Performing Classical Masculinities and Old Age: Josep Maria Pou in Alberto Iglesias and Mario Gas’s Sócrates. Juicio y muerte de un ciudadano

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of classic aging masculinities in Mario Gas and Alberto Iglesias’s play Sócrates. Juicio y muerte de un ciudadano (2015), featuring the leading performance of Catalan actor Josep Maria Pou. I will examine the physicality of Pou’s idiosyncratic bodily performance upon the stage in order to discuss how age is construed as a means to reinforce the Greek philosopher’s masculinity, as expressed in his use of rhetoric, his questioning of writing vs orality, and his final acceptance of death.

Keywords:

• Classical Masculinities
• Aging Masculinities
• Socrates
• Josep Maria Pou
• Mario Gas

Notes

1 Pou’s film and theatre career has also proven to be consistent in terms of the choice of strong, male characters regardless of their sexual orientation, as shown by his role of an old, gay teacher in Ventura Pons’s film Amic/Amat (1998) and of a gay magistrate in Guillem Clua’s play Justicia (2020).

2 Based upon Alcibiades’s testimony, Montaigne, in his essay “De la physionomie,” referred to Socrates as a “vile forme” (1037).

3 The overwhelming amount of worldwide works that have depicted or approached Socrates as a character or as subject matter makes it impossible to justify a sufficiently comprehensive selection within a footnote. For the sake of brevity, suffice to say that the oldest historical reference to Socrates appears in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds (423 B.C.), and that throughout more than twenty centuries since, he has appeared in works that range from eighteenth-century plays such as Voltaire’s La Mort de Socrate (1759) and the equally titled 1823 romantic poem by Lamartine, to Italian film in the hands of Roberto Rossellini and his Socrate (1971), or the futuristic American narrative by Paul Levinson, The Plot to Save Socrates (2006). In Spain, a number of notable productions predate Sócrates, Juicio y muerte de un ciudadano, the most significant being Adolfo Marsillach’s Sócrates, written by Enrique Llovet, which premiered in the Poliorama Theatre of Barcelona in 1972.

4 A noteworthy exception is Badenes’s (2014) approach to the old (or older) man figure in Federico García Lorca’s farces La zapatera prodigiosa (1930) and Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (1933).