Plaça del Diamant is "one of the great European novels of the 20th century", says theater director Carlota Subirós. Perhaps for this reason Mercè Rodoreda's work has been the subject of numerous adaptations. Now she is the one who has adapted it, with Ferran Dordal, and who has directed it, in a great production by Grec and TNC. This Jew opens the season of the Great Hall, after the premiere in the Montjuïc amphitheater in July. On stage, only one character, Colometa, but played by ten actresses and one musician.
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Is it the most committed piece you have directed, due to all the symbolism it entails?
The feeling of challenge has been very strong, because it is a very well-known and beloved work, which has had very popular film and stage versions. Therefore, any proposal you make must be compared, especially with the intimate reference that each one has. Also for the historical experience that it portrays and honors. For many people it is still their family memory and is part of our identity as a country.
How do you approach adaptation to stand out?
From the first moment we shied away from illustrating or realistically staging the spaces and characters that appear, because we had the feeling that we would always fall short of the imaginary that the novel displays, with those little apartments in Gràcia. That is the river of a woman's life through the river of her memories, and we decided to put that voice at the center. When you read La plaça del Diamant, you imagine the Gràcia neighborhood, the streets of Barcelona, the experiences from the Republic to the post-war period and, instead, everything is narrated from the first person of Colometa.
When it premiered at the Grec, he claimed to claim Natàlia's name over Colometa.
Because Colometa is the nickname given to her at the beginning, but I claim that her name is Natàlia. Based on the decision to look at this figure again, we wanted to present it from a contemporary vision. We are interested in multiplicity and diversity, and not so much in responding to who Colometa is today and pointing out an actress to take over from Sílvia Munt from 1983.
Is that why it has multiplied?
That adaptation marked the character's imagination in an almost indelible way and that is why we wanted to turn it upside down with ten actresses and a musician.
To not put the burden on a single actress who is 40 years old or older?
That's right, and let's see if we were right or not. Since the novel is written in the first person, we do not know what Natàlia is like. We seem to have a very clear picture, and it is never actually described. Also, she covers many ages of her life and that also attracted us. Thus, it is the memory of everyone, in a collective way. From the beginning the idea arose of making the character resonate through different voices, like a kaleidoscope or, using an image by Rodoreda, like a broken mirror.
How did you choose the actresses?
For me it was important to reach today's young people, but the cast was not an attempt to make a sociological portrait of contemporary Barcelona, because the exercise we could do could hide history. That's why we stick to women of various profiles. In the selection, there are always connections and complicities. For example, with Alba Pujol we discovered Rodoreda together when in 2008, on the occasion of her centenary, we put on a show called Rodoreda, retrat imaginari, with a very important part of the current team.
Haven't they rewritten the text?
We've cut it, but we haven't rewritten it. We have not dramatized the situations here. The adaptation is scenic and musical. That's why many of the actresses can play with music.
In his version, the objects take center stage.
Rodoreda says that he is interested in explaining the intimacy of the characters, their subjective reality, through the objective reality of the outside, so that we understand what happens to them. We wanted to capture it with these objects in the large white space of the stage, which the actresses manipulate to make this journey.
When did you read La plaça del Diamant for the first time?
The first work by Rodoreda that I read, when I was very young, was Aloma, and it scared me, it seemed very dark to me. Maybe that's why I didn't read the other works until I was older, when we prepared the piece around his figure for the centenary.
Catalan version, here
