Valladolid applauds its innocent saints

The premiere of the first theatrical version of the novel took place in Valladolid yesterday, marking the final cutting of the umbilical cord of this country with the Franco regime. Venue, Privileged, Calderon Theater. Day, pristine, mourning Friday. At the entrance, the community, which included part of the Delibe family, was confused by the numerous young brothers dressed up to nine and with huge medals of the Virgin on their chests. Valladolid received its premiere adorned with faith and banners. Not everything is Netflix, not everything is centrifugal cities. Traditionalist and Reverend Spain is still very relevant.

The work convinced some viewers to watch the performance for almost two hours in absolute silence. The editing is based on the intellectual version of Fernando Marასისas, as well as the director of the work, Javier Hernდესndez Simონისn, and the actors where the solvency actors are recognized: Pepa Pedroშეe, who plays Regula, Jacobo Dicenta, played by Mr. Ivan. , Javier Gutierrez, who acts as Paco El Baggio, and Luis Berméjo, who faces the challenge of turning into Azariah. This luxurious quartet is accompanied by five other actors (Yune Nogeiras, Jose Fernandez, Martha Gomez, Raquel Varela and Fernando Huesca). All of them accompany and enhance.

Theatrical adventures are risky and welcome, especially when it comes to private initiative. Moving the show with nine actors and leading figures is not easy today. In addition, the challenge of this installation was enormous. He encountered the presence of two works at the height of both the novel of Delibe and the film of Mario Camus, which united the sacred duo: they were the benchmark of renewal in each of their genres and, at the same time, had. Great depth in Spanish society transcends any sociological barrier. In the maximally experimental novel, Delibes manages to combine the narrator’s voice with dialogues (even without a hyphen and quotation) to rural speech. In the film, Camus managed to combine masterpieces from directing, lighting or music, as well as acting: “When, as in this case, you are faced with a film of this quality, there is no minor. The Element, “said Diego Galan in his critique of the film before its premiere in 1984 at the Madrid Film Coliseum. Probably for this reason. Holy Innocents It took forty years to wait to see the author’s first theatrical version, which, on the other hand, was brought to the theater with great success as Five hours with Mario Played by Lola Herrera, with a huge budget, as in the staging Red Clock Directed in 1986 by Manuel Collado or a stage great like Jose Sacristan, who recently staged Mrs. in red on a gray background.

To meet this challenge, the editing direction made risky decisions that alienate Camus’s film and even, even the faithful version of the verse, from the spirit of the novel. Thus, we see that the actors who play the backward people of the Spanish countryside, uneducated and hopefully already completely gone, speak almost neutral Spanish. There is no typology and although this decision is strange at first, it is ultimately appreciated. But perhaps the most astonishing decision is how they attacked Azarias’s character, that greedy and young idiot that Paco Rabal knew how to put everyone in a cerebral cortex. Luis Bermekho, perhaps one of the most talented and intelligent actors on the Spanish scene, approaches him from a more sober side, without delay. The strength of this character is incredible and how it reaches and chains the viewer. Every time “Milana Bonita” plays on stage, you feel the vibration that goes through the whole theater. In several stage production productions in the Bermekho’s Darby stalls (one of the most emblematic moments of the novel, as man and nature meet in freedom unlike the breathless Spain), the moment when you can feel the love that Bermekho manages to attract from every place. Javier Gutierrez, in turn, attracts humility and truth (perhaps there is no other way to interpret Paco El Baggio), also manages to keep the public with him, in a defeated and obedient manner, but at the same time maintains dignity. That it is all over the city. Peppa Pedro takes a completely different rule, much more human and close, united by an obvious love for her husband, a love that, despite moving this hard and dry field away from the novel, manages to bring the characters closer to the community. And Dicenta names all the types and rounds up the gentleman Ivan, who is probably the figure in the work that has the most to do with our present. His manners and origins are still well known in today’s society. Every time Dicenta utters the word “bassoon” on stage, in the barracks language that has been imposed in this country for so many years, another anti-vibration vibration of Milan passes through the theater.

No theatrical play

But while the montage has performances that can already be seen at the premiere, which will grow into an extensive tour that has already been concluded, the montage does not predominate. The scenic space is divided into three elements, a roof surrounded by birds, a large house in the background; And some items that are transformed into a humble family home, or trees, from which Paco El Bajo cultivates a trench to make pigeons dance and thus attract the game. Nothing more. It starts from an empty space, full of possibilities to appear on the field, a game with incredible changes that move us from a small scenic solution from one place to another. None, or very little happens. The scenic direction puts everything in dialogue and the novel’s sense of being in an atavistic Spanish village is not seen on stage. There are scenes in the work that retain the power of the great delicacies. When a gentleman forces Paco El Bacho and Regula to write their names in front of guests to show that in Spain, for example, there is no backwardness. Or when Senorito Ivan forces Paco El Bajo, who is dying of pain, to walk with a broken leg just because he wants to use it as a secretary in the next hunt. But in the end, the montage is unbalanced and there is a feeling of excessive sequence of dialogue scenes.

Also noteworthy are the two moments when the montage departs from Delibe’s text. In principle there is nothing to question. The authors have already written and the theater is written on stage. In one of them, the property manager’s wife, Pura, has a quasi-monologist on the condition of women who find themselves in a patriarchal and unhappy marriage in a cage. Involvement that seems to try to bring the text closer to the current sensitivity. The second is the description that Regula makes of his brother, Ireneos, who died in the war. A description that forces Irenaeus to fall for the senseless mythology of the anti-Franco struggle by the Spanish left (a very good man, strong as a tree, trustworthy as others, etc.). None of the contributions contradicts the spirit of the novel. But perhaps his style, where everything is described, nothing is emphasized.

This leaves the editing of the power of Delibe and his characters intact, even without the renewed but theatrical experiments enjoyed by its literary and cinematic predecessors. Take another small example. ᲛMusic. Research and imaginative experiments relate to each stick in Camus’s film. Anton Garcia Abril, a genius who can create a soundtrack And Citroen Or Man and the Earth, Created a soundtrack that accompanied all the sadness of the work and at the same time all its growing tension towards tragedy. To do this, Garcia Abril writes a theme based on percussion (membranophones and idiophones and sounds of popular music as typical as a carved bottle scratch) and experimental sounds; And another, the most melancholy, for which Abril records a Cantabrian cowboy, Pedro Madrid, who plays Rebecca, a record that later merges with the sounds of a metal string violin. A pure creature that enhances the entire film. Instead, theatrical production music goes unnoticed.

One of the recurring themes that this theatrical performance has raised since its release is its urgency. Just a note about that. One of the film’s screenwriters, Maonolo Matji, tells us about the long lines of the Cinema Colosseum in 1984, everyone wanted to see this film. An audience that knew that our memory and dignity over this celluloid was at stake is probably a good part of our lost identity. Matji says that at the moment when Azarias kills senior Ivan, the public applauded angrily. And he recounts how at the premiere, Miguel Delibes, seeing this reaction, raised his hands to himself and said, “This is not the case, this is not it.” At the premiere of the play at the Calderon Theater, the public only applauded the actors and the entire team. Something is changing. However, it may not be enough to fully understand the answer that Delibes himself gave to Camus when the latter asked who were the innocents in his novel, and the wise man of Valladolid replied, “Everyone!”