"I can affirm that this work will never leave the billboard as long as we are all alive." With these words, the Polish director Krystian Lupa reaffirms his commitment to Ritter, Dene, Voss, the work of the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard that premiered in 1996 in Krakow with the same three performers who continue to represent it today. That all refers to him and Agnieszka Mandat, Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik and Piotr Skiba, the two sisters and brother who star in this drama of the Viennese bourgeoisie.
This story has become mythical, like its director, a benchmark on European stages, who is always present in all performances. This "professional rigor" is one of the aspects highlighted by the director of Temporada Alta, Salvador Sunyer, in the presentation of the production.
Ritter, Dene, Voss has already passed through Girona twice, the first in 2006. For this third time, the festival organization has chosen to present it in Barcelona, at the Romea theater, only next Tuesday, October 18. Three hours with intermissions, spoken in Polish with subtitles in Catalan.
The action takes place at a long family dinner, in which two sisters, moderately successful actresses, await the arrival of their brother, a philosopher, who has spent time in a mental hospital. Upon his arrival, the brother presents clear signs of his mental state and family conflicts and the drama of loneliness appear.
For Lupa it is “one of Bernhard's most personal and profound texts”. In these years, "little by little the critics and the public have been discovering the human drama of great depth that is hidden in this kind of palimpsest". He also refers to the presence of “the anguish of intellectual madness”.
But how do you perform a play with the same performers as in 1996? “When we took it up again after a few years of having stopped representing it -recalls Lupa-, we were able to recover the sets because they had not been destroyed. We thought that great efforts would have to be made, but it was as if we were in a seance and the play began to transform with the actors. Those characters would come back, and it was an incredible effect.”
“The fact that the actors get older also enters into the secret of the characters. With Bernhard we have three lonely people who have lost happiness according to stereotypes, such as marriage. Old age is there, but what remains is a youth not exhausted. It is the child that inhabits the adult”, he concludes.
Catalan version, here
