Estación Alta expands and, as is becoming tradition, also offers some shows in Barcelona. This time it is neither more nor less than La douleur, by Marguerite Duras, performed by Dominique Blanc (only this Friday, December 1, at the Romea theater, in French, there are surtitles in Catalan).
La douleur “is a magnificent text that tells us about hope, love, war and resistance,” declares the actress, who made her world premiere in Salt (Gironès), at the 2008 Season Alta festival, and which since then he has not stopped interpreting: “I would like to represent Duras’ text all my life.”
In this piece, Duras waits for the return of her husband, deported to a concentration camp. “Duras was a visionary, because she talks about pain, war and Europe. She explains the Second World War in Paris, where she witnessed torture sessions and had relations with a member of the Gestapo in the hope of having news and saving His couple”.
Robert Antelme is her husband at the time, a prisoner in three concentration camps. From her experience, Antelme published The Human Species in 1947, but her book was not successful. On the other hand, Duras’s book, which was published in 1985, prepared from his notes in notebooks, did enjoy the public’s favor, and led to a confrontation between Duras’ family and that of Antelme, who considered that he I had stolen his story.
Pain, with the subtitle “The Notebooks of War”, is the basis of the work that Patrice Chéreau, Thierry Thieû Niang and Dominique Blanc premiered in 2008, and which continues to be performed today, with Blanc, a member of the Comédie Française, on stage.
“The show has worked with me for 14 years, and in this time incredible things can happen. The staging, roughly speaking, is the same, the one who has changed is me. I always try to do it as if it were the first time,” he declares. the actress.
“Duras usually talks about love and this is a very different text. It is a writing that is not like that of his other works: it is very raw, harsh, realistic, just as he writes at the end of his life. It is a very difficult text to memorize, more than Racine’s Alexandrian verses,” he concludes.
