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‘Anatomy of an instant’Theater of the Abbey, Madrid
Forty-one years later, the 23-F reopens its doors, is among us once more. For this reason, the controversial and prominent Álex Rigola organizes an almost nursery party with costumes, colored balloons, soft drinks and large bags of chips and cheetos. For Valle-Inclán, Spain was a cloudy corral, for Rigola a children’s celebration presided over by the doll of the King. Inspired by the novel by Javier Cercas, this adaptation to the theater is fundamentally a history lesson, more than that act of understanding that Cercas proposed, an act of understanding of him towards the figure of his father and by extension of his generation towards that generation. who lived the Franco regime from beginning to end and who allowed himself to be convinced by that boy from Ávila called Adolfo Suárez.
Rigola likes history as a game of ambitions and theater as a mester of minstrelsy. Four actors, four minstrels tell us the story of the definitive failure of the Franco regime and the catharsis of the new democratic regime. We do not find the fat salt of the drama, the tragedy or the grotesque that entertain our creators so much when talking regarding Spain, we do not find the handy black legend either, what there is is the apotheosis of reality, the objective chill of the facts, a national episode turned into a monstrous and heroic photo album. Rigola points out the historical discomfort that those images continue to produce when the Francoist monsters refused to give up and points out, in front of them, the resistant epic that was maintained in some seats despite the machine gun bursts. A moral moment in which Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado and Carrillo faced that sinister tradition of military coups, coups and involutions. When Sunday falls on Monday, life will have lost its mind, wrote Ramón Gómez de la Serna. And that happened on 23 F: the calendar of history was confused for a decade and even a century and they had to come back to channel it once more, even despite the controversial portrayal of the King.
The story raised from that moment has much of a black story, an investigation of those dark suburbs of politics in which people like Milan del Bosch, Armada and the Socialists fought to take advantage of the shattered UCD.
Rigola’s documentary theater, with its dramaturgical insignificance, attempts to lead us to a plot elementality. Faced with the spectacular staging, he prefers the simple and direct narrative. Everything moves towards an intensity of content, of the message, towards a clear line of meaning and the very fact of the narration. For this reason, the actors do not play a specific character but rather their function, as in minstrelsy, is to give voice to the different real beings that make up this ‘drama em gente’, as Pessoa would say. The risk is maximum, but Rigola, not far from conceptual art either, surprises us once more with this apparently simple twist that shows a look at the abysses of our politics, and that is where he shows himself to be accurate, true and conflictively powerful. Although the final confessions are left over.
