani Muriel and Miguel Hermoso have the delicate task of supporting her in their respective -and hard- two steps with the actress and the three form a committed and fine-tuned interpretive triangle.
‘La alibi’ -whose original title is ‘To Quiet the Quiet’, something like ‘To silence the silence’- is a disturbing and suggestive piece; it is full of nooks and crannies that are not always clearly shown to the viewer. Bernabé Rico (David Mamet’s ‘executor’ in Spain) faces the direction for the first time, and he does it neatly and carefully, perhaps too much so, because this work surely requires a more daring and creative staging.
