The tragedy, idealism and temperament – including a slap to a PP MEP in the European Parliament – of what Francisco Umbral called the muse of the Spanish transition, Carmen Díez de Rivera, come to the fore. To those of the Spanish Theater in Madrid, with Mónica López as the protagonist and Oriol Tarrasón giving life to Adolfo Suárez, for whom he was chief of staff.
A life that at times becomes a Greek tragedy when this woman of aristocratic birth discovers that the man she is in love with is actually her brother because her father is not her father, but rather the former Franco minister Ramón Serrano Suñer. his mother’s lover. A tragedy from which she nevertheless knows how to get out, those responsible for the Carmen montage have pointed out, nothing from anyone, to find her own path, marked by dialogue and the fight for a better world.
In the production, Carmen Díez de Rivera, already ill with the cancer that took her away at the age of 57 in 1999, goes on stage to tell part of her story. “The show focuses on the dizzying months in which the communist party was legalized and the influence that she could have had. The show goes back and forth. We will see her relationship with her mother when she was young, her love story with her brother, We will see how she arrives on Spanish Television and meets Adolfo Suárez. I thank the director Fernando Soto for not making a biopic but explaining the causes of this woman. It is the most important thing. She is a very complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, fascinating character, in a frenetic time in which there was fear, improvisation,” underlines Mónica López, who has given life to a woman surrounded by a universe that is often sexist.
“She was a woman that everyone wanted to sleep with. Everyone. Even from her great friend Umbral, she despised all that about the muse of transition in her writings. She suffered insults and in the show we have tried to make that happen, that contempt for the fight for universal rights. And she was fed up with being surrounded by all that. When she returned from Africa, they sent her photos of black people with enormous living limbs. ‘This is what you’ve been doing in Africa.’ She lived stratospheric levels of aggression and contempt,” explains the production’s director, Fernando Soto.
For him, Carmen Díez de Rivera “represents an ideal, a utopia that I, as I imagine many of us who dedicate ourselves to the theater, pursue, the practice of goodism, of social equality, of rights, of freedoms. May this world be more fair. And Carmen, her struggle, represented it. An incessant struggle to try to make the world better. And that is what powerfully caught my attention about this woman. Her personal tragedy was interesting, but what she hides Below is the most interesting thing.”
Starting from numerous documentation, from books such as those by Manuel Vicent – The Chance of the Blonde Woman – and especially The Triangle of Transition by Ana Romero, “the one that has served us the most to reconstruct the dialogues that appear in the work because also There are also fragments of her diary, things that she said,” says the playwright Francisco Justo Tallón, they have recreated her story. Some diaries that she wrote practically every day of her life since she was very young, says co-playwright Miguel Pérez García: “She kept some diaries where there was material that must have been absolutely wonderful to read because of Carmen’s intellectual abilities and because of the people who she knew in the moments she met them. Ana Romero did read those diaries, but those diaries were destroyed upon her death following her wishes.”
At the moment of transition, says the director, “she is a very quixotic character, in the sense of utopian, fighting for something that you don’t know if it will be, if it will become flesh, if it will become effective.” And then she even burns the newspapers, a fight that then burns, you don’t want it to go behind the scenes in the sense of ego. It is a show told from the point of view of a fighting woman, with ideals in which she grows fervently, and that gives her leads to being a rather vehement, unfriendly person, with a lot of humor but also very vehement. A fierce fight to believe in something. There is a text in the performance that the King tells Suárez ‘she will always tell you the truth. This The country needs people who tell the truth, it needs people who say things. She comes to try to dialogue, to try to lay some foundations. Dialogue is necessary. We are realizing it.”
The actor Víctor Massán, who plays King Juan Carlos, remembers that she is “an aristocratic woman, daughter of Franco’s minister and her father was a Francoist soldier, and that is why they also let her speak and behave in that very way.” arrogant and because it came from the hand of the King”. Ana Fernández, who plays the mother of the protagonist, the Marchioness of Llanzol, emphasizes to complete the complex prism of Carmen Díez de Rivera that she was “a very intelligent woman with an education that surpasses many of her bosses and that is why she as far as she goes, marked by an evident class and with a brutal personal drama that I think in a way you have to be grateful for to see the woman she became.”
Because, she reflects, “if what happened to her doesn’t happen to her, then she will probably marry the boy she had fallen in love with and would have been an aristocratic lady, with her children. That brutal trauma leads her to that adventure of moments and trips, and one takes her to Africa where she discovers another reality, another way and becomes aware of many things and decides to go that way. She is a woman who decides what her path is going to be.”
And he adds that he never forgot the trauma of discovering that his love was his half-brother. “People who were in his last moments told us that he remembered that story. He never forgot that boy and he never forgot the three lies in which he had lived: that his father was not his father, that a person closely related to the family was the father, and that her boyfriend was not her boyfriend and that he was her brother. “What I see in this character are lines almost from a Greek tragedy, a Greek heroine. A character capable of overcoming her destiny, family, social, personal destiny, of fighting against that destiny that is written and working her own path in history,” concludes Pérez García.
