More than three years ago, on February 16, 2021, a 19-year-old woman lost an eye. A projectile mousse, rubber bullets used by the Mossos d’Esquadra, mutilated this young woman near the police station in Balmes (Barcelona), where she was protesting against the entry into prison of the singer Pablo Hasél, sentenced that same month of February to a sentence of nine months and one day in prison to which the Supreme Court sentenced him in May 2020 for apology for terrorism and insults against the Crown and state institutions. Later, other sentences would be added.
At that time, Spain was emerging from a harsh pandemic, activism was reacting after a 15M that was far away and it was doing so in the same streets that in 2014 saw the largest Diada in history and that five years later, in 2019, hosted the convulsive protests that left this country overwhelmed. There are moments in history when it seems that all the past that composes us, recent and not so recent, converges.
That Tuesday in February 2021, at half past eight, when that projectile was heading more than 300 kilometers with the worst of destinations, it could well be one. It is the moment captured in the text by Antonio Morcillo López, Blue (brief epic of an eye between life and death)and that society Girls of Maritornes chose to roll. A text where reality, dream and poetry intertwine. The eye, of that quartz blue of the “clear and extremely cold days”, will be the character who will fly over and manage to fix this moment in the recent history of Spain to look and listen to who we were, what we wanted, what we hated. and what we were afraid of that February night.
Blue proposes to start from a theatrical situation. Two friends of the mutilated young woman, Maica and Carlota, wait in a waiting room while she is operated on. They cry and insult each other, blame and blame each other. But Carlota’s ex-boyfriend, the rubber bullet itself who is tired of “cleaning up other people’s shit”, the head of the Nazi regime responsible for the extermination of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann, or the National Court itself, who talk and complain, will also appear on the stage that no one understands them.
We will even see the ghost of María de Villota, the Formula 1 driver who lost an eye in an accident and later died from a blood clot, wandering around the place. All of them become characters in a space that is removed from reality and in which reigns this eye that learns to look from its new disembodied state after finding itself in a small “garbage can transformed into a purple gelatinous mass.” And to top it all off, the voice of this eye on stage is that of Carlos Hipólito.
Political theater?
The play presented this week at the Quatrième Mur (from September 12 to 21) will not meet the expectations of those who will endorse an injustice, reaffirm on stage what they already think. The bet is different. “I escaped as much as possible from the banner,” Rakel Camacho tells this newspaper, “the author’s proposal goes in the other direction, that’s what interests me, political, yes, but with a poetic plan that gives depth and opens.”, he concludes.
Antonio Morcillo Lopez is already a talented author with works such as The Butchers who won the Marqués de Bradomín Award in 1998 or Bangkok which premiered at the La Villaroel Theatre in Barcelona in 2013. His career has been mainly in Barcelona and his texts follow the long path of influence of Sanchis Sinisterra where the story is strange by letting in the poetic, the changes of plan and the plurality of files. Although he is a recognized author, he is perhaps little known. Camacho describes this circumstance very well: “there is something absurd in being from La Mancha in Barcelona and Catalan in La Mancha or Madrid.”
In this production, the mixture of a supposedly friendly code also stands out, which even borders on white comedy, but which at the same time contains certain invisible burdens that will make more than one viewer uncomfortable. “Antonio does not attack the fact itself, it is an irreverent text but does not offend,” explains Camacho, “there is a black humor, but almost innocent, a nobility that moves away from transgression but remains very strong. Innocence is what comes closest to love and non-violence.
My daughter told me the other day that what might happen if a policeman were to see the play, well, he would have to open his mind or, if not, leave.”
Rachel Camacho
— director
The dialogue between the two friends is passionate, fast-paced on many points, but also immoderately radical and prejudiced. They exaggerate, insult, distort and denigrate the police officers, calling them sons of bitches of automatons, psychopaths incapable of love or pure sadists. “My daughter told me the other day that what could happen if a police officer went to see the play,” says Camacho, “well, he will have to open his mind or, if not, leave,” he replies. In the same way, the spectator who expects to see behind the speeches of the young women a sophisticated sociopolitical theory will be disappointed. Maica and Carlota are two twenty-year-olds, confused, in an extreme moment where their fears and contradictions resurface.
No one comes out a winner and the work opts for a different approach. “For me, the inclusion of these other characters like the ball itself or María de Villota is very important, characters who come from nowhere and are invoked to give their point of view,” explains Jorge Kent. “What is interesting is how, from a concrete event, the author opens the doors of the philosophical and the poetic, and how this bet takes on a dimension in the staging, creating a journey where violence confronts love,” concludes Camacho.
The Maritornes
Rakel Camacho just made her premiere at the Mérida Festival peace by Aristophanes in Francisco Nieva’s version. Camacho is one of the most reliable directors in the country. Two years ago he directed one of the biggest successes of the capital’s theater, Coronada and the Bulla work that recovered the best of Nieva and hung for weeks the ticket ban sign in the Naves del Matadero (Madrid). Jorge Kent, in turn, is one of the most powerful and versatile actors on the national scene, capable of playing a spiritual trans with three breasts in Coronada, the great nun, and of tackling projects such as The fatherdirected by Josep María Mestres in which he shares the stage with José María Pou. They are already veterans of the stage. Both are from Albacete.
But the theatre industry, the job, “is not good” – as Yung Beef would say – and these two people from La Mancha have decided to retire to take flight. The work Coronada and the Bull He failed to perform a single concert on tour after Madrid, which is incomprehensible and says a lot about the health of the country’s theatre circuit.
“Coronada is already dead, whoever wants to see it will have to do it on video. There have been many calls, many projects that have been strangely interrupted,” Camacho explains bitterly, “I had a bad time, but I no longer have any complaints, and now I am moving forward with projects like the Nieva that we did in Mérida or the work that we are preparing for the Abbey Theater by Carmen Martín Gaite, The back room“, says this director, who says she is very enthusiastic about the new company’s project where “we find the desire to work together and to do it in close proximity, as a family, with common criteria.”
