Carmen Laforet has always lived attached to a suitcase, until this moment on a train platform where expectations open up and we can look towards the future. On the way to Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, the United States, Italy, Laforet always fled Spain, a country where it was impossible for him to breathe. Thus begins his first novel with which he won the first edition of the Nadal Prize in 1944, Nothing, but with Andrea, his 18-year-old alter ego, arriving at Barcelona’s Gare de France just a few months after the end of the civil war. But the play premiering this Friday at the National Drama Center (CDN), the first theatrical version of this modern classic, begins differently, with a fight.
This production, directed by Beatriz Jaén and adapted by Joan Yago, begins in the famous apartment on Aribau Street, when the drama is already in full swing. Juan, Andrea’s uncle, screams like a man possessed. The unbreathable atmosphere of the family broken by war, full of Catholicism and vicious, emasculating machismo, prevails. Thus begins this theatrical adaptation which, at the same time as it collects the profusion of action and intrigue that Laforet deploys in this hungry and defeated Barcelona, has attempted to maintain in which lies the revolutionary power of this novel: the disruptive gaze of a woman on society and on her own identity.
Nothing It is one of the most read books in Spanish literature, both in Spain and abroad. The readings that have been made of it have varied depending on the society. In the 1940s, social and political reading predominated. In the first years of democracy, it was claimed by a whole generation of women writers; “the rare ones” as Carmen Martin Gaite would say. Today, Laforet’s complex personality and prose are illuminated by new lights. Topics such as literary genius, conciliation, women, feminism or sisterhood have changed to many degrees over the last decades, changes that provoke a new look at this novel that founded so many things and at the figure of this author, so refractory to success and ambition. , and so personalist in his vision of the world.
“When I read the novel at the age of 16, I didn’t take the time to think about many of the scenes and behaviors described in it. And when I reread it now, now at my age, I suddenly say: how courageous, precise, raw Carmen Laforet is, what beauty in her descriptions. And how it depicts gender-based violence. Without any modesty and without any fear, he stages very violent scenes, brutal sexist violence that I did not want to hide on stage and I am not going to hide it,” declares director Beatriz Jaén, opening this interminable melon of Laforet’s new strength in the present.
The second aspect that the director wants to emphasize is the revolutionary fact of her time that Nothing “It’s not a novel about a girl who meets boys but a novel about a girl who meets a girl, and that girl is her great friend and her great supporter and there’s a lot of sisterhood there, and it “That’s exactly what we are too. We talk about so much now,” he explains. The director highlights one of the last scenes of the novel, where Andrea reconciles with her friend Ena: “It’s almost. a declaration of love and a total affirmation that together we are stronger, fraternity as something revolutionary,” she concludes.
Joan Yago, in turn, admits to this newspaper that the temptation to transform Laforet into a flag crossed her mind at one point. “This could be a lesbian pride story, but it’s not exactly one. And this is still the case and it is beautiful and it is legitimate that there is a political lesbianism which recognizes in Nothing a reference. A reference for the simple fact of presenting a character who, whether or not he feels romantic love towards his friend, the fact is that he puts her at the center of his existence, but we did not want to decant it and make by Laforet a sort of marble sculpture of lesbianism because that is not the case,” explains Yago.
“The novel has a lot to do with this awakening of emotion, with the famous come of age and the loss of innocence, but expressed in the most complex way, accepting the complexity that we don’t understand what is happening to us, we feel things that we don’t know if it is okay to feel. All of this is brutal in the novel and I think that is one of the things that will most interest today’s audiences who see the work,” adds the director.
Retrieve the fundamental authors
This premiere is part of the CDN programming line directed by Alfredo Sanzol to recover and give space on stage to the voices of fundamental authors of the 20th century. So it was created last season Frankenstein’s mother by Almudena Grandes and was also staged That’s how we talkedmontage around Carmen Martín Gaite from the company La Tristura. On this occasion we called a tandem that has already provided one of the successes of this center with a work that has just finished its tour these days at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Brief history of the Spanish railwayan amusing and acidic satire which, through the history of the train in Spain, forms a grotesque mirror of the birth of capitalism and the disastrous legacy of the Bourbons from Ferdinand VI to King Emeritus.
But on this occasion the humor of Joan Yago, well demonstrated in her company La Calòrica, will not be present. “At first, I was afraid, because while reading Nothing It was very introductory, I was living at the time in the Balearic Islands and I already wanted to settle in Barcelona, reading it gave me the strength to make this decision”, explains the author, who admits to having wanted to make a conversational adaptation. “If 25 theatrical adaptations of the novel had already been made, we could have considered a more intrusive dramaturgy, but this is the first. We tried to transfer the experience that you live as a reader to the dimensions of the. scene, always trying to make our manipulation of the text as unnoticeable as possible,” Yago explains of the adaptation.
Yago says that at first they saw two possible options, a monologue from Andrea for two hours, the novel is told entirely through the perception of the protagonist; or a work in the style of Tennessee Williams where “the violence of family life prevails, of these characters who live locked in a ruined house and scream”. “We quickly came to the conclusion that we should not place ourselves in one or the other of these extremes, because both would involve undoing one of Carmen Laforet’s major proposals: the combination of life with the reflection of life,” he explains.
The adaptation is risky and clever, with the protagonist’s narrative voice present, but also including the university scenes, the beach excursions, the Guixols office with its new bourgeois intellectuals, Andrea’s meditative walks in the Gothic Quarter or the night raid on Chinatown. For the setting of this old family home, director Beatriz Jaén started with a sentence from the novel “in which Andrea says that she found a devilish atmosphere of furniture and people,” she explains. “This is what the spectator will find when arriving at the theater, and it is from this space that the others emerge, through a game with the stage box that I left bare. It is in this space where, with a play with the comb of the theater, its galleries and its lights, Barcelona will appear, the shadows of the Gothic, the air of the beach and all that outside world which destroys the stifling universe of the apartment family.
The production stars Julia Roch as Andrea and Julia Rubio as Ena. In addition, one of the greats, Amparo Pamplona, plays this very special character, Andrea’s grandmother. “We did a very choral work focused on the characters, one of the strengths of the novel is in the description of the characters, the portrait that it paints which is at the same time a portrait of a very specific Spain, of characters crossed until ‘at the root because of the conflict of the civil war,’ explains the director.
For the premiere, two of Laforet’s children will be present. Cristina Cerezales Laforet, painter and writer who recounted in white music the last years of his mother and the writer Agustín Cerezales Laforet. The director reveals that she asked Cristina Cerezales for a painting to stage the play which takes place in Guixols’ studio and that she, “with all the generosity in the world”, offered them one by Manuel Cerezales , his recently deceased. brother.
