The rooftops have been unique and even mythical spaces. If someone was born in a house in a maritime town, that terrace can become a whole world, where the most festive, most intense and also the most intimate passages have been experienced. This is the case of the playwright Pere Riera, who had lived in Canet de Mar and who, when Sala Beckett commissioned him to write a play for the 2007 season dedicated entirely to Catalan authorship, he found that his house no longer existed. .
“The house was no longer there and when I saw the empty lot it was a shock. In fact, the work came out a little by itself,” confesses the author of Casa Calores, which premiered this week at the Poblenou theater in Barcelona. Riera, who is an author and director, continues: “Of the works I have written, this one, without being autobiographical, does have fragments of things I experienced in Canet de Mar, the town where I lived, but which are not mentioned in the work.” .
“It is not a photo album – Riera clarifies – but they are lived moments. The mother is not my mother but she is very recognizable; There is also a kind of NASA technician without a degree, who is the town's handyman, always available and guardian of all essences; and the four friends of adolescence, who grow throughout the three acts, set in 1989, 1996 and 2003. The young people start at fifteen years old.
The mother is Rosa Renom, the handyman is Jordi Boixaderas and the cast is completed with the young Emma Arquillué, Júlia Bonjoch, Arnau Comas and Eudald Font. “I have taken the name Casa Calores from a real house and have asked for permission. I like it because I find it very euphonious,” says Riera. Rosa Renom adds: “The terrace is a very lively space, where many things happen: a storytelling and poetic space at the same time.”
The director of the Beckett, Toni Casares, explains: “We are committed to an unapologetic theater of manners, which makes us relive a world that is in the memory of the author and the characters. On that roof of a house in a seaside town, the work speaks of personal ethics and dignity.”
Casares also points out that, if so much time has passed since the dramatized reading in 2007 until now, it is, among other reasons, because it is a production with many characters: “I expected a public theater to do it, but since that hasn't been the case, "I don't want to die without seeing it on stage." It must be said that the stage is a beautiful hyper-realistic reproduction of a rooftop from the last century.
In these 17 years, when Riera has picked up the work again, he has done a rewrite, to the point that it is “a new version,” he points out. “Now Casares has asked me for a fourth act, but it hasn't worked out.” And she concludes: “Living in a town or in an urban environment are very different worlds. “When you leave town you don’t know if you will come back.”
The synopsis says that summers are precious seasons and that youth is the most precious of life stages. “And when you're young, one of the best things that can happen to you is to spend summers by the sea. If, on top of that, you were born in a town with boats and a jetty, it is possible that all the summers of your youth will be soaked in a warm, salty memory.”
