When the director Ester Nadal wants to emphasize something, she uses the expression “with bold and body 18”. During the interview with La Vanguardia he uses it twice. The first, to explain that about 18 years ago I wanted to direct a production of the play Andorra, by the Swiss playwright Max Frisch. If she has finally succeeded as a female director, “it was because the TNC is also directed by a woman: Carme Portaceli” (here are the bolds and body 18).
During these years, Nadal has given dramatized readings of it in Andorra and at the Romea in Barcelona, ??but he is aware that the staging, with many characters, “has a high cost, in addition to being a very political and very hard work” .
But Andorra has nothing to do with the country of the Pyrenees, or maybe it does. The work begins with this sentence: “The Andorra of this work has nothing to do with the small real State that bears this name or with any other State. Andorra is the name for a model”.
Nadal explains that, according to the translations, instead of model is used model or concept. “With this appointment, Max Frisch seeks the necessary distance to approach his native Switzerland and other small states, which defend their identity above all.”
The fictional Andorra portrays “a society where appearance is the basis of social relations and where everyone lives depending on what they will say; the work tells us about deception and identity”, says the director. “Unfortunately, every time I’ve taken it out of the drawer again, it was topical, because it connects to some current conflict, like the war in Ukraine when we started preparing it or, now that we’re releasing it, the war in Palestine and Israel”.
The second thing that Nadal wants to emphasize with boldface and body 18 is that just as Andorra is an “experimental model” for Frisch, so is the adopted son of Jewish origin of the family who stars in the work: “He is the different of a society”.
“Max Frisch tells us at the beginning how the play ends: the protagonist ends up being flayed. It does this so that the viewer follows the story with the characters. The main couple has adopted a child from the other side of the border when the Jews were persecuted. His father saves him, but, twenty years later, when they come to persecute Jews, the people turn him in and thus take the blame off him. At this point the father confesses that the child is not Jewish, but it is too late.”
When he discovered the work, Nadal, who is from Andorra, did not understand that people in his country or in Barcelona did not have it in mind. “On the other hand, when I studied with Jacques Lecoq and said I was from Andorra, the German-speaking students were surprised that my country existed. For them it is a work as well-known as Terra Baixa is here,” he explains.
“I studied in Paris between 1991 and 1993 and it coincided with the war in Yugoslavia: the work resonates there. We did the reading of Romea in October 2017, with the whole street as it was in Catalonia, and the work also resonated there”.
“I also want to highlight the complicity of the artistic and creative team, because there are many of them who have been with me for about ten years: it is very nice to know that I am not arriving here alone, but with company, as the company in the past It was a joint creation”, he concludes.
