Andrés Lima has done it again and has managed to emerge victorious from one of the greatest challenges of his theatrical career: bringing to the stage nothing more and nothing less than the Spanish Civil War. A task for which the style for which he is already known has been entrusted. A style that is a pure mixture of thuggishness and anarchy where all theatrical genres can coexist and a chotis can be combined with the Spanish Bombs from The Clash and fit perfectly. 1936the work that has just premiered at the National Dramatic Center, is a journey through our history, through the horror of a fratricidal war. And at the same time it is a political, anti-fascist and republican position taken, in the face of memory and the present.
The play begins hard, with a furious Queipo de Llano (played by Morris) on Radio Sevilla on July 18. The positioning of the assembly is clear from the beginning. The repression and violence was not the same on both sides. In 1936, the work says, left-wing violence killed 800 people in the southwest; the fascist, 25,000. Throughout the work, contrasted data will be given in the existing historiography and contextualized with the talks that the team has had with historians such as Julián Casanova, Paul Preston or Ángel Viñas.
From there the proposal will not stop in the 28 scenes that make up the four hours that the work lasts. The stage space, with the audience on four sides, will become the war board where the contest is chronologically crossed. Lima knows that it faces an unfathomable conflict. And it manages not to capsize for several reasons.
The first is a tremendous capacity for distillation thanks also to the writing of Lima himself, Juan Cavestany, Juan Mayorga and Albert Boronat. It is incredible how the Battle of the Ebro or the resistance of Madrid is told in just 15 minutes. And no less important is the ability to recreate episodes in which much historical and graphic documentation is missing, such as the Badajoz massacre or the massacre on the road from Malaga to Almería. Episodes covered up until very recently and that current historians of the stature of Pío Moa still continue to deny.
The second is the ability to combine planes of emotion. He does it through the music and songs of the time. The four mule drivers, The international, Face to the sun or the aforementioned song that the British punk group The Clash dedicated to the International Brigades, are entering and joining together in a device that thus manages to escape from the discursive. A danger that he also avoids with different proposals, from the most horrible farce to simulating a bombing of the theater in which part of the audience participates by crouching on the stage next to the actors.
And the third is the ability to raise mirrors with current events, bridges that unite different planes of reality, but drawn from the stage and not from what is said. The great example of this is the Madrid youth choir. A dozen young people will be in space throughout the entire time. They will be young fascists, militiamen, people, soldiers who kill themselves, they will sing, they will be crushed on the Malaga highway, shot in Badajoz, bombed in Madrid, they will be peasants collectivizing land, death squads spreading terror. And we will see them, there, in street clothes, young and totally immersed in the chaos and horror of some furious years, in theory distant for them. The viewer looks at them and knows that they are also watching, drinking and digesting everything that happens on stage.
Another example of this ability to build bridges with the present is the success of giving relevance to the voice of women. Lima will pay tribute to the generation of Las Sin Sombrero, Rosa the Dynamite will appear, the women’s militias in Catalonia will appear, and Pilar Duaygües’ diary will be, along with the speeches of Azaña and Franco, one of the threads that will run through the work (diary that this young woman from Barcelona began writing at the beginning of the war at the age of fifteen and was published in 2017).
It will be addressed how the Republic also represented a feminist revolution that sought the liberation of women from the slavery of marriage and how that raised brutal opposition from the rebels. Something that, without making it explicit, is confronted with the current moment where the resurgence of the extreme right no longer makes it obvious that it is also a reaction to the latest feminist revolution.
There is a moment where that desire to give voice and space to women becomes flesh on stage. María Morales plays Azaña. At one point Morales takes off the hero’s clothes and becomes Clara Campoamor. From there, Morales will no longer need to characterize himself as Azaña in the other speeches he will say about him. Pure stage metaphor that can only be sustained in the sensible and wise diction of this actress.
It is worth highlighting the costumes and set design by Beatriz San Juan. Each warrior of each soldier, from Queipo de Llano, from General Mola, from Rojo, from Miaja or from Franco himself, are perfect. The weapons are accurate, even the grenade that explodes in Rosario la Dynamitera’s hands is a good replica of the FAI bombs used by the anarchist militias. All of this work gives a documentary seriousness to the montage that, together with the characterization of Cécile Kretschmar, makes it so that when, for example, Guillermo Toledo appears as General Miaja on stage, it is nailed.
Plus, then there’s the acting work. Pure and chameleon-like juggling where everyone shines. Blanca Portillo is impressive as Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Juan Vinuesa finds a Franco halfway between a joke and a nightmare. Alba Flores is telluric and earthly like La Pasionaria. And José Calvo Sotelo’s Interpretation of Paco Ochoa is from another world. His diction, his bearing, his phrasing… It’s something spectacular to see.
Ochoa’s scene comes in one of the core parts of the montage that serves to take a look at the background of the war: the creation of the Falange, the plot of industrialists and the oligarchy from the very pronouncement of the Republic, etc. A flashback which is a true dramaturgical virguería that should be studied now in theater schools. In that flashbackIn addition, we will see the most Brechtian and ideological part of the piece in which, apart from the background of the war, the montage allows an approach to more transversal themes. Above all, two: violence and hunger. There, Natalia Hernández, an essential actress in the production, speaks to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. Everyone sings that song of the time, No bread. The scene works like a shot, the representation rests, reflection enters and although there are some excessive points, such as comparing the hunger of ’36 with the current “food insecurity”, it is one of the most powerful moments of the work.
The third act will be the defeat of the Republican army: the last attempt, the Battle of the Ebro that saved Valencia for a few months, but which turned into a bloodbath with more than 30,000 dead. Goya will appear, always Goya, and Azaña’s words will be heard in that famous speech two years after the war in which he said that later generations will have to think “about the dead and will have to listen to their lesson.”
The work has an ending that, without spoiling it, can be said to be a clear tribute to Emilio Silva and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. An incredible theatrical ending, where the dead and the living come together in the present under a large ten-meter-long flag of the Republic. A scene of great emotion that is full of unfulfilled hope.
1936 It stands as a theatrically solid and historically relevant proposal, a vision from the left on the Civil War that does not want to please everyone and that brings together the profound reviews that historians have made of the conflict in the last twenty years. This montage is the one that Franco and the Franco regime would never have wanted the Spanish to see. The applause was generous, enraged with what man is capable of doing, with the injustices that others have suffered, an applause full of history and shock. At the exit I could see a young man who looked at the ground and repeated to himself: “Long live the Republic, long live April 14.”
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