Muñequita rubia

Dear reader: this book is the program for the premiere in Paris of a play entitled Little Blonde Doll, by Pierre-Michel Wals. Contains the text of the play, an introductory note from the director of the Teatro de las Artes, the list of characters and actors, some costume sketches and some advertisements. The play stages the reunion of five friends who in their youth set up the musical group the Peter-Pans and had a first success with a song entitled "Muñequita rubia". Now, twenty years after that, they meet again. The peculiarity of the meeting is that three of them are still alive, they have grown old and are about to turn forty, but the other two, who passed away a long time ago, present themselves as twenty-something ghosts stuck in the past. The crossing of one and the other leads to a melancholic, funny and disillusioned reflection on life, desires and the passage of time, in a territory between dreams and reality. Dear reader: everything contained in this book that you hold in your hands is a literary game, a whim created by Patrick Modiano and his accomplice, the exquisite illustrator Pierre Le-Tan. Everything is fictitious, starting with the supposed author of the piece. All? Well, the book includes some winks, because among the actors there are some who did exist, like Modiano's own mother, who was indeed a theater and film actress. It is part of the charm of this sophisticated pirouette that is presented as entertainment, but is much more than that: a prodigious exercise in literary and visual juggling that, under its apparent lightness, explores themes such as the corrosion of time, the abandonment of ideals of youth and the assumption of the disappointment that comes with growing up.