‘Don Friolera’ horns, the hope of honor

Yes, we have not seen Valle-Inclán for a long time and in this assembly it offers us Ainhoa ​​Amestoy of ‘Don Friolera’s horns‘. A long time ago that Valley It was not taken to the tables with this balance, with this depth and with this dramatic sense. The result is simply magnificent, a party from beginning to end: the treatment or version of the text, the staging itself, the superb interpretations. Ainhoa ​​Amestay is aware that Valle always challenges us, throws us a pulse, undergoes absolutely original codes and that it is easy to fall defeated. She has understood very well that in all this universe humor, the satirical or the grotesque are more than resources, they are a vision of the world. A critical and moral vision but, above all, theatrical. And he has understood that ‘Don Fiolera’s horns’ is a play that contains many works, many tones, many planes and in all of them shows an audacity, an absolutely brilliant and captivating orchestral consonance.

Ainhoa ​​Amestoy does not get carried away by the siren songs of the easy, but puts before our eyes, forcefully, this whole plot of jealousy, of honor, this village scandal of infamies and paranoias in order to portray those dark angles of the human soul. But he does it knowing that he has theater between his hands, a theater of maximum demand. Hence, never betray Valle, to show it in all its greatness, in all its sharpness, respecting the optics from which it was written now a century ago and raising a bridge, very balanced, towards the understanding and sensitivity of today’s public, including the sociological impact of many of these issues. In this sense, the scenery designed by Tomás MuñoZ, that metal structure from which to see, spy, murmur and lift infusions and that is metamorphosed in many symbolic spaces, is a delight.

At the same time, the portraits that it manages to stand are as accurate as unpayable, all of them moved by a blind force that, of so extraordinarily melodramatic, makes them dolls, in puppets, as happens to that poor lieutenant Astete, nicknamed Don Friolera, a common man who is dragged to be a military deformed by his sense of honor and finally a murderer. Ainhoa ​​Amestoy makes all this choir of souls a chorus of fantoches, but without being something over, but something that is born of its own course. And taking advantage of a cast in a true state of grace, carries the different works that are here to jester limits to the final romance.

‘The horns of Don Fiolera’ in the hands of Ainhoa ​​Amestay is, without a doubt, a powerful, dazzling work, with enormous theatrical force, of which Valle- Inclán would undoubted would have felt more than complicit.