Jordi Galceran's new comedy is FitzRoy and comes ten years after El crèdit, with four actresses and directed by Sergi Belbel. It has already been released in Bulgaria, and there are two productions underway in Germany, but the Catalan public will have to wait until after Christmas to see the original premiere, at the Borràs theater.
It is surprising that so much time has passed: "I have started fifty works and I have left them, because it sounds to me that I have already seen everything", explains Galceran, who believes that now he has found a new idea.
“FitzRoy is a mountain in the Andes, in Patagonia, between Chile and Argentina, and it's where the comedy happens. It is the story of four climbers who are halfway up, a very difficult wall that has never been achieved by a female team”. The author spoke with many climbers to explain their experiences and their language: "I'm not a climber or anything."
And he gives some clue to the plot: “It's a bit of bad weather and they have to stop, and during that time a series of things happen to them and they will be forced to decide whether to continue the ascent or pull back”. Climbing inside a theater.
“When I was studying the first year of Philology –he continues–, a teacher told me that, if I liked the theater, I had to go see Xavier Fàbregas, the best theater historian that there has been in Catalonia. I told him that I liked to write plays and that I would like to write adventure plays, because what I like the most are pirate books and movies, and I would like to create those feelings and emotions on stage. Fàbregas got up and left, came back with a pile of books and told me: 'That adventure theater thing is very good, but read this first'. They were all works of Shakespeare, and that was adventure theater”.
“I realized that Shakespeare worked because at the time there was no cinema. Maybe today I would make a movie. And I also realized that he couldn't compete with the weapons of cinema, that the works he wrote had to be very theatrical. I always try to have unity of time, action and space. And FitzRoy is the most adventurous of all the plays I've ever written."
So, exteriors in a room: “I don't know how they will do the scenery. There are also no time jumps. I think when I get everything to be there and exciting, it works very well because you don't set narrative traps. And it is something different from what the public sees in the series. In El mètode Grönholm the spectators have the same tools as the characters. And in FitzRoy it is also like that”.
Galceran also refers to how he came up with it: “I like people who achieve Guinness records, those absurd records that no one has ever achieved. People who go bankrupt and lose everything to achieve an absurdity. From that idea I came to climbing, which has a similar point. "Now some women will climb this wall, which no one has ever climbed." Why? What benefit do you get? None, just the satisfaction of doing it for the first time. That's what drives those girls to climb that mountain. These types of people are the ones who make society move forward, because they dare to do things that no one has done. As in science, the experiments that are done to try to see what happens”.
Catalan version, here
