Àlex Rigola was chasing a dream: that the magic that occurs during the first fifteen days of a play’s rehearsal would not be lost when it was brought to the stage. That is why he had a wooden box built, with few spectators close to the performers, so that they did not have to raise their voices or impose it. And even less to use microphones, as he himself did in some of his famous productions from years ago, such as Juli Cèsar (2002) or Santa Joana dels escorxadors (2004).
Like someone looking for the holy grail of intimacy, Rigola’s evolution has now led him to make boxes to put the actors and the audience in L’oncle Vània, Who is me? Pasolini and Hedda Gabler. And finally a theater has been built with this spirit of maximum proximity.
It is the new Heartbreak Hotel room, located in Plaça de l’Olivereta in the Badal neighborhood of Barcelona. Some provisional performances of Hedda Gabler have already been seen in the wooden box this fall, but the official performances will begin with all the missing elements (stands, lights, soundproofing…) on October 31.
The opening production is L’home de teatre, by Thomas Bernhard, a meta-theatrical classic, which Rigola has adapted for the occasion, based on Bernat Puigtobella’s translation, and where references to the new theater appear. So, meta-meta-theatre, with a reduction to three characters, which has had the complicity of a great Andreu Benito, accompanied in this dark box by Àlex Fons and Marwan Sabri.
Because the new room is just that, a dark room, reminiscent of the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia that Rigola renovated in 2010, when he was its artistic director. It is no coincidence, then, as he himself confesses, that it was built by the same architects: Francesc Guardia and F. Xavier Massagué.
All black, Rigola also seeks the realm of silence: “The room has been designed so that there is absolute silence. The lights are led and we have removed the fans, so that the performers can speak at a low volume.”
The theater man begins with a problem with the emergency lights. The protagonist asks the technician to talk to the fire chief to allow them to turn off these lights for five minutes.
“I’ve had this obsession with emergency lights – declares Rigola – because there are theaters that have very powerful emergency lights. Bernhard must have seen these obsessions in the plays’ rehearsals and put them into the text. Sometimes I find myself giving directions that are the same as in the text.”
And Àlex Fons, who plays the son, adds: “During rehearsals there were funny situations where I didn’t know if the instructions I was receiving were from the play or from the director, when moving the trunk, for example” .
Rigola explains that the new theater has been given the same name as his company’s, Heartbreak Hotel, “because culture is healing”. “But with this name, there have been people who wanted to reserve a room”, he concludes.
