The most relevant Spanish playwright of his generation and member of the Royal Spanish Academy has succeeded in crossing borders with his bright and committed theater
The theater is lucky. Juan Mayorga (Madrid, 1965), the most relevant Spanish playwright of his generation, has just won the Princess of Letters Award 2022. Deep, lucid, committed and methodical, it has crossed national barriers to be translated into more than thirty languages and performed in the major theaters on five continents. His works are in bookstores, they have critical editions that are studied in universities and institutes and there is no theater season in Madrid where some of them do not coincide on the poster.
Mayorga is also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Elected on April 12, 2018, he took office on May 19, 2019 with the speech entitled ‘Silence’. He occupies the seat corresponding to the letter ‘M’ and is also treasurer. A speech he devoted, how could it be otherwise, to theatre, the genre to which he has devoted himself for three decades and which has made him the most represented, translated and edited living Spanish playwright in the world.
The man from Madrid is also director of the Chair of Performing Arts and of the Master’s Degree in Theater Creation at the Carlos III University of Madrid, full academician of the Royal Academy of Doctors of Spain, honorary member of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society and member of the Scientific Committee of the National Library of Spain.
Mayorga graduated in 1988 in Philosophy from the National University of Distance Learning (UNED) and in Mathematics from the Autonomous University of Madrid. And in 1997 he obtained his PhD at UNED with his thesis ‘The philosophy of the history of Walter Benjamin’.
He was also professor of mathematics at university centers and secondary schools in Madrid and Alcalá de Henares, a phase in which he showed the warmth and didactic eagerness of the teacher, professor of playwriting and philosophy at the Royal Higher School of Dramatic Art of Madrid and director of the seminar ‘Remembrance and thinking in contemporary theatre’ at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). He has also taught playwriting workshops and conferences on theater and philosophy in many countries.
His extensive theater work, in which the pieces ‘Himmelweg’, ‘The boy in the last row’ stand out — filmed by François Ozon in the film ‘Dans la maison’, winner of the Golden Shell in the San Sebastián, ‘Nocturnal Animals’, ‘Hamelin’, ‘Love Letters to Stalin’, ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘The Cartographer’, has been translated into more than thirty languages. Publisher uÑa RoTa has collected the following texts in Theater 1989-2014: ‘Seven good men’, ‘More as’, ‘The Blumeberg translate’, ‘The burnt garden’, ‘Angelus Novus’, ‘Love letters to Stalin’ , ‘ The Fat and the Skinny’, ‘Himmelweg’, ‘Nocturnal Animals’, ‘Snowflake’s Last Words’, ‘Hamelin’, ‘The Boy in the Back Row’, ‘Darwin’s Tortoise’, ‘The perpetual peace’, ‘The tongue in bits’, ‘The critic’, ‘The cartographer’, ‘The Yugoslavs’, ‘The art of the interview’ and R’eikiavik’. The same publishing house subsequently published ‘Famélica’, ‘Intensmente Azules’ and ‘El Mago’.
His short plays have been collected by the author under the title ‘Theatre for minutes’. This selection includes the works ‘Fatal Widow Kolakowski Concert’, ‘The Golden Man’, ‘The Bad Image’, ‘Legión’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Skin’, ‘Yellow’, ‘The Crack’, ‘The woman of my life’, ‘BRGS’, ‘The left hand’, ‘A letter from Sarajevo’, ‘Meeting in Salamanca’, ‘The good neighbour’, ‘Candidates’, ‘Innocence’, ‘Justice’, ‘Communist Manifesto’ , ‘Street Sense’, ‘The Spirit of Cernuda’, ‘The Devil’s Library’, ‘Three Rings’, ‘Women on the Cornice’, ‘Le Brun Method for Happiness’, ‘Department of Justice’ , ‘JK’, ‘De woman with the sad eyes’, ‘The winter movies’, ‘581 maps’, ‘I want to be a swarm’, ‘Lagrange cake’, ‘The door’, ‘EAJ1’, ‘Voltaire, Augusto and Margaret’, ‘ Between the Trees’ and ‘A Break’.
The playwright has also treated classical texts by other authors, such as ‘Hécuba’ (Euripides), ‘La dama boba’ (Lope de Vega), ‘Fuente Ovejuna’ (Lope de Vega), ‘El monster de los Jardines’ (Calderón de la Barca), ‘Life is a Dream’ (Calderón de la Barca), ‘King Lear’ (William Shakespeare), ‘Natán the Wise’ (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), ‘Don Juan Tenorio’ (José Zorrilla), ‘Woyzeck’ (Georg Büchner), ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky), ‘An Enemy of the People’ (Henrik Ibsen), ‘Platonov’ (Anton Chekhov), ‘Before the Law’ (Franz Kafka), ‘Divine Words’ ( Ramón María del Valle-Inclán) and ‘The Visit of the Old Lady’ (Friedrich Dürrenmatt).
Also noteworthy is his essay ‘Conservative Revolution and Revolutionary Conservation. Politics and Memory in Walter Benjamin’ and those collected in the Elipses Collection.
Juan Mayorga has won numerous awards and accolades, including Europe New Theatrical Realities (2016), National Theater (2007), National Dramatic Literature (2013), National Letters Teresa de Ávila (2016), Valle-Inclán (2009), Ceres (2013 ), La Barraca a las Artes Escénicas (2013), Ojo Critico de Radio Nacional (2000) and Max for best author (2006, 2008 and 2009) and for best adaptation (2008 and 2013).
Since February 2022, he has been director of the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid and the Corral de Comedias in Alcalá de Henares. And to that overwhelming curriculum now adds the Princess of Asturias of Letters – successor to the French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère – who almost always hesitates to consider his texts completed.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
