Writing for a Catalan Theatre

WRITING FOR A CATALAN THEATRE

Carlota Subirós interviewed by Bonnie Marranca

arlota Subirós is a director and translator. At 23 she staged her ﬁrst show, based on the Thomas Bernhard novel The Loser, which was highly C acclaimed by the critics. The piece was presented at Teatre Lliure, one of Barcelona’s major independent theatres, of which she has recently become a member of the artistic direction team. Meanwhile, she has introduced in Spain the work of contemporary playwrights as Jon Fosse and Wallace Shawn, whose The Designated Mourner she directed in 2003. She has also staged plays by Catalan young writers such as David Plana, and worked with dance, music and literature as sources for her own pieces. Carlota Subirós has translated plays by David Mamet, Wallace Shawn, Harold Pinter, Neil LaBute, David Harrower, Jessica Goldberg, and Luigi Pirandello into Catalan, and edits a journal published by the Teatre Lliure, DDT, Documents de Teatre. This interview was conducted on June 20, 2004.

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Teatre Lliure seems to be host to many contemporary productions as part of Forum Barcelona 2004, not only those of Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Peter Sellars, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Robert Lepage, but also the Catalan choreographers Cesc Gelabert and Àngels Margarit. What is the proﬁle of this theatre in relation to the city and to Catalonia?

This is one of the two main subsidized theatres in the city, the other being the National [Teatre Nacional de Catalunya]. It was founded in the 1970s and has a personality rooted in Barcelona becaue it started playing the classics and contemporary plays in Catalan, in a beautiful and engaged way. Since the former head of the theatre, director and set designer Fabià Puigserver, died in 1991, the theatre has undergone a long period of uncertainty. Now we are starting a new phase after a bit of controversy involving Lluís Pasqual, who started his work at the Lliure and has been the director of the theatre for short intervals, but renounced the directorship because of political and economic problems. A new young director, Alex Rigola, was apppointed in 2003. He set up a team of four people, including himself, who are

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520281052863999 by guest on 25 September 2021 artistic directors, of which I am one. We base our program very much on contemporary theatre and on interdisciplinarity.

When you speak of performing plays in Catalan, does that mean you don’t perform any in Spanish?

Very, very rarely, for speciﬁc occasions. The natural language of the theatre is Catalan. We perform in Spanish if we perform a Spanish play, or if a Spanish or South American company is invited, and sometimes we’ve produced plays in both languages, as I’ve done with The Designated Mourner. One character, Jack, played by an Argentinian actor, was performing in Spanish, and the others in Catalan. This happens often, too, in pieces which don’t depend on a text but are created by actors’ improvisations and end up having a bi-lingual text.

How did the question of using different languages in the Wallace Shawn play come about?

That happened because I wanted to work on this play with Gonzalo Cunill, an Argentinian actor whom I had seen in the wonderful play by the Needcompany Morning Song. I felt it was silly not to do it since in Catalonia we are all bi-lingual. On the other hand, when I had this idea I felt it would give so much more volume to the piece for us. It gave interesting political associations because Catalan was banned during the Franco dictatorship. That had implications in The Designated Mourner which is about a culture being repressed by a dictatorship. Catalan intellectuals went into exile in South America where the situation was that of Catalans being refugees and the culture hosting them being Spanish. Still, the fact that Jack was Argentinian also reminded one of the Argentinian dictatorship. It was not an explicit interpretation affecting the text, and as a Catalan audience you forgot about it after a few minutes, but the associations were working throughout the play. I felt it was making the ambiguities richer.

Did the critics view the production from this double perspective?

They didn’t stress it that much. There were some nationalistic critics who asked why someone was speaking Spanish in this play.

On the subject of Catalan, does the theatre favor Catalan playwrights? Is there a mandate to produce their work? Theatre has always been, especially for minority cultures, for example, Polish or Swedish, a repository of the language of the country. Especially in politically repressed countries, it has been an arena of dialogue and debate due to the absence of that in public space. What is the siutation like here, in that respect?

It works in two ways. It makes a lot of sense to preserve, defend, and encourage the use of Catalan in theatre and contemporary culture. On the other hand, it can be limiting, and many people—actors, playwrights—have felt that. We’ve had a nationalistic government for twenty-three years and that has just ended. The

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520281052863999 by guest on 25 September 2021 government now is an alliance between three parties, one of them being not only nationalistic, but independentist. This is where a substantial part of our funding comes from. The president of Catalonia is Pasqual Maragall who’s from the Socialist party but he is now in a pact with what’s left of the Communist party and the Catalan independentists. Usually, socialists wouldn’t have a nationalist and independentist priority, and now they must. What we as a team are clear about is that we don’t want to be dogmatic. We don’t want nationalism to be cutting off opportunities for people from Spain or other countries to be working in our theatre. Bi-lingualism has great riches, but it is really sad that we can seldom use them in a productive way.

Why is that? Is the pool of writers and artists small? Or, is it that there is not enough collaboration with Spanish-language artists?

The two languages have traditionally been in opposition. There’s been a strong Catalan culture and Catalan scene in theatre, painting, and the arts. But there has always been a Spanish-speaking Catalan scene and it has often been polemical, except in very speciﬁc moments in history, or with speciﬁc artists. The relationship of the Catalan-speaking Catalans, which are the majority of Catalan culture, and Catalan artists who work in Spanish, has been problematic because nationalism has so polarized the issue that it’s been hard to relate to each other smoothly and in a fertile way.

Would you say that the theatre created in Spanish is demonstrably different from the Catalan style?

Everybody will tell you that the Madrid scene and the Barcelona scene are very different. Many people say that Barcelona is more modern. In terms of playwriting, some people who are working in Barcelona in Spanish are not necessarily so different from those working in Catalan. In this case, language is not really the aesthetic border. It’s more a question of style, energy, themes, and the attitude that creates the difference.

What is the difference?

In Madrid the commercial scene is very lively and has a long tradition. The alternative scene is much smaller. For example, there’s a strong tradition of boulevard comedy and of Spanish plays in repertoire, plays by Carlos Arniches, Buero Vallejo, alongside the classical heritage by Lope de Vega, Calderón. In Barcelona there is not such a tradition of commercial and classical theatre and one of the problems with this is that the audience is not as accustomed to going to the theatre. We’ve just had a controversy at the National Theatre here which produced Front Page, and a few years ago at the Teatre Lliure Lluís Pasqual wanted to produce Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Spanish so that he could tour it in Spain. In both cases the controversy has been whether a public theatre should produce projects that are intended to be commercial successes.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520281052863999 by guest on 25 September 2021 Let me ask you about another controversy—the opening of the National Theatre, in 1996, with Angels in America in Catalan. Can you elaborate on that?

It had a lot to do with the choice of that play for the opening of the National Theatre. Catalonia had been longing for a national theatre ever since the beginning of the century. The controversy had to do with the director who was the founder of the theatre, Josep Maria Flotats. There were a lot of polemics about what kind of play should open this theatre, whether it should be a new Catalan play or a classical Catalan play, or an international play. Then, whether it should be Angels in America, which some critics attacked as being too commercial.

Wasn’t there some discussion about it being a gay play?

I would not say it was the main issue. Politically, it was complicated because of the personality of the head of the theatre who was dismissed after the theatre opened, in part, because of the speech he gave on opening night in which he claimed that the people of Catalonia should thank him for having a theatre. He also created a polemic with commercial theatre. The background of the polemic is a ﬁght for the audience. The city of Barcelona has only 1.5 million inhabitants. There isn’t a powerful theatrical tradition, though there are traditions coming from the early part of the century, with plays by Angel Guimerà, Josep Maria de Sagarra, that connected with a popular audience. But that was cut off by the war and the dictatorship. A smaller tradition comes from the independent theatre of the 1970s, but that’s much more alternative, with groups like Els Joglars, La Fura dels Baus, Comediants.

Who are the important writers in Catalonia?

I think that the most important writer is Llüisa Cunillé. From the beginning she’s had a clear personality in her writing and in the world she creates—the critics have spoken of “Cunilléland.” She’s just written what many people consider her master- piece, Barcelona Shadowmap. She writes about everyday life in a very condensed, pure way that is enigmatic. She doesn’t deal in an overt way with issues though you can always trace the problems of solitude, isolation, sexual identity. They are beautiful plays. There is a small but faithful group of people who believe in her work which is produced mostly in the alternative scene, in small spaces.

Like the Antic Teatre?

The Antic Teatre is very new and regarded as the alternative to the alternative.

Then, do you mean spaces like the Sala Beckett?

Yes, she comes from the Sala Beckett tradition.

Is that part of the new realism that’s sweeping Europe?

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520281052863999 by guest on 25 September 2021 It is, in a way. You could maybe use the reference of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian playwright. Then of course the most well-known Catalan playwrights are Sergi Belbel, Josep Maria Benet i Jornet. Their plays have had enough support and they’ve been translated and produced internationally.

Which playwrights in Europe do you think are important? Who would you like to see at your theatre?

Sarah Kane—she’s not been produced enough. Only her fame has arrived. The work that’s been done on her is not in proportion to its importance, like other British writers who are not yet known in Barcelona, such as Martin Crimp. I directed the ﬁrst Jon Fosse play to be produced in Spain. I think he’s an important writer but I am not ﬁnding as much as I would like. Now I’ve been reading a lot of German writers. The problem is we are all looking for the incredible play. It’s a mistake to be waiting for that. On the other hand, theatre texts do not circulate so easily. You really have to look for them.

I have the feeling that there is a renewed interest in writing. Things are heating up across the continent in the post-1989 period—EU politics, the refugee situation, the Iraq war. Sarah Kane seems to have tapped into the extreme cruelty and violence appearing now in drama and she’s enormously inﬂuential all over Europe.

In Barcelona there is a feeling that concern with contemporary issues can be more easily found in what we call “creation theatre”—theatre created by a group, combining with dance and music. These fragmented, multidisciplinary composi- tions might be more appealing to young sensibilities as a feeling of our times. But good playwriting could do that just as well and it’s more portable. One of the things I want to mention about language is that as a translator I keep finding how difficult it is in Catalan to use different registers, like English or American playwrights do. In Catalan we have this terrible fear of the norm and of correctness. Because our language had to fight so hard for normal status we now have to write well. Writing how you speak is almost impossible in Catalan, and it looks terrible. The play now at the Sala Beckett by the actor and playwright Pau Miró—about a prostitute and her client [Plou a Barcelona, It’s Raining in Barcelona]—has characters who speak on stage in a way that is new to us. That is rare in Catalan. That’s a huge problem when you translate a play by David Mamet or Pinter or David Harrower.

Is this keeping audiences from theatre—language that is a bit too formal, too literary, rather than vernacular?

Not only is it keeping audiences away, but it has to do with the quality of plays, too, in terms of their being artiﬁcial. I’m thinking of the richness you can get playing with different speech styles. What I think is that we need more writers who will make a virtue of having a minor language and a short history in terms of theatrical traditions so that playwriting becomes freer. Like in Belgium—they barely had any

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520281052863999 by guest on 25 September 2021 tradition and they made that their strength and created a whole generation of new playwrights and dancers and choreographers who are so powerful. I really emphasize not to have this in nationalistic terms because they are not my terms. Rather, I’m thinking of the essay by Gilles Deleuze on Carmelo Bene. He has this theory about the “minor” being the only possibility of real creativity and real dissidence of our time and of our culture. So, in those terms I am always optimistic about having a minor mother tongue, even if it is probably going to disappear in a few generations. So few people speak it, if you think in global terms. At the same time, we have a mother tongue that is not such a mother, but a very close aunt—Spanish, which so many people in the world speak. The quality of what is not a majority but a minority has always been a source of strength and interest in the arts.

So, are you saying that the artists haven’t quite used this status to its full advantage and that that’s where you are right now?

Exactly. I think that’s where we are as a culture, and also in theatre. Of course, theatre is a minor thing in the state of the world and in the state of the arts. But, that’s why it can be important as well. As we know, global things tend to pervert themselves. It’s very difﬁcult to keep them valuable and interesting because they grow out of scale. Theatre is still something where people can be in the same room, but that minor event can have a big meaning and importance.

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