‘Juana la Loca’: the pain of having loved

The myth of Juana La Loca never ceases to be among us. For some time now, in a room at the Teatros Luchana, Nicolás Pérez Costa It makes that myth something alive, exciting and true, pure passion. It talks about love by opening the bowels of love, it talks about jealousy and betrayal, intrigues and challenges, portraying a life for which madness is only a test of sentimental lucidity. In an hour of high interpretative density, Pérez Costa tests himself as an actor: he not only embodies the extreme personality of Juana La Loca, but also a whole galaxy of characters, in which he unfolds himself, that serve to draw the contours of this tragedy as intimate as it is family or historical.

From that cell in Tordesillas where she is locked up by her father’s decision, King Ferdinand the Catholic and his son Emperor Charles Vthis Queen who never reigned subjects us to a vertigo of conscience without there being any other stimulus than this last testimony of her pain. The pain of having loved and continuing to love when everything has turned its back on you, when life is about to say goodbye. It recreates her biography: her childhood, the teenage questions of who her husband will be, the marriage for the convenience of the State that in the end will become an outburst of passion, the vision of Flanders and Castile and, above all, sex, a Sex so omnipresent, so obsessive that, in some moments, it deactivates itself and makes a work that tries to convey to us the value, the courage of a woman who has become an emblem here lose strength.

Everything happens from that red robe that overflows throughout the stage space and from which Pérez Costa gives us a lesson in theater come to life. The spectators thank him with that loyalty that has lasted for years, because sometimes in a tiny room they find that the so many times recreated Juana the Crazy He still has something to say to them and that a single actor is capable of setting up that world of frenzy, that soul that they all threw into the abyss.