Seppuku. El Funeral De Mishima

Seppuku. El Funeral de Mishima. O el placer de morir. Genre: Contemporary theatre. Not recommended for under-18s. Running time: 2h without interval. In Japanese and Spanish, surtitled in French.

An obsessive reader of The Golden Pavilion, Angélica Liddell places herself under the patronage of Mishima and his legendary death.

With Seppuku, Angélica Liddell brings to a close her Trilogy of Funerals: death, the stubborn horizon of her theatre, becomes the promise of a dazzling beauty. Before the flesh decays, is it still possible to attain grace?

On 25 November 1970, at the headquarters of the Tokyo Self-Defence Forces, Yukio Mishima carried out, in the company of his most loyal followers, the ritual disembowelment he had long dreamed of, written and even filmed.

An impossible, scandalous act – hara-kiri or seppuku – which Marguerite Yourcenar regarded as the deed of a hero and his ultimate masterpiece.

An obsessive reader of The Golden Pavilion, Angélica Liddell places herself under the patronage of this enigmatic figure and his legendary death.

For who better than Mishima to express this visceral need to bring together, in a single impulse, the absolute pursuit of aesthetic shock and the inextinguishable desire for a heroic death?

With Seppuku, Liddell closes her Trilogy of Funerals, begun with Vudú (3318) Blixen and Dämon. El funeral de Bergman. Death, the stubborn horizon of her theatre, becomes here the promise of a dazzling beauty, of a ravaging poetic violence.

Priestess or thaumaturge, Liddell invokes on stage the figures of the beyond: her poetry mingles with the dazzling flashes of Mishima, with the laments of the ghosts of the Noh play Hagoromo, and opens a passage between the living and the dead.

Before the flesh decays, is it still possible to attain grace? To make theatre a conflagration, to ask the setting sun for a little more colour?

A twilight work, Seppuku demands a beauty that 'would make the gods weep' and makes ritual suicide the ultimate metaphor for 'sacrifice as a