While Clara is trying to explain to her philosophy students what Kant’s categorical imperative is through Kafka’s The Trial, she loses sight of the world and faints. She is going through a moment of hard stress, since she has just been separated from her and she is kicked out of the apartment where she has lived for fifteen years. She is an associate professor at the university and the boys and girls that she has in charge of her are not very interested in her work: they do not want to know anything about Kafka.
Thus begins the brilliant L’imperatiu categòric by Victoria Szpunberg, a kind of continuation of El pes d’un cos (TNC and CDN, 2022), a piece in which she settled accounts with herself and highlighted her relationship with her father, the Argentine poet Alberto Szpunberg, during the last years of his life. She emphasizes that both are connected through the protagonists, “women who are over fifty and who are in a kind of invisibility.”
If there everything happened through the life of a mature woman who has to face the end of a sick father, with Laia Marull as the singing voice, now the center of social gravity is found in the drama of housing in Barcelona. Szpunberg, who suffered a situation similar to that of the character played by Àgata Roca, explains to us that she recorded several moments in which real estate workers showed her rental apartments, “a very humiliating moment, especially when a single woman is looking for an apartment.”
This was the topic and the author has no compassion. The dialogues seem taken from a hidden camera documentary… The drama of the philosophy teacher is that, when the play begins, she has fifteen days to leave home. A vulture fund has bought the building and they ask her for money for the rent that she does not have. Not a strange event in today’s Barcelona. Plus, she has a neighbor who plays music loudly. And at the university she is showered with criticism, both from students and from a hard-core department head who exploits her.
During the writing, Szpunberg crossed paths with a friend in a precarious situation at the university, rereading The Trial and one of the Kantian concepts par excellence. “I wanted to write pure fiction, a genre that is being diluted by so much confessional stuff,” says the playwright. On a formal level, she thought of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, but she believed that she would not place a protagonist outside the system in the work. She also returned to Roberto Zucco de Koltès and several marginal characters in the history of theater. “She didn’t want a marginal woman, but a normal, ordinary woman,” she points out.
One of the curiosities of L’imperatiu categòric is that it is performed by only two actors. Roca is Clara and Xavi Sàez represents all the male characters in the piece, as if “all guys were equal.” Szpunberg affirms that the Kantian categorical imperative is “a very patriarchal formula” and that she has sought to portray all types of males cut from the same cloth, from the lowest social class (a beetle, a new nod to Kafka) to a psychiatrist. She knows that it is difficult for men to turn out well in contemporary fiction, unlike what happens in real life, where there are still heroes. “It is the writers’ revenge for so many years of invisibility,” she shoots.
Szpunberg, despite El pes d’un cos, states that he is not done with his father. He says that he was a poet “between political realism and mysticism” and that the latter has greatly influenced him, as we could see, for example, in Mal de coraçon (TNC, 2023), where he reviewed the life and work of Teresa de Jesús in the key of existential comedy. “I greatly admire the writing of poets, but I am more prosaic,” he admits.
Victoria Szpunberg was born in Buenos Aires and came to Catalonia when she was very young with her family following the outbreak of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), a period that emerged in The Clausman Sisters’ Favorite Brand (Tantarantana, 2010 and Sala Beckett , 2019). During the sixties and seventies, Alberto Szpunberg was a brilliant and important literary and political activist. He often appears in the first volume of the Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia, as a companion in battles and fights.
For a few years now, it has adopted Catalan as a literary language. “It was an unplanned thing, which has to do with my daily life,” she says, which has taken her a little further away from her origins and closer to her adopted country. She has friends who help her, like the writer Albert Pijuan, and now the time has come when she feels very comfortable with Catalan. Thanks to La maquina de parlar (Sala Beckett, 2007 and 2022 and Teatre Maldà, 2017) she achieved her first hit, a piece that has crossed borders, although she has not yet arrived in Buenos Aires. “I have never premiered, and I have done so in Chile or Peru,” says the playwright.
