Almudena Grandes will rise to the tables of the National Dramatic Center and the TNC

“There is a gorgeous perforated wild red silk curtain.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
07 November 2022 Monday 23:45
4 Reads
Almudena Grandes will rise to the tables of the National Dramatic Center and the TNC

“There is a gorgeous perforated wild red silk curtain. And the photo that occupies the back of the stage is fabulous, ”says a fascinated spectator on the phone before the act begins. The huge photo, covered on the sides by red silk curtains, becomes a great metaphor. Because the one covered in red is the face of Almudena Grandes photographed from the side, painted lips, pearl earring, fist holding her chin and looking with wise determination at the horizon, whose light is reflected in her eyes and her complexion. A look that she last night, in the great tribute that the Film Academy offered her at the María Guerrero theater, headquarters of the National Dramatic Center, seemed like a farewell to her.

They went to say goodbye to Grandes from Pedro Almodóvar to the vice president Yolanda Díaz or the minister Miquel Iceta in an act that began with surprise: the director of the National Dramatic Center, Alfredo Sanzol, announced that next season his institution will join forces with the National Theater of Catalonia to make a co-production of Frankenstein's mother, belonging to the monumental series Episodes of an endless war by the writer who died a year ago. The direction will be in charge of Carme Portaceli to embody this book, said Sanzol, in which "the mental illness of a woman is a metaphor for that of an entire country."

The editor for decades of Grandes, Juan Cerezo, recalled that Almudena "believed in the ambition of the nineteenth-century novel but at times she also faltered, and in 2003, embarked on The Frozen Heart, in the midst of those cyclical controversies about the end of the novel and that young people only read short stories, and she was working on a thousand-page novel, she asked her son Mauro for his opinion. He told her that at the time she was reading a huge five-volume series, A Song of Ice and Fire, which would later become Game of Thrones. And she saw that she didn't have to curb her ambition."

Accompanied by the piano of Rosa Torres-Pardo, José Sacristán, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Blanca Portillo, Juan Diego Botto, Susi Sánchez and a portentous Carmen Machi – who gave life to both the torture and the children who listen to it in El reader of Jules Verne, and who flee from them humming The hare runs through the sea...”– they read fragments of works by the author. And her widower, Luis García Montero, put an end to her tribute by reading a poem written in exile by Luis Cernuda, 1936, "to celebrate with Almudena the Law of Historical Memory." A poem that asks: "Remember it and remind others." Like Almudena's novels.