There are many things to tell about the impressive premiere of Bohemian lights. It was the first time that Valle-Inclán’s work premiered at the Teatro Español. Amazing appearance, but very significant. Great production with twenty-five actors on stage, something that is no longer seen in the theater, to represent the author’s crowning work 100 years after its publication. And Eduardo Vasco’s first production at the helm of this theater redesigned by the Madrid City Council. The result: a montage of Bohemian lights like has not been seen in years.
The first thing is to highlight the work of Ginés García Millán, who was facing one of the great roles of Spanish theater and also did so after the captivating work that Juan Codina, Nosferatu of the stage, did six years ago. Every theater fan has been in conversations about what the Max of Bohemian lights. Conversations from which it is deduced that the Spaniard seeks in this character the personification of the author himself at the same time as the tenebrism of the character on whom he is inspired, the poet Alejandro Sawa. An imitation of golden traps with pants dripping with urine and a transposed verb. We imagine him to be gothic, traditional, even though he is of Andalusian origins, always dark, somewhat cynical and hustler.
However, García Millán has walked his own path and found another Max, much more luminous, smiling, tender, human and hurt. The first impression, as soon as the play begins, when Max, his lazarus dog and Don Latino de Hispalis (Antonio Molero) are going to leave Bastardillos Street in the Lavapiés neighborhood, is that García Millán does not fit the role, he has too many leftovers. the suits well. But the actor, without ever making his character grotesque, wins you over, discovering a new Max Estrella that is less dark and full of nuances that will have, apart from the final scene of his death, two revealing moments. The first comes in the sixth scene, with Max already imprisoned for telling a police officer: “Mr. Centurion, you will speak Greek in its four dialects!”
A scene in which this poet takes sides and brothers with a Catalan prisoner who is going to be shot. The scene, wisely performed in the theater pit, very close, is driven by an impressive acting work by José Luis Alcobendas, who composes a prisoner full of that truth before the scaffold. It is impressive how Alcobendas looks at Max knowing that he can contemplate him in privacy because he is blind. García Millán takes advantage of that space of shared intimacy and shows it all, the pain, the empathy… Tremendous scene.
The other is a scene, the ninth, in theory the most superfluous, spoiled many times in other productions, in which Max meets Rubén Darío (Ernesto Arias) at the Café Colón. García Millán collapses on a sofa, he has already been in prison, he has already gone to visit his friend the minister, now with the money that His Excellency has given him he can set foot in a café, something that is prohibited for his economy. Follow the curve and the possibility of living in artificial paradises. And lying there, García Millán fills the entire scene.
The old people, already close to seventy and beyond, always talk about the legendary role that José María Rodero played in 1984 in the production directed by Lluis Pasqual. Now, there is only the possibility of seeing that montage in a dark video of the demon, where almost nothing is seen. But the video sounds good and perhaps Millán, after more than twenty years of editing a more telluric and gothic Max, comes close to that well-remembered interpretation.
A privileged cast
But this premiere also has many other attractive elements. The first of them is a direction full of successes, something that Eduardo Vasco’s last production – a forgettable Goldoni – did not predict. It is true that Vasco has done everything and many things well. But, even so, the maturity and wisdom he has in this production is surprising. He demonstrates this from the beginning, where he turns the Spanish, thanks to a play on the curtains, into a “chamber theater”, a pure cinematographic cut that greatly enhances the first scenes.
The direction of actors is remarkable. There are many actors who are great. You can still see the seams of the composition, it is normal, they are the first functions. But directing actors begins at casting. You have to know a lot and know the actors to make such a wise choice. Thus, we will see a traditional Pisa-Bien (María Isasi), exaggerated but full of suburban life. We will see the aforementioned José Luis Alcobendas who, apart from the prisoner, embroiders the character of El Pollo, making the Pica Lagartos tavern tremble. We will see Jesús Barranco capable of playing characters as dissimilar as Don Gay or the Gravedigger.
And we will be amazed by Mariano Llorente who composes a minister of the government of an acting quality reserved for very few. But others are also in their place, Cesar Camino acting as the editor of The PopularJuan Carlos Talavera as Inspector Serafín el Bonito… The list is endless and includes several of the core schools of Spanish acting, such as Ángel el Ruso or Teatro de la Abadía, among others.
A point in this minister who has so often wanted to be related to Julio Burrel y Cuellar, a “letra-wounded” minister who held the Ministry of the Interior for a few months in 1917, a true oppressive tool in the reign of Alfonso XIII. Being true that the character in Valle-Inclán’s work has a literary past, it is very doubtful that this was the main influence, but rather the conservative Gabino Bugallal, Minister of the Interior when the author was precisely writing that scene and who applied the “law of escapes” as repressive medicine. That’s exactly what happens in Bohemian lights. It is incredible how Valle creates a theater of urgency, telling what is happening in those moments in the streets of Madrid and how that resonates today in the prisons of shame that Europe wants to establish, for example.
That scene is essential. They say that Valle’s theater at the time was unrepresentable, I don’t believe it. Rather, during the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship, no one dared to set it up. Then, with Franco, the work was banned by the censors precisely because of that scene. The heirs of Valle-Inclán never accepted, and they did well, that it was mounted with that suppression. It would premiere in Paris directed by Jean Vilar in 1964 and it would not be until 1970 that Tamayo would stage it professionally, with Carlos Lemos and Agustín Gonzáles as Don Latino.
The staging and dramaturgy is full of games and bets. Vasco begins with an epic, historical theater, where the political moment is reflected. In the first scene, not present in the original script, we see the entire cast singing a popular anarchist song (children of the town) that looks like a painting by the proletarian artist Otto Griebel. This epic aspect will be very present in the first scenes… with current gameplay included. In the Zaratustra bookstore, where the bookseller has a parrot that says “Long live Spain,” Vasco has a waiter from Acción Ciudadana, a paramilitary militia of strikebreaking volunteers, shout it, instead of the parrot, crossing the background of the scene with a flag of Spain. It is impossible for the wink not to resonate in this Madrid of street rosaries and cayetans.
The enigma of the last three scenes
As the play progresses, this epic theater disappears and an amalgamation of stylistic references emerges: the sainete, the soap opera, the guignol, the operetta or the small genre. Some work better than others. The orchestra of three musicians works, enlivening and giving rhythm and echo to the scenes. And the transitions work like a shot, some are prodigious.
Another success is the scene where Max, faced with a mass shooting in the streets of Madrid of the protesting citizens and a mother who screams to the sky while holding her dead son in her arms with a bullet in the skull, says “I’m chewing nettles.” Vasco has the wisdom to place the two protagonists on the proscenium stairs that lead to the stage. In the background we see what is happening on the street. In the first line, we witness a close-up of what happens to our characters in the face of this. The scene works perfectly and there Molero shows the true face of Don Latino. They are three minutes of pure acting that also speak of the height of this actor.
For an hour and a half the montage flies, the richness and forcefulness of Valle’s words sound, the actors command and the director leads. Superb costumes by Lorenzo Caprile and beautiful and wise lights by Miguel Ángel Camacho that follow that desire for Valle-Inclán where the drama resided in the light. Only some uses of the video clash. It is incredible how today stage projection has become the papier-mâché of contemporary staging.
But this work has an enigma. In scene twelve, Max dies frozen and lying at the door of his house after saying the great speech about the cat alley and the grotesque. There, canonically, the work should end with the death of the poet. However, Valle adds three other scenes. The wake of the poet, the funeral and the final scene, the one in which Don Latino drinks in the tavern all the money he has obtained by stealing the lottery ticket from his friend’s corpse. Scenes have always been gibberish for directors. The work always falls apart. There is no way to solve the riddle. Many have said that Bohemian lights It would be better without those three scenes. Perhaps it is that unresolved problem, that aporia, one of its mysteries.
Vasco doesn’t get it either. He tries it with a puppet game at the wake. He tries it in the cemetery with a meta-theatrical wink around the Hamlet of Shakespeare. And he tries it with a superb final scene in the Pica Lagartos tavern, perhaps the most bitter scene in Spanish theater. But that scene is the easy one. There the work returns with all the bitterness of a truncated ending, like that of Spain.
The production will be on display until December 15. He will hardly go on tour. We will have to make a pilgrimage to the Plaza de Santa Ana in Madrid. The reward is great, many neurons in the audience are activated. It smells like Spain, a word that, although it hurts, is not annoying to hear in this work. What’s more, a possibility is claimed to think about this country, to be able to improve it and not accept to continue living in the same swamp as a hundred years ago. Different decor, same direction and libretto.
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