Juan Carlos Rubio knows that words are important, that they create the world, that they unite but that they can also do a lot of damage and perhaps that is why he speaks slowly, with the clarity of someone who is on stage. It is pure kindness, pure calm.
“My mother had a hairdresser and my father a bar: we were a large family, I am the youngest of a family of six brothers and sisters: my parents moved to Madrid when I was four years old to give more and better opportunities to their children, but I came back a lot for them. [donde nació] because they then bought a house there and my family is still there,” he said. Blond.
Since the year 1992 He combines his work as an actor and presenter with writing scripts for television, such as “Pharmacia de Guardia”, “Pepa y Pepe”, “Colegio Mayor”, “More than Friends”, “At Eleven at Home or Adolfo Suárez, the President”; and cinematographic, such as “The Warm One”, “Return to Hansala”, “Bon Appétit”, “The Wounds of the Wind” and “The Inconvenience”. “There is no one in my family who has had a professional activity similar to mine: since I was little, I loved reading, and I have always been a very theatrical child, dressing up”, adds the one who trained at school. Royal School of Dramatic Art.
He has directed nearly twenty plays of his own hand and has staged many others by other authors.
-The sentence with which you introduce yourself on your website caught my attention: “I am a storyteller.”
-What drives me is communication, this desire to communicate with others. What interests me is telling stories.
-He gave the proclamation of the Montilla-Moriles Harvest. In it he declared that “wine fights sorrows, celebrates joys and enlightens conversations.”
-Yes. It was a great honor to be a town crier and also a foreman; It was a double honor. In that proclamation I made in Montilla, I said that despite what I might think, I was very far from wine, yes, investigating, I realized the many links I have with it. Starting with my father. The taverns… And also, theater and wine share many things.
-Like which ones.
-The Dionysian festivals, which were celebrated in honor of Dionysus, who later became Bacchus… Well, that’s where the theater comes from. In the speech I gave, I studied these links, especially since Montilla is a city very attached to the vine, to grapes, to wine.
“Human beings very quickly develop anxiety about living and seek keys to defend themselves”
-In which aspect of your activity are you most comfortable? As an actor, screenwriter, writer, director…?
-I no longer work as an actor, because I left it in the hands of other performers better than me. I use all that training and experience that I have had in this field to be able to write, direct and produce shows. Any format suits the storyteller that I am or that I claim to be: I really like cinema, I really like television, which I have done a lot, but perhaps in the theater I find that direct contact with my compatriots. It is an act that is similar to a ritual, it is different every night: it is also a space in which I find greater creative freedom, which is why I have turned to theater in recent years.
-The theater reinvents itself every evening.
-Certainly. When we recently premiered “Dear Agatha Christie” in Montilla, we happened to jump to Murcia afterwards, and in each place the experience was different, because the audience is also unique every night. I really want to talk to people at the end of the show: there are spectators who want to share with you what they take home, which is sometimes a reflection and sometimes it is simply entertainment, a concern. It is wonderful. Because theatre can become a very powerful instrument for society.
-Many writers, singers or composers say it: as soon as a novel, a poem or a song reaches a reader or a listener, it is no longer those who created it, but these recipients. So it also happens in the theater.
-Clair. I always say that a huge team of professionals works to raise the curtain, and what I do is write in the solitude of my office, my home, wherever I am. But the theatrical event takes place surrounded by many professionals. I am lucky to have a great team that brings all the blood that the theater needs: from the performers to the people responsible for lighting, costumes, music and post-production. It is an art that needs many hands to raise it, and especially the eyes of the spectators so that the life cycle of the theater is completed.
The playwright in front of the computer screen on which he writes
-I recently saw an interview they did with you a few months ago on Canal Sur in which you said exactly that. More precisely: “The team is what makes a production great.”
-Certainly. I have always tried to have the luck, but also the eye, to surround myself with a good team, good people, and I have learned so much from each of them. My career is based on the talent of many people. That’s how it is. It would be ungrateful and ridiculous not to recognize it. The more talented the people around you are, the more you can progress, in any sector, but especially in ours.
-The theater, like the book, has survived in sometimes surprising ways despite the challenge of new technologies.
-We are animals that need each other. We need to meet. We are social. Even if technologies are wonderful… I am very much in favor of what happens with them, of the opportunities that the Internet or platforms offer us, but I defend finding ourselves in a space with other people that we do not know how to share with them. the fact of a concert, an exhibition, a play. Culture in general, even if it can be presented as solitary, has a social echo that makes it essential.
“Wine and theatre have a lot to do with each other: theatre was born from the festivals in honour of Dionysus, who later became Bacchus.”
-You mentioned the book ‘Dear Agatha Christie’, in which it is still striking that it crosses two writers as disparate as the British detective novelist and Benito Pérez Galdós, who apparently have little in common beyond that both have millions of readers.
-Well, the wonderful thing about what we do is that we can reinvent reality. That’s what Lorca said, that we have to give poetry to History and move away from a certain realism. In recent years, I have worked a lot on theatrical texts in which I have brought together personalities who sometimes met and sometimes not. In “Strange Land”, for example, I put Concha Piquer with Rafael de León and with Lorca, and Lorca and she have never met. It is a marvel to be able to dream or imagine what could have been and what was not. At the moment, we also have “The Boyfriend of Spain” on tour, with Carmen Sevilla, and soon I will present a show with Pau Casals. I go to the Canary Islands a lot, because I love the Canary Islands and because I like to travel everywhere in general, and in Tenerife I discovered a sculpture by Agatha Christie and I started diving into the Internet and I discovered that she had fled to Tenerife because of a great personal and creative crisis, and that interested me a lot. I love delving into stories of self-improvement and it seemed to me that this woman had found in Tenerife a thread to lean on and recover. And then the imagination enters, here there are no limits, here you are God: you sit at your office table in front of the newspaper and… In addition, Pérez Galdós is a writer, an intellectual and a politician to justify, because he is a progressive and very important, I am passionate about his work and his life. And bringing the two together on a stormy night, both inside and out, was fascinating. And I was lucky enough to have it premiered in Montilla: we offer a game of humor, of mystery.
“Spain’s boyfriend”
-You are now in Valencia with “The Boyfriend of Spain”, which boasts the figure of Carmen Sevilla, who you joked was much more than the lady who announced the coupon on television.
-Yes, yes. Memory is not always accurate in relation to what we remember. I am interested in recovering these types of numbers, which seem not to exist because they are not on Facebook or TikTok and we tend to forget them. Sometimes we believe that we have invented something and in reality everything has been invented for many centuries, when there were people with our same problems, our concerns, our desire to live or our lack of freedom. It is very good that we remember that History is cyclical and that there were people who before us experienced the same thing as us.
-There is nothing new under the sun.
-Nothing. Human beings very quickly develop anxiety about living and seek keys to defend themselves in life, in this more or less long journey in which we want to be loved and free and happy, and this has happened several times in History.
-Which classical theatre authors do you read with the most interest?
-I am very spongy and I read both classics and contemporaries. I like a lot of people. Everyone… From Shakespeare to Lorca or Lope de Vega, or the Greek classics. Spanish drama is living a wonderful moment.
-In “The Road to the Zoo” you work with Fernando Tejero. How does the experience go?
-Very well. We have known each other for many years. We did the Max Awards together at the Gran Teatro in 2011 and that same year also a gala at the Malaga Festival. And last year we did a beautiful show together at the Gran Teatro on the occasion of their anniversary based on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with the Cordoba Youth Orchestra. And for a long time we wanted to enter a theatrical text with more scope and we found “Road to the Zoo”, which is a work by Edward Albee, one of the wonderful masters we were talking about and we premiered it in Cordoba. We are on tour now.
