George Kaplan is a myth, a legend, a rebel, a virus, a fiction, or rather, several fictions. George Kaplan appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959). He is the character that Cary Grant is mistaken for and because of whom he is chased by a crop duster plane in a wheat field. In reality, George Kaplan is a phantom character whose every detail is created, including moving his belongings from one hotel to another to make him disappear just at the moment when Cary Grant was about to find him. George Kaplan is also the title and leitmotif of the play written by Frédéric Sonntag that is being performed at the Sala Beckett in Barcelona. It is a political comedy that explores the relationship between power and fiction. G.K. It consists of three scenes with different characters, played by the same actors (a group of activists, a creative team and a shadow government), who face the same challenge: to create a fiction that has viral effects, in the first case, that can be used as an alibi by others, in the second, and that is a tool of control, in the third case. Playing with conspiracy theories, at a certain moment in the work, Kaplan not only appears in Hitchcock’s film but also in secret works by the Dadaists, Warhol or John Cage himself. In the three acts, George Kaplan is the key piece that highlights the role of fiction in the contemporary world, from Hollywood blockbusters, to political storytelling (or the art of narrating), through to advertising stories. In reality, they all fulfill the same function: to add us to a type of thinking, to identify us with certain ways of acting or to make us consume certain products.
