A journey through the Spanish theater scene, from Andalusia to the Basque Country, from Palma de Mallorca to Valencia. With a long stop in Catalonia. And, of course, in Madrid, its headquarters. The programming for the next season of the Teatro de la AbadÃa already has names and a headline: “We want the programming to offer transformative moments, for the Abbey to be a dangerous place”, its director, the playwright Juan Mayorga, underlined in the presentation of a course in which the return of a classic by José Sanchis Sinisterra, El lector por horas, and the world premiere of the new work by Argentine Claudio Tolcachir, Rabia, stand out. And there will also be a new work by Mayorga, La colección, starring José Sacristán and Ana Marzoa.
After a first season with 75,000 spectators and 87% occupancy, Mayorga recovers for his second assault three great essential hits of the course that is ending, Finlandia, the new look at the difficult relationships of Pascal Rambert, with Israel Elejalde and Irene Escolar ; The sea. Vision of children who have never seen him, theater of objects and documentary about a teacher, Antoni Benaiges, assassinated in the Civil War, directed by the couple Alberto Conejero and Xavier Bobés; and Electra, the play by Sophocles humorously directed by the Argentine actress Fernanza Orazi.
It will precisely be Finland that will open the season on September 7, but Rabia will immediately arrive, a monologue that brings Claudio Tolcachir, director of the global success The Coleman Family Omission, back to the stage as a director, along with Lautaro Perotti, but above all as actor to adapt the novel by Sergio Bizzio in which a man has to live hidden, almost like a ghost witness to numerous injustices, in the mansion where his beloved works.
Undoubtedly, another of the high points of the season will be La colección, in March, in which Mayorga, based on a real story that appeared, as so many times in his works, in a newspaper, puts Sacristán and Marzoa under the skin of two art collectors without heirs who wonder what will happen to their paintings when they are gone. In addition, the Abbey will recover the realistic and atrocious comedy El traje, by Juan Cavestany, with Javier Gutiérrez and Luis Bermejo as protagonists.
And of course the other great proposal of the season is the return of El lector por horas by Sanchis Sinisterra, starring Pere Ponce, Pep Cruz and Mar Ulldemolins directed by Carles Alfaro and for which Sala Beckett has joined as a tribute to Sanchis Barcelona, ​​the Abbey and the Valencian Institute of Culture. “If for many medieval philosophers Aristotle was the quintessential philosopher, for many playwrights throughout Spain Sanchis is the quintessential teacher. It is an inexhaustible work, one of the most important in Spanish dramatic literature in recent decades, three fascinating characters linked by the danger of reading, how by reading we give ourselves to reading, we make ourselves legible”, Mayorga pointed out. Instead, Sanchis has humorously defined this work about a family that hires a reader for his blind daughter as “my plagiarism of Harold Pinter.”
On its tour of Spain, the Abbey will feature one of the surprises of the year, the uncomfortable Altsasu, from the Basque company La dramática Errante, about the altercation between plainclothes civil guards and some young people in a bar in this Navarrese town who ended with bruises and jail. A work in which, says the author, MarÃa Goiricelaya, “you enter with prejudices, certainties, a clear thought, and the show forces the public to jump from one place to another.” Also from the Basque Country will be The Color of Milk, directed by Fernando Bernués, based on the novel of the same name by Nell Leyshon about a young woman who dreams of learning to read and write.
The tour of the Catalan theater will be extensive. From Búho, a play about memory and the search for the self by Titzina Teatre (Diego Lorca and Pako Merino), to Pere Arquillué starring in the monologue with multiple voices The most beautiful body that will ever have been found in this place, a work by Josep Maria Miró directed by Xavier Albertà begins with the corpse of a young man in a swimsuit in a forage field.
MorÃos also comes from Catalonia, a work with a text by Anna Maria Ricart driven by the experience of the director himself, Joan Arqué, in an ICU due to covid. “By my side -Arqué told the presentation- people begin to die, older people, and there one realizes the treatment of these bodies that are considered second or third category, the moment in which this body is not productive or reproductive. This poverty of spirit defines us as a species. And in the work we give the capitality of criticism to the body, that’s why we have the choreographer Sol Picó”.
And also from Barcelona, ​​from Sala Beckett, comes Winter Trip, a text by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek directed by Magda Puyo that Mayorga defines as a “disturbing show of great visual and musical beauty that starts from Schubert’s Winter Trip to perform a journey through the shocked and always disturbing intimacy of Jelinek with his morals going against the grain”
From Valencia will come the multi-award-winning family show Paüra, music and clown about fear, and from the Teatre Principal in Palma de Mallorca Kings of the world, a meeting between the oligarch Juan March and the humanist Joan Mascaró in the fifties that was born from the novel by Sebastià Alzamora adapted by Josep Maria Miró. José Martret directs a cast that includes Carme Conesa and Toni Gomila.
From Morón de la frontera comes the humor of Solo queda caer, a comedy by La Periférica full of Iberian disputes, and the veteran Andalusian puppet company El espejo Negro dares nothing less than to bring Berlanga’s executioner to the stage in a production next to the Antonio Banderas theater, Soho CaixaBank. Its founder, Ãngel Calvente, has assured that “that Spain of the sixties wants to resurface in 2023, a dark and sad Spain, and among all of us we have to give it color”.
There will be proposals as special as Project 36′ 39′: Lagoons and Fog, by LaJoven, allied with the Schaubühne in Berlin and the National Theater of Greece in a project on the memory of Europe. “They have started by asking kids what we know about our civil war, if they are interested, if they are bored, if they can imagine what a young man would be like in the year 36 in Madrid”, Mayorga explained about this work with a text by Paco Gámez and direction by José Luis Arellano.
The Germans Familie Flöz will bring their celebrated theater of masks to Feste, Mario Gas and Rosa Torres-Pardo will give life to Nosotros, a concert and recital with texts by Luis GarcÃa Montero and the countertenor Xavier Sabata will give life to Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in a co-production of contemporary opera together with the Teatro Real. Shakespeare will be approached by creators in Casting Lear, by Andrea Jiménez, a search for the father and the theatrical tradition in which every night there will be a guest to be a different King Lear, and in Lady Anne, where Elisabet Gelabert and Inma Nieto take up Ricardo III to talk about the world of theater. Contemporary dance will be represented by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from 10
