Two ways of looking at the literature of our time from the theater. That of Ostermeier / Louis, contemporary, based on the personal experience of a man who, years after disconnecting from the family, sees his father again and the world falls on top of him. That of McBurney/Tokarczuk, through pure fiction. One, through the document, the protagonist of the story who narrates in first person the rediscovery of his father. The other, with a novel, which will arrive at Estación Alta with the English title, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and which takes us into an area of ??Poland, which was Germany until the Second World War, with some hunters. that they die in a mysterious way and that the protagonist, the engineer Janina Duszejko, believes that it is at the hands of animals, who have decided to take revenge.
“Tokarczuk’s novel raises a series of questions that interest us all,” says McBurney. For example, “it appeals to the patriarchal system of our world and how we see ourselves in that world, how we connect with nature, and how we behave with nature and animals.” “They are the only questions that are valid in our time: what does it mean to be an animal? “What does it mean to be consciously mean to an animal?” adds the director.
Another question that Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead raises, according to McBurney, is “what does it mean to be a woman in her late seventies in a society whose voice, often, no one hears.” Because everyone doubts Janina’s version. He is a lover of these contradictions and of bringing great books to the stage. A decade ago he left us speechless with his version of The Master and Margarita that we saw at the Lliure.
With Tokarczuk, as with Mikhail Bulgákov, McBurney and his company, Complicité have not attempted to copy the original point by point. Following John Berger’s teachings regarding translation, the director says that his goal, always, is “to find the gesture that caused the words before they emerged.”
For his part, Louis explains to us that he wanted to go beyond everything, not only with Who Killed My Father, but with the cycle about his family that this book set in motion and that will end shortly with a volume about his brother, who died. last year of alcoholism. “I had to forget everything I had learned about contemporary literature to get closer to the father and mother,” he exclaims. He believes that eliminating emotions, politics and explicit language from novels is today’s big mistake, and thinks that literature is becoming “a tool to hide reality.”
When I was writing the text that we will see in Season High, I was translating the versions of Antigone and Helen of Troy by the Canadian poet Anne Carson. And she saw her path clearly: “In Greek tragedy the opposite of what contemporary literature told me to do happens, because tragedy is very political, there are frictions, it is explicit, there is confrontation.” “By going back to antiquity I found a way to put a bomb inside contemporary writing,” she concludes.
In Who Killed My Father, Louis says he explored “the paradox of domination,” where a man, with the attributes of the dominant, ends up destroyed by the same system that gave him all the power. “When he died, he was 58 years old, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t breathe properly,” he remembers. And he adds: “Deep down, the father thought that all his suffering was a product of his freedom, since he had always chosen: he drank because only real men drink… Marx calls this alienation.” ”.
In his book, Louis gives names and surnames to those responsible for his father’s disaster, all those politicians who cut the French social security system (the father suffered an accident in the factory where he worked and was badly damaged). That, he says, has a great impact on the theater audience, since, originally, what he intended was to force the audience to see or hear things that, deep down, they know exist but do not want to know: “Everyone knows that there is poverty in the world, that there are social classes, injustices, and we live without looking at what we already know exists.”
“As for literature, I am interested in creating literature that, with formal tools, with the use of politics, a certain language, a certain literary form, forces the reader to hear things that he already knows, but does not want to hear.” Louis adds. In the theater, the first time he went on stage, he found that this possibility “was multiplied by ten.”
There is an autumn weekend, every year, in which Girona and Salt become the epicenter of European contemporary creation, which often includes the participation of the good and best of each house, especially Catalan and Spanish artists. who seek to export their creations or show them for the first time in Catalonia, under the watchful eye of programmers from all over the continent. These are the ones that can be seen this year.
