The anecdote has its meaning and Albert Boadella jokingly recalls it. “Juan Carlos I came to see two of my plays. The play about Dalí, like that, for good measure, because he had known Dalí a lot, and he also came to see Don Carlo at the Escorial theater. And he came without being invited, perhaps because the story interested him. In the play there is a moment when the singer who plays Philip II says: ‘I will be buried in the Escorial.’ And he, who was next to me, told me: ‘Here, just like me!’ Now the emeritus king is the one who takes to the stage of the Infanta Isabel in Madrid with the new work by Joglars, El rey que fue, in which Boadella returns to direct the company a decade after having passed the baton to actor Ramon Fontserè.
A look from today, from a party on a sailboat in his exile in the Persian Gulf in which a young boy “congratulates him and he explains his reasons”, to the adventures of a monarch who, Boadella assures, has a touch of tragedy classic: “If Shakespeare had known him, he would have abandoned all his projects, about Hamlet, about Macbeth, and he would have made Juan Carlos I.”
“I wanted to do something about the king emeritus even when he was not emeritus, I was very interested in his personality and his life and I could only do it with a person like Ramon Fontserè, capable of not only imitating but also getting into the personalities of the characters he plays. ”, he remarks. And he gives the reasons for his royal interest: “He is a man who belongs to what we would call the ancien régime, the form of the monarchy of the past, he is more like Charles IV or Charles III than Philip VI, the son of the. He belongs to an idea of ??the past and suddenly he finds himself in our modern world in which the aspects of respect, impunity, and monarchy partly fade. He is faced with this trauma. In addition to an impressive life, being born in exile, meeting his grandmother Victoria Eugenia, killing his brother, accidentally but which is a trauma in life, spending 27 years under the tutelage of Franco, whom in the end he almost considered his father. “He is the man who has absolute power for 14 months as Louis XIV had, before handing it over to the Spanish, and who will end up abdicating and going into exile.”
A man who, he is sure, “will go down in history for having brought freedom to Spain after a long dictatorship. This will be the historical content, what will prevail in the memory. The rest will remain in the background. I’m not saying that it isn’t sad, that there aren’t perhaps uncivil aspects in his behavior, but it will go into the background. That’s why I think this man should not die in exile. What’s more, I think he should not have gone into exile.” And he reflects on the uncivil aspects, the commissions of Juan Carlos I: “For many years he had great impunity. He comes from a legacy of the past that is unpunished in every sense. This impunity in Spain has lasted many more years, the politicians themselves have had infinite impunity. And he has had it in spades. That means that perhaps he was not aware of the repercussions that all that meant. They were like almost hereditary rights that he assumed with a certain naturalness.”
