One of Almudena Grandes’s most acclaimed novels takes the stage. Frankenstein’s Mother premieres this Friday at the National Dramatic Center of Madrid, at the María Guerrero Theater. Then it will go to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, which co-produces it and whose director, Carme Portaceli, is also the director of the new production, which was proposed by the writer herself: “She was talking to me about a novel, I was talking about another, and suddenly I was correcting Frankenstein’s mother and told me: I think it has to be this one. And when I read it, it seemed brutal to me,” recalls Portaceli, who then directed the Spanish Theater in Madrid.
Frankenstein’s Mother is the fifth of Almudena Grandes’ Episodes of an Endless War and a great metaphor for the Spanish fifties. In fact, the advertising chosen by the National Dramatic Center is emphatic: “Can a country become a madhouse?” In the midst of the National Catholic regime, in which silence is the best strategy after, after the Second World War, it is clear that Franco is not going to fall, the madhouse of the work is that of Ciempozuelos. There, says Portaceli, “the most famous parricide in the history of Spain, Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, is admitted there, a woman you can never hate as Almudena did not hate her, a pure paranoid, she has killed her daughter, but there is something his greatness, intelligence, vulnerability and need to be understood by someone who attacks you, who touches you greatly.
Aurora, played by Blanca Portillo, is cared for by psychiatrist Germán Velázquez – played by Pablo Derqui – who has returned from his exile in Switzerland, where he went when he was 19, finding an unrecognizable country compared to the one he left after the war. .
“I wish Almudena could see it, we are sure that he would like it very much, there has been fidelity to his novel. In lescena there is hardly anything, it is a madhouse and Doña Aurora’s small world, a madhouse as a metaphor for a country with restrictions on all kinds and with a lack of empathy,” points out Portaceli, who assures that despite the fact that the play is close to three and a half hours – despite which there are hardly any tickets left – “it flies by because interesting things happen and whether it’s your turn or not generation, Almudena talks about our country, where we come from, our roots, ways of thinking, everything directly concerns us.
“It is a document of brutal poetic height, and the most important characteristic of the work is the life that springs forth despite the darkness of a black period, there is always something that comes from people, from wanting to live in a certain way, to maintain justice, freedom, the life that springs forth despite everything,” says the director.
And Blanca Portillo points out that “doing Doña Aurora is very difficult, complex. Almudena said that she was a very interesting woman, she belonged to a high social class, she was cultured, brave, brave, she had a powerful line of thought, she was socially committed, she did things that no others did, but he had a mental problem. He thinks that his daughter is his life project and, since he thinks it has gone wrong, he kills her.
Her daughter was Hildegart Rodríguez, whom Aurora conceived almost as a scientific experiment, a woman from the future. She read from the age of two, she wrote from the age of three, and at 18 she already had a degree in Law and was studying two other degrees. But the deterioration of her relationship with her mother, her attempts to separate from her, in the midst of her paranoia, led to her being shot four times while she was sleeping at the age of 19.
“That paranoia,” says Portillo, “that horror in the head, erases everything else that was wonderful about Aurora, that she was very intelligent, very cultured. It is interesting to love her there, with all those things that she had in addition to a mental illness. It is important that From the theater let’s review the mental health problems. I have grown fond of her, she suffers a lot, a lot, a complete lack of understanding, she believes that no one loves her, that everyone is after her. She withdraws into herself, she doesn’t want to talk to the doctors and “she feels nothing less than that she is being persecuted by international powers. She finds in Germán the psychiatrist, some understanding and affection.” And he emphasizes that in everything she has been “very present with Almudena, we loved her very much. I loved Almu very much and we talked to her every now and then.”
