Carmen Laforet always lived attached to a suitcase, to that moment on a station platform where expectations open and one can look to the future. Heading to Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, the United States, Italy, Laforet was always escaping from Spain, from a country where it was impossible for him to breathe. Thus begins his first novel with which he would win the first edition of the Nadal Prize in 1944, Nothing, but with Andrea, his 18-year-old alter ego, arriving at Barcelona’s France Station just a few months after the end of the Civil War. But the play that premieres this Friday at the National Dramatic Center (CDN), the first theatrical version of this modern classic, begins differently, with a brawl.
This production, directed by Beatriz Jaén and adapted by Joan Yago, begins in the famous apartment on Aribau Street, with the drama already in full swing. Andrea’s uncle, Juan, screams like a man possessed. The unbreathable atmosphere of the family broken by the war, full of Catholicism and a vicious and emasculating machismo, prevails. Thus begins this theatrical adaptation that, at the same time as collecting the profusion of action and intrigue that Laforet deploys in that hungry and defeated Barcelona, has tried to maintain what the revolutionary power of this novel lies in: the disruptive gaze of a woman on society. and about his own identity.
Nothing It is one of the most read books in Spanish literature, both in Spain and abroad. The readings that have been made of it have varied with society. In the 1940s, social and political reading predominated. In the first years of democracy it was claimed by an entire generation of women writers; “the rare ones” as Carmen Martin Gaite would say. Today Laforet’s complex personality and prose are illuminated with new lights. Topics such as genius in literature, conciliation, women, feminism or sisterhood have changed many degrees in recent decades, changes that provoke a new look at this foundational novel of so many things and at the figure of this author, so refractory to success and ambition, and so personalistic in her vision of the world.
“When I read the novel when I was 16, I didn’t stop to reflect on many of the scenes and behaviors described there. And when I read it again now, now at my age, I suddenly say: how brave Carmen Laforet is, how precise, how raw, what beauty at the same time in her descriptions. And how it portrays sexist violence. Without any type of modesty and without any type of fear, it portrays some very violent scenes, a brutal sexist violence that I have not wanted to hide on stage and I am not going to hide it,” says director Beatriz Jaén, opening that endless melon of the new force of Laforet in the present.
The second aspect that the director wants to highlight is the revolutionary fact in her time that Nothing “It is not a novel about a girl who meets boys but a novel about a girl who meets a girl, and that girl is her great friend and her great support and there is a lot of sisterhood there, which is exactly what we are also talking about so much now,” he explains. Jaen. The director highlights one of the last scenes of the novel, where Andrea reconciles with her friend Ena: “It is almost a declaration of love and a total vindication that together we are stronger, of sisterhood as something revolutionary,” she concludes.
Joan Yago, in turn, confesses to this newspaper that the temptation to turn Laforet into a flag crossed his mind at some point. “This could be a lesbian pride story, but it’s not exactly one. And it still is and it is beautiful and it is legitimate that there is a political lesbianism that recognizes in Nothing a reference. A reference for the simple fact of presenting a character who, whether or not he feels romantic love towards his friend, the fact is that he puts her at the center of his existence, but we did not want to decant it and turn Laforet into a kind of sculpture of marble of lesbianism because it is not,” explains Yago.
“The novel has a lot to do with this awakening of emotion, with the famous coming of age and the loss of innocence, but expressed in its most complex way, accepting the complexity that we do not understand what happens to us, we feel things that we do not know if it is okay to feel. All this is in a brutal way in the novel and I think it is one of the things that will most interest today’s audiences who see the work,” adds the director.
Recover the fundamental authors
This premiere is part of the CDN’s programming line directed by Alfredo Sanzol to recover and give space on stage to the voices of fundamental 20th century authors. Thus, it premiered last season Frankenstein’s mother by Almudena Grandes and was also staged That’s how we talkedmontage around Carmen Martín Gaite from the La Tristura company. On this occasion, a tandem has been called that has already provided one of the successes to this center with a work that has just finished its tour these days at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Brief history of the Spanish railwaya fun and acid satire that, through the history of the train in Spain, forms a grotesque mirror of the birth of capitalism and the disastrous legacy of the Bourbons from Ferdinand VI to the king emeritus.
But on this occasion the humor of Joan Yago, well demonstrated in his company La Calòrica, will not be present. “At first I was scared, for me reading Nothing It was very introductory, I was living in the Balearic Islands at the time and I already wanted to move to Barcelona, reading it gave me the strength to make that decision,” says the author, who confesses that they wanted to make a conversational adaptation. “If 25 theater adaptations of the novel had already been made, we could have considered a more intrusive dramaturgy, but it is the first. We have tried to transfer the experience you have as a reader to the dimensions of the stage, always trying to ensure that our handling of the text is as minimally noticeable as possible,” explains Yago about the adaptation.
Yago says that at the beginning they saw two possible options, a monologue from Andrea for two hours, the novel is all told through the perception of the protagonist; or a Tennessee Williams-style work where “the violence of family life prevails, of these characters who live locked in a house in ruins and scream.” “We quickly came to the conclusion that we did not have to place ourselves at any of these extremes because both would imply undoing one of Carmen Laforet’s great proposals: the combination of life with the reflection of life,” he reasons.
The adaptation is risky and intelligent, with the narrating voice of the protagonist present, but also including the scenes at the university, the excursions to the beach, Guixols’ study with his new bourgeois intellectuals, Andrea’s meditative walks through the Gothic quarter , or the nighttime raid on Chinatown. For the staging of that old family house, director Beatriz Jaén has started from a phrase from the novel “in which Andrea says that she found a devilish atmosphere of furniture and people,” she explains. “This is what the spectator will find when he arrives at the theater, and it is from that space where the others emerge, through a game with the stage box that I have left naked. It is in that space where with a game with the comb of the theater, its galleries and the lights, Barcelona will appear, the shadows of the Gothic, the air of the beach and all that outside world that is destroying the suffocating universe of the family apartment.
The production features Julia Roch as Andrea and Julia Rubio as Ena. Furthermore, one of the greats, Amparo Pamplona, plays that very particular character, Andrea’s grandmother. “We have made a very choral work focused on the characters, one of the strengths of the novel is in the description of the characters, the portrait it makes of them that is at the same time a portrait of a very specific Spain, of characters crossed to the root due to the conflict of the Civil War,” says the director.
For the premiere, two of Laforet’s children will attend. Cristina Cerezales Laforet, painter and writer who recounted in white music the last years of his mother, and the writer Agustín Cerezales Laforet. The director reveals that she asked Cristina Cerezales for a painting to set a scene from the play that takes place in Guixols’ studio and she, “with all the generosity in the world,” has donated one to them from Manuel Cerezales, her recently deceased brother.
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