“Manolete, the task your sisters did for me yesterday was much better than the one you are doing today.” The bullfighter was speechless before this offense launched by one of the assistants to the bullfight with which the right-hander was already presented as a figure in his hometown, Córdoba. Others chose to boo, insult and label the two older sisters who attended the big family event from a box. It was in 1943 and the bullfighting chronicles reported this unpleasant situation the next day. The overwhelming story of those two women who were forced to engage in prostitution to help the family finances, centered on the career of the bullfighter, is the main theme of the play Manolete’s sisters, which opens this Wednesday at the Fernán Gómez theater de Madrid, directed by Gabriel Olivares and written by Alicia Montesquiu, who also performs the play with Alicia Cabrera and Ana Turpin.
The work, a tragicomedy that recreates the meeting between these two sisters with Manolete’s lover, the actress Lupe Sino, shortly after the bullfighter’s death in Linares in August 1947, is also a portrait of the repression that women suffered during the Franco regime. Their names were Dolores and Angustias and they were daughters of the mother’s marriage, who on the death of her husband remarried and had three other girls, in addition to the right-handed one.
Alicia Montesquiu (Barcelona, 45 years old) exploded in her head that offensive phrase that was heard in the Cordovan bullring that afternoon and that she read in one of the bullfighting chronicles of the time. He had been investigating the life of the right-hander and his lover Lupe Sino for a long time and that day the impulse to take this story to the theater was definitely unleashed. “The figure of Manolete has always seemed fascinating to me. This, together with my interest in learning about real life in the Spanish postwar period, was what led me to begin my study of the bullfighter and the women who surrounded him. Those two older sisters were engaged in prostitution, at the same time that Manolete started his career. The family bet to the death for the talent of the brother and, above all, with the knowledge of the mother “, assures the author after a dress rehearsal.
Manolete’s sisters does not judge any of these women. “They are all victims of the moment, including the mother,” say both the author and its director, Gabriel Olivares, who have chosen to give the work a Berlanguian touch. In front of these sisters, two women brought up in the sadness and social repression of the time, the figure of Lupe Sino emerges, a brave, modern, determined and republican actress, who was Manolete’s great love, and who was prevented from approaching the right-hander on her deathbed to prevent the bullfighter’s wish to marry her from being fulfilled. “My intention has been to make a portrait of postwar women, of how difficult it was for them to have freedom. Now it is easy to make a value judgment, but you have to get under the skin of all of them to understand the situation they had to face, ”says Montesquiu.
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In this sense, Gabriel Olivares (Albacete, 1974) believes that this work could well have been titled The women of Manolete or The women of the Franco regime. “Any of the three titles could do. In the function the two Spains are clearly seen. On the one hand, the modernity and the avant-garde that Lupe Sino represented, which would be modern even today. And on the other hand, there are the sisters, the fruit of Franco’s and repressed Spain “, explains the director, who from the outset rejected the temptation to make the mother, Angustias, guilty of all this, a very Lorca character, authoritarian and deeply rigid . “I didn’t want the blame to fall on her. She was also the victim of adverse circumstances. The enemy is not Angustias. The enemy was the historical context ”.
The function, with a very mobile scenography, is developed as if it were a film shoot, with its cuts, changes of site camera, flashbacks and repetitions. The work process, says Olivares, has started from the investigation on the scene itself. “The idea of filming helped me to enter this traditional drama with a vision that poses a certain distance to approach the story, as a point of view that helps to understand the social context in which it takes place,” explains the director.
Manolete’s sisters
Text: Alicia Montesquiu. Direction: Gabriel Olivares. Cast: Alicia Montesquiu, Alicia Cabrera and Ana Turpin. Fernán Gómez Theater. Madrid. From January 12 to 30. Tuesday to Saturday, at 8.30 pm. Sundays, at 7:30 p.m.
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