You fulfilled a prophecy.
What prophecy?
"It will take fifty years to be represented": Lorca.
Ah, the public! “Impossible theater”, said Federico... I was able to stage it myself in 1986, in Milan, for the first time in history.
Exactly fifty years after the murder of Lorca.
"You talk to my brother at night!" Isabel García Lorca, the poet's sister, told me...
Why was he telling you that?
He was amazed by things that I told him about Federico, his ideas, his texts... If I work on something with passion... things happen to you.
Who taught you to work like that?
I lived my first eighteen years in the paternal oven. I am the son of Saturday night.
And so?
My father made breads, my mother sold them. Only on Saturdays did they meet in bed.
Bread and theater, are they related?
They are the same: a play and bread must be served on time and be good. I have never delayed a performance.
Self-demanding and compliant?
Both bread and theater are essential public services!
How did you come to the theater?
Reus has four theaters, and every Sunday afternoon, theater! Although I was originally going to be a Latin teacher...
That's quirky.
I loved Latin, I enrolled in Philology at the University of Barcelona. But I also went to the Institut del Teatre...
And in the end the theater won.
We did street stunts: I was arrested and jailed for dressing as a woman.
Acting career did not.
I liked being in the shadows more than going on stage to repeat the same thing. Juliet falls in love every evening from 7 to 8... No: I get bored and that's why I admire actors.
What virtues do you value in an actor?
Ability to get out of himself and give himself, a generosity... that I don't have.
And what does he have, as a theater director?
Patience. Discipline. And I tell myself the truth: if I see something mediocre, I rectify it.
Enjoy?
My happiness is a rehearsal room. I feel free! There are no rules, there I can play, there I can go far.
An actress, in this context, accused you of having humiliated her in public.
What a lier. There are witnesses. I have never humiliated anyone.
Who did the profession believe?
“This is like opening a feather cushion on a windy day,” Paul Newman told me one day about gossip.
And he resigned from the Lliure... that you founded.
I felt so harassed and so deprived of my freedom, that I took off.
The Madrid.
Barcelona became unbearable for me, in life and work.
To that extreme?
My endorsements were withdrawn and it became dangerous to do what I wanted to do.
And good bye. How many plays has he directed her?
There have been 140 assemblies throughout fifty years of professional work.
For what purpose?
That the public breathe with the story that I tell, that everything is not a hobby.
Do you dare to choose two mounts?
The Bitter Dialogue, my first Federico García Lorca, in 1986, with Antonio Banderas: it lasted four and a half minutes.
AND...
Roberto Zucco, by Koltès, in 1993, with a newcomer Eduard Fernàndez playing a character at the same time with a big ego and wanting to disappear: like me!
And the public, don't forget...
There it was all intuitive, I had a fever, I doubted...
What made you doubt?
Given the success, I asked myself: did Federico want this... or for the public to get angry?
What do you think Lorca wanted to say there?
That he was a man. And that, as the man that he was, he loved other men.
In Poet in New York, he lashes out at "queers around the world."
He wanted to get away from the "fan fever", the mannerisms, the "crazy"... There he agreed with what Jean Genet said one day.
What did Jean Genet say?
Two “crazy women” approached him on the street asking for his autographs, and he chased them away saying “I like men”.
Who is Federico García Lorca for Lluís Pasqual?
It's light. A glow: short-lived and dazzling. The best work of him was himself.
Will his remains ever appear?
No. Her father, a very rich man, paid to have her body back. A man from Granada showed me one day a receipt for 5,000 pesetas that his grandfather received for removing earth from a ditch in Víznar in 1936...
