With The categorical imperative, Victoria Szpunberg leaves no one indifferent. The last play of the playwright and director hits everyone’s throat. And if the viewer is a mature woman, then the annoyance multiplies. The play, which premiered on Wednesday at the Gracia headquarters of the Teatre Lliure, tells the story of Clara, a woman in her fifties, associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, who, in a series of mishaps, after divorce and in the middle of menopause, they kick her out of the flat because she can’t pay the new rent.
At the Gràcia theater, the scenography of panels that open and close to offer different spaces sets the rhythm of the play, in which our anti-heroine wanders – allow me the expression – like a scumbag through a ditch. Àgata Roca plays, playing a role player, this mature, disciplined, rigorous and compliant woman, who due to a series of circumstances finds herself expelled from the very system she defends. Kafka’s process is the great metaphor.
The actress explains: “The character is a gift and for a long time I will not be able to complain saying that there are no good roles for mature women. We consider how the young have it, but also how the elderly have it. The associate professor is based on reality: she is on the street because the building was bought by a vulture fund, and she has a lower salary than what they ask for the rent”.
The categorical imperative “is a concept of Kant’s that has a remarkable forcefulness, and I wanted to talk about these imperatives”, declares Szpunberg, who has titled the work thus and who says that it has turned out to be “very feminist”. On stage, the anti-heroine played by Roca is echoed by an actor who transmutes into seven characters. The architect of this frivolity is Xavi Sáez, who, convincingly and without falling into easy caricature, represents a real estate agent, the head of the department, a date, a waiter, a noisy neighbor…
Sáez points out: “There are so many novels and plays about heroes and anti-heroes, that I really like working with an anti-heroine. In addition, having a director who is also an author is very enriching because it makes you feel that you are part of the work’s creation process in a certain way”.
Szpunberg describes her protagonist: “She is a teacher who is on a tightrope. She is not an extraordinary person, she has done everything the system has asked of her, but she is about to pass to the other side without her being able to do anything about it. At first I thought of a young woman, but a friend of mine, a teacher and of my age, was in a precarious situation and this made me reconsider the protagonist”. And this is surely one of the keys to the greatness of this little wonder: the current precariousness, so associated with the young, exposed in a woman who should have her life resolved.
“If there is a philosopher who has generated a rigid and forceful and, at the same time, very important system, it is Kant – continues Szpunberg-. The categorical imperative is a concept that today we can say is very patriarchal, because it is a precept that can include everything from human rights to Nazism, because it is an abstract phantasmagoria. She meets a series of men from different social strata, but all cut by the same pattern. I was interested in men being paradigms, so that I could focus on the things I wanted to explain, because, otherwise, many melons would open up”.
Szpunberg concludes: “The protagonist is disciplined and obedient until one day she finds herself with a sharp knife in her hands… I don’t know whether to say that The Categorical Imperative is a comedy, but it does have a lot of irony.” More than one person in the audience left the performance on the day of the premiere with this symbolic knife stuck in their chest or wanting to stick it in someone’s chest.
