Rooftops have been unique and even mythical spaces. If someone was born in a house in a maritime town, this roof can become a whole world, where the most festive, most intense and also the most intimate passages have been lived. This is the case of the playwright Pere Riera, who had lived in Canet de Mar and who, when Sala Beckett commissioned him to write a play for the 2007 season dedicated entirely to Catalan authorship, found himself that his house no longer existed.
“The house was no longer there and when I saw the empty lot it was an impact. In fact, the work came out a bit on its own”, confesses the author of Casa Calores, which premiered this week at the Poblenou theater in Barcelona. Riera, who is the author and director, continues: “Of the works I have written, this one, without being autobiographical, does have fragments of things that I experienced in Canet de Mar, the town where I lived, but it is not mentioned in the work”.
“It’s not a photo album – clarifies Riera – but they are moments lived. The mother is not my mother but she is very recognizable; there is also a kind of unqualified NASA technician who is the village handyman, always available and guardian of all essences; and the four teenage friends, who grow up over the course of the three acts, set in 1989, 1996 and 2003. The young people start at fifteen years old”.
The mother is Rosa Renom, the handler is Jordi Boixaderas and the cast is completed by the young Emma Arquillué, Júlia Bonjoch, Arnau Comas and Eudald Font. “I borrowed the name of Casa Calores from a real house and asked for permission. I like it because I find it very euphonious”, says Riera. Rosa Renom adds: “The roof is a very lively space, where many things happen: a storytelling and poetic space at the same time.”
The director of La Beckett, Toni Casares, explains: “We are betting on a costume theater without complexes, which makes us relive a world that is in the memory of the author and the characters. On this roof of a house in a seaside town, the work speaks of personal ethics and dignity”.
Casares also points out that, if so much time has passed since the dramatized reading in 2007 until now, it is, among other reasons, because it is a production with many characters: “I was hoping that a public theater would do it, but since it hasn’t been so, I don’t want to die without seeing her on stage”. It must be said that the setting is a beautiful hyper-realistic reproduction of a roof from the last century.
In these 17 years, when Riera has taken up the work again, he has rewritten it, to the point that it is “a new version”, he points out. “Now Casares has asked me for a fourth act, but it didn’t work out for me”. And he concludes: “Living in a village or in an urban environment are very different worlds. When you leave the town, you don’t know if you’ll return.”
The synopsis says that summers are precious seasons and that youth is the most precious of life stages. “And when you’re young, one of the best things that can happen to you is living the summers by the sea. If, on top of that, you were born in a town with boats and a breakwater, it is possible that all the summers of your youth will be soaked in a warm and salubrious memory”.
