Això ja ho he viscut

I Have Been There Before is the third of JB Priestley's works that make up the so-called Time Plays, together with Dangerous corner  and the well-known Time and The Conways. In these three dramatic works, the English playwright masterfully explores the paradoxes and theories of John William Dunne about non-linear time, "memories of the future" and premonitory dreams. I have already experienced this , written in 1937, and as its title suggests, it deals with one of the strangest and most enigmatic sensations that can happen to us in our lives - and who has never experienced it?: the so-called " Déja Vu” , the feeling of having previously experienced a situation completely unknown to us until that moment. A sensation that shakes the linear, "chronological" temporality of the events we experience, that disturbs us because it calls into question the objectivity and the "past-present-future" logic, and that, despite the scientific explanations of the phenomenon, it can cause us anxiety and insecurity.

In JB Priestley's play, six characters in a rural setting, a small idyllic hotel far from the hustle and bustle of the city, are suddenly plunged into an unexpected upheaval when a guest, an eccentric-looking foreign man, he warns that this will be the scene of a horrible misfortune in the immediate future because he has already experienced it . From here, the events will be chained together in a spiral that constantly oscillates between reality and dream, the present and the announced future, science and malady, and finally, between the acceptance of misfortune and the desperate yearnings of the characters to change their future.

Sergi Belbel