Andrés Lima returns to the civil war in ‘1936’: “It has been told wrong”

It’s not hard to imagine what a show titled ‘1936‘ (referring, of course, to the year our civil war began) directed by Andres Lima. The director, author of the text along with Albert Boronat, Juan Cavestany and Juan Mayorgaassures that the production, which lasts four and a half hours and premieres today in the Valle-Inclán Theateris an “attempt to reflect what is essential, because the civil war is unfathomable.” Lima is accompanied in this project by eight actors who play a total of twenty-four characters: Antonio Durán ‘Morris’ (Queipo de Llano, Obispo Antonio Montero, Nicolás Franco), Alba Flores (La Pasionaria, General Rojo, Mika Etchebéhère), Natalia Hernández ( Yangüas Messia, Cardenal Gomá, Señora Guerra), María Morales (Manuel Azaña, Largo Caballero, Clara Campoamor), Paco Ochoa (Pau Casals, George Orwell, General Mola), Blanca Portillo (José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Von Richthofen, Rosario La Dinamitera), Guillermo Toledo (General Yagüe, Alfonso XIII, General Miaja), Juan Vinuesa (Francisco Franco, Norman Bethune, Ramiro de Maeztu). They are accompanied by around twenty voices from the Madrid Youth Choir.

And there is a certain didactic intention in this staging, produced by the National Dramatic Center in collaboration with Check In Producciones and El Terrat. The show “is aimed at youth,” adds Lima, for whom this tragic episode in our history has been very poorly told. “The official history in this country has been told from the prism of the victors, of the rebels,” he assures. and this lack of historical education It reaches us until today. But the theatrical view of this production is not based on the dichotomy of the winners and the defeated, of friends and enemies. Our view will be analytical, critical and documentary.

Faced with a hypothetical complaint – “Another play about the civil war!” -, Juan Mayorga gives several reasons for returning, in the theater, to talk about it. There is never excess in doing it, he says, but rather you have to ask yourself why we continue doing it. «It is important – he argues – to do theater because the civil war has narrative density; There are all the characters and all the stories. Besides, theater is the art of conflictand our civil war is not only a great conflict, but telling about it is still conflictive and that is why we have to talk about it. The playwright is convinced, finally, that “to speak calmly about war is to work for peace.” And ask one last question. “Which forces that caused the civil war may be alive today?” Andrés Lima himself completes the idea: “We have to discover what we were like to know what we are like.”

The germ of this show is in a previous double work by Andrés Lima: ‘shock‘ and ‘Shock 2‘, also with historical pretensions. At that screening some images of the devastated city of Mosul were projected, and Lima thought of Guernica or Barcelona… “Our shock started there,” he adds. And if this is the origin, one of its driving forces is the “rebirth of the extreme right throughout the world, also in Spain.” «Before the extreme right was imposed through coups d’état, but today they are voted at the polls. “Why?” asks the director.

«We are going to try to do theater –explains Lima-. “We are going to try to paint a landscape eloquent enough that it serves to remember and imagine, to ask ourselves questions that lead us to better understand, to discover where the wounds are.” And this, points out another of the authors of the text, Juan Cavestanand, through a function that is at the same time “a documentary, an epic, a conference, a master class, theater within the theater…”