Known to the general public for ¡Ay, Carmela!, the playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra (Valencia, 1940) is the subject of a series of tributes by the theater he himself founded in Gràcia in 1989, the Sala Beckett (now in the Poblenou), which extends to other rooms in the city and also in Madrid, in the theater of La Abadía. La Tardor Sanchis is in turn a tribute to the Tardor Pinter that the same author organized in Barcelona in 1996 to introduce the English playwright who would later be recognized with the Nobel Prize to the Barcelona public.
Sanchis Sinisterra confesses his “overwhelming” feeling for the cycle, but acknowledges “a certain complacency for the link with La Abadía de Juan Mayorga, with whom we have a very beautiful friendship”. The playwright also feels comfortable with this Madrid-Barcelona bridge, because it is a reflection of his life, although there is a but: “In Madrid, where I have lived for twenty years, I opened the Teatro Fronterizo in a local provisional, a Lavapiés cabal, with the hope that by generating a whole series of activities not very frequent in the Madrid theater scene, or even I would say Spanish, there would be a reaction on the part of the institutions, but there is none there was none and we were shipwrecked. Now I’m trying to relaunch a similar project with another name, Teatro del Común, but I’m also afraid that I’ll have a hard time in Madrid”, he admits in sorrow.
It premiered at the Tantarantana Ñaque o de piojos y actores, and Vitalicios has just been shown at the Beckett, and the performances of El lector por horas continue. “For an author it is a very stimulating value because one always believes that works from another time, from other decades, could have become more or less obsolete. The option that Carles Alfaro invented for El lector por horas seemed very daring to me, because it gave another bias to the text. And at the moment I have not yet been embarrassed by any of the works that are being presented, because the directors have done an interesting job of fertilizing the texts with a sensibility closer to the present moment”.
This conversation with the playwright takes place in the Sala Beckett, during a break in the rehearsal of the dramatized reading of Correr tras un ciervo herido, which he directs with Aina Tur and in which, at 83 years old, the playwright continues to experiment: “In in this piece, the narrative element, the poetic and the dramatic intersect, and so something quite unusual remains. But it is true that in the personal sphere, private I would say, when I already know how to do something, it no longer interests me, and I love to investigate other aspects more. And another thing that is very important to me is to share the research. I have a motto, since I make a list of mottos to orient myself in this chaos that is life, which is that you only have what you share”.
Based on the theory he deploys in the first scene of El lector por horas about how to read aloud, Sanchis Sinisterra goes further and explains: “I studied a stream of literary criticism called the aesthetics of reception, which is precisely what it says is that it is the reader who gives meaning to the work. The author only writes a kind of map, of a score. I had discovered this in my rereadings of Kafka, for example, linked to different life moments. The reception was different and then I realized that it is true that it is the reader, with his biography and with his present situation, who interprets the text”.
Sanchis Sinisterra also admits to having drunk a lot from the narrative: “I have taken from the narrative a freedom that the theater does not normally have, because it is more subject to canons. First to the Aristotelian canons, which in reality were not, but which were taken as canon. And then the conditions of representation, the aesthetics of the theater era. On the other hand, I say that the novel was born wild, it was born from minstrels, from popular storytellers, and it has been invented throughout history; therefore, it has an original freedom that the theater hardly has”.
When the interview ends, Sanchis wants to add: “When I decided to settle in Madrid to spend more time with my daughters and my grandson, I offered Toni Casares the helm of Beckett, and I am very happy to have made that decision. In addition, this place is magnificent, it is a wonder, with this architectural arrangement that shows the imprint of time”, he concludes.
