Up to the eyebrows with junk, dragging an ages-old trade from town to town and from square to square, putting up and taking down temporary tableaus every day, gradually piling up the miles on a journey to nowhere. Monte Isla, which at TNT 2022 took on the challenge of fitting a whole landscape into a theatre, is now cramming as much as it can into a van and dedicating its latest creation to the figure of the puppeteer, an obstinate creator of fiction in a world that doesn’t need it, selling smoke and mirrors in times of air conditioning, an invisible body shouldering the weight of both precarious living and tradition.

So buckle up and get ready for one of the most faecal spectacles that you’ll have seen lately Un cos sense talent is a feast of indigestible comedy and cruel metaphors about how artists get by as they vomit confetti and dance in a minefield. Bellyache and defecation act as masters of ceremonies in a game of theatre inside a theatre, where the hamster wheel that so many artists forcibly tread is poetically equated to a stomach cramp. Something is rotten in Denmark.

We might think that Monte Isla, with its concern for the creation of memorable theatrical images (which already appeared in their Trilogia del Paisatge), is taking the opposite path to that of El Conde de Torrefiel, whose La Luz de un Lago is all about sobriety and the rejection of visuals in a world saturated with images. In fact, Un cos sense talent is based on the same diagnosis and visual explosion that is more reminiscent of Monty Python’s over-fed diners. Beneath the cloak of theatre and entertainment lurks the ghost of burnout. It’s a kind of magic.

With this reflection on the existential conditions of the artist and the tacit pact with the audience that keeps them in the shadows of anonymity, Monte Isla voices a concern that is also echoed by pieces as different as Núria Corominas’ Un xai ha creuat el desert, Alberto Cortés’ Analphabet and Mucha mierda by Elena Carvajal.