Àlex Rigola pursued a dream: that the magic that occurs in the first fifteen days of rehearsing a play would not be lost when it is brought to the stage. For this reason, he had a wooden box built, with few spectators next to the performers, so that they did not have to raise their voices or impose them. And even less 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 searching for the holy grail of intimacy, Rigola’s evolution has now led him to build 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 Plaza Olivereta in the Badal neighborhood of Barcelona. This fall we have already seen some provisional performances of Hedda Gabler inside the wooden box, but the official performances will begin with all the missing elements (stands, lights, soundproofing…) on October 31.
The inaugural production is L’home de teatre, by Thomas Bernhard, a metatheatrical classic, which Rigola has adapted for the occasion, based on Bernat Puigtobella’s translation, and where references to the new room appear. Thus, meta-meta-theater, 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 camera obscura, reminiscent of the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia that Rigola renovated in 2010, when he was its artistic director. Thus, it is no coincidence, as he himself confesses, that it was built by the same architects: Francesc Guardia and F. Xavier Massagué.
All black, Rigola also seeks the kingdom of silence: “The room has been designed so that there is absolute silence. The lights are LEDs and we have removed the fans, so that the interpreters can speak at a low voice volume.”
L’home de teatre 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 those lights for five minutes.
“I have had this obsession with emergency lights,” says Rigola, “because in some theaters they are very powerful. Bernhard must have seen these obsessions in the rehearsals of the plays and put them in the text. Sometimes I find myself giving instructions that are the same as those in the text.”
And Àlex Fons, who plays the son, adds: “In rehearsals there have been funny situations where I didn’t know if the instructions I was receiving were from the play or from the director, when I had to move the trunk, for example.”
Rigola says that they have given the new theater the same name as that of his company, Heartbreak Hotel, “but with this name, there have been people who wanted to reserve a room.” “It is called the hotel of broken hearts, because culture is healing,” he concludes.
Catalan version, here
