“For me, theater and life are the same,” he tells us over the phone. Alberto Isola. In five decades he only stopped doing theater when the theaters were closed due to the pandemic. “Because of the violence (of the internal war) it was very difficult, but it had never stopped.” He is approaching his 150th play and his return to the live theater, as an actor, was in April. “My hands were shaking. It hasn’t happened to me since I started.”
Now we see him in The Caretaker. After raising the door of a container with graffiti and the Donald Trump center, Ísola appears as Davies, an immigrant who lives on the street and seeks refuge in a house. where they have accumulated useless things. “I like stories of specific people that reflect the world.”
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— The caretaker is written 60 years ago, but it is very current. What is the most interesting for you?
— This theme of the character as a migrant, that is something that is not in the (original) work. I think that the great protagonists of the last decades all over the world are immigrants. The work speaks of that impossibility of communicating and of that ability to exploit each other, to deceive each other.
— And how did you build this character, who is also racist?
— It’s terrible because sometimes people who are racist are victims of racism too. It is something that we see a lot in our country, you see racism at all levels. When I was studying theater in Italy, a great French actor, Jacques Dufilho, came to the school. He gave a talk and had just done the caretaker and one of the things he said was about the image of this character as those street dogs, who are crazy, capable of seeking support, but attacking the one who gives it to them. Displaced people are also an image that you have everywhere, in the same country.
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— Do you think similar things happened when the pandemic broke out?
— That is still the great evil of our country. The fact that we are not capable of being a country, of assuming that image that Arguedas had, of being a country of all bloods. It is something that we have not done and it remains pending, unfortunately. Of course, that man (his character of his) has been reduced to the most essential, to his instincts. He has been turned into that and that seems to me a tragedy.
— As a director and actor, have you done what you wanted to do?
Yes, I have, and I’ve been lucky. My experience in the cinema has not been good, because I think there is a level of immediacy and I am very slow as an actor (smiles). Television itself was something else, between the cinema and the theater. In addition, the possibilities of fine-tuning the character are very great.
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— He even shared a script with those who entered.
— Television taught me a lot. On the one hand, having to solve in the moment and act with people who probably would not have met. There is a phrase that they told me at school, in London: ‘You are only as good as the people you work with’. You have to make sure that everyone can give their best work.
— What projects do you have?
— I directed La Cisura de Silvio by Víctor Falcón in Arequipa. This is the beginning of a plan that I have to start working with groups from the rest of the country. I really want to work, I’m going to go to Trujillo, to Cusco. Theater must be decentralized because it is a source of learning.
— In the absence of a plan from the Ministry, you bet on producing more and with self-managed projects, right?
— It has always been our story. There is a very hard and funny anecdote; When Luis Álvarez, our great actor, was asked one day what the State had to do in front of the theater, he said: “no jo…” (he laughs). It’s a terrible phrase because we continue to live in situations and every time something happens with the culture, one says: ‘it’s better not to get involved’ or ‘give it meaning’. But as long as that happens, well, we theatricalists manage the theater and take it forward at the point of push, of passion… that’s the truth.
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