Mark Fisher said that depression is often better understood from an impersonal rather than individual point of view. That’s why Núria Corominas, a member of Las Huecas and a resident artist at this year’s TNT, has chosen not to be alone as she stages a topic as sensitive as mental health and, more specifically, the depressing word. She is accompanied by a musical combo that is as explosive as it is daring. St. Frances and Daft Kant are half nostalgia and half euphoria, if such a mix is even possible, firmly shaken by the distorted energy and humour of a jester, the mask that Núria dons to talk about herself with a voice that is not her own.

All of this is hint enough that we shouldn’t expect a psychological or testimonial performance, but rather a musical fable that seeks to subvert depressive narrative through jest, comedy and satire. If you’re up for such an extreme combination, then you’re in the right place. This mix of clinical storytelling, psychoanalysis, Marxism and baroque poetry takes us on a hallucinatory trip that is as good as any antidepressant. A designer drug to mask the void of the self and loss of meaning, and to disguise the fact that most of today’s depressive states are the more the outcome of financial than mental factors.

And at the bottom of depression lies the same problem as with theatre, namely the impossibility of distinguishing between reality and delirium, between verisimilitude and truth. What is lived and what is feigned? What is innate and what is implanted? What is life? A frenzy?

Exploration of the boundaries of the self is a recurring theme at this year’s TNT, with more solo pieces than ever. If, as Quim Bigas reminds us, the solo is a format that flourishes in precarious times, this flourishing is accompanied by intense political questioning of the self and its distress in the world. Rosa Romero’s Soy un baile, Marta Izquierdo’s Flip and Mourn Baby Mourn by Katerina Andreou are other manifestations of the same desire to make a stand against paralysis.