Juanjo Puigcorbé returns to the theater after 11 years. After a long absence from the public arena following his abrupt departure from politics, in recent times he has starred in series such as Between Lands and the second season of Alfa Machos, and also a film in Argentina in which he plays Pope. “It is a dystopia. A curious guy,” he says with amusement in a bar in Madrid next to the room where he rehearses Roca negra, a play by Ignasi Vidal (Barcelona, 1973) about fatherhood starring a father and a daughter who are writers. A production with which he starts the performances this Thursday at the Pavón Theater in Madrid together with María Adamuz.
Puigcorbé (Barcelona, 1955) talks about the play but also about his absence from Barcelona theater and his fleeting time in politics: signed in 2015 by Esquerra Republicana to be number two on its list for Barcelona, he was Councilor for Culture of the Provincial Council Barcelona, a position from which he jumped in 2018 due to an internal report that accused him of workplace abuse and that the actor refuted and assures that it was only due to internal political disputes and an attempt to ruin his life. With cruelty.
How do you experience the return to the stage?
I have resumed my career a little. He was very perplexed. After the four years of politics in which, although hypothetically I could continue working, I never did so because I had no human time, in the three following years that I was in Barcelona neither my wife nor I have had any type of job. Which is a little creepy. It is very difficult to live in a city where you cannot work. It just can't be.
What do you attribute it to?
To many things, but in any case, apart from attributing it to whoever, because I have, logically, my clear suspicions, objectively, you cannot live without working. And when it happens, I think for many, there is a problem. In Barcelona I always see the same people, in the same places all the time. I inaugurated the Center Dramàtic de la Generalitat with Ibsen's Peer Gynt and yet in the last 36 years I have not received any proposal from either the Lliure or the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. I have already understood the message.
In 36 years there is a good chance that both an official public, private and subsidized theater can call an actor who is supposed to have some abilities. On the other hand, in Madrid they have always taken me into account. Even in the period he was in politics. And at home, nothing. It is not normal. I can't live in a place that happens like that. I love Barcelona. But both me and my wife can't, we are not rich.
Perhaps he is not a prophet in his land?
No. There are other people who experience the same thing. That it is difficult for them to work there, other people leaving... In Madrid there has always been a third of the Catalan acting population. Núria Espert, Marsillach, Fernando Guillén, Aurora Redondo, Alicia Agut. It is a country that does not absorb all the creative power it has and that is why it creates so many universal Catalans, because everyone leaves. My daughter, for example, lives in Australia, she has a doctorate in environmental sciences and has had to go find a life abroad.
The talent that Barcelona generates is so great that it cannot absorb it, it is clear. What is not understood is that a little chapel stays doing the same thing all day, like a loop. The same people do everything. Theater, cinema, television, dubbing, theater, advertisements. Everything Everything everything. You think: one day I will have to be called to do something at the National Theater... well, never. When there is never, there is a serious problem.
Has Madrid treated you well?
Always. In Barcelona it's not that they treat me badly, it's that they don't treat me.
And why did you decide to make the leap from Madrid to Catalan politics at the height of the process?
It was a time when I was also a little upset with things that were happening here. And many things had happened: everything about the Statute, the big demonstrations in Barcelona... They offered me the possibility of going to the Department of Culture or the Barcelona Provincial Council as a Deputy for Culture, which is what I finally did. I asked my wife, my daughter, my mother, and they told me, well, if you believe... Why not? I exercised with will and desire. It had a budget of 80 million euros and activity was frenetic.
But I tried to do things according to a rational criterion that was not partisan and internal friction began... and the way to resolve it seemed terrifying to me. What they did to me has no justification of any kind. They looked for ruin for me and that's it. You've already been told, you've already read novels, you've already watched series and movies about politics to know what it is about. But reality far exceeds it. I never had the opportunity to publicly defend myself against that kind of two-page provisional report that was released on television and that was released, obviously, by whoever had to release it. They had told me before, if you don't leave office, we'll let this go. And they did it.
I thought: I'm going to defend myself because this is bullshit, but they didn't give me the opportunity anywhere. I have all the documentation to prove that it is a lie. When someone close to you makes that move to destroy you, so that you can't fight back, which is the typical mafia thing, one is touched. I couldn't understand anything. I received the support of many people from other parties, except my own. There was a will to destroy a person. There was a desire for him to have a bad time. I don't want to say that I'm not to blame for things, I have my share of responsibility, but the cruelty...
And it is a situation that made me hesitate in my profession as well. Now I'm back to what I do, logically with a few more years. You gain weight in some things but you also lose abilities. Not like a dancer, not like an athlete, but our profession also needs mental and physical health that declines with age, although other resources grow.
You entered politics at the height of the independence process project, how do you see the result?
There is a territorial problem that is not solved, that has to be solved. Spain is a state with a large population on the periphery and in the center of the circumference and in the middle that great empty Spain absorbed by the two poles. The entire periphery, which is the majority, has little voice in the parties that are unitary, led from the center. It is a huge contradiction of a country that was colonial and that when it stopped being colonial in 1998, it devoted itself to the African project and a concept of Spain where Catalonia was the first to rebel against the levies, although Prim and company were also Africanists. Catalonia becomes a traitor of that Spanish concept and from there a problem is born that we still have to deal with and that has not been solved at all.
In Catalonia, federalism is natural and independence was a formula to force the State to break a status quo. People felt that the infrastructure is not there, the Mediterranean corridor is not being built, the Barcelona airport is in the hands of Madrid... And we are in the same place, they are trying to pacify but it is not fixed, the cure is still not the right one. .
The problem is latent. What happens is that it is believed that there is only one way to understand things as legitimate. And that is a serious problem. Because there are people who believe it and there are people who exploit that truth. No. Everyone has a way of understanding it and they are all legitimate. I still think the same. But the ideal world is one thing and the real world is another. In the real world I have encountered things that I don't like at all.
Why return to the stage with a work like 'Roca Negra'?
I really liked the text. It is the story of a successful writer who has a daughter who, in turn, is also a writer, but without success. She is the same age as my daughter. The work talks about the relationship between father and daughter, about the resentments that exist due to the absence of someone who is known, who travels. It talks about universal issues and a topic that has been little touched upon. Motherhood has been touched upon a lot, but fatherhood, little. There are things that resonate with all fathers, with all daughters. And the performance moves. All of us who are parents or have been children can understand these characters who are genius and figure and who argue with power and with affection. Ignasi has portrayed his generation here.
What was yours like?
Mine perhaps had a more countercultural vision of the world, more hippie. All values were in question. The war, the drugs, everything. It was the world of '68, the power of imagination, the search for oneself, fulfillment, which was the magic word of the time. We were all looking to fulfill ourselves, to find ourselves. Success was not a goal, it was fulfillment, which did not necessarily have to do with success. Then the goal changed in the next generation to success and then purchasing power. And then to survival and now to precariousness, in summary.
Today the actor has to spend a month and a half rehearsing, charging little for a rehearsal for only a month of performance, and if he is lucky, maybe he will tour it. Or not. With those two months he cannot live the whole year. He has to link it with something else. And with a third. And a fourth. And live with friends. Existentialism is different. My generation, that of '55, lived in a sweet time in which it was even allowed to be an idiot. We were happy. We were children of '68. Everyone allowed themselves to make mistakes. And there was permissiveness to do so. Something that now it seems that no one can afford.
