La Una Rota publishing house has been publishing the main texts of Juan Mayorga for years. In 2022, Himmelweg saw the light of day, accompanied by an essay by the thinker Reyes Mate, where he talks about a “popular and critical” theater, and El Golem, along with an essay by Santiago Alba Rico, in which he celebrates the call on stage for that clay creature who, like all of us, "the words of another have been put into the mouth". Shortly before, the same stamp published 581 maps, a version illustrated by cartoonist Daniel Montero Galán. And for January they are preparing a non-venal edition that will reproduce the text that Mayorga read during the delivery of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.
The fact that Mayorga's theater is published in book format is of special importance for the also member of the RAE. He explains to us that, in adolescence, before becoming a theater spectator, he had already discovered it as a reader. “I remember the impact that reading Buero's Historia de una escalera had produced on me. And years later, if I was asked about my favorite play, I would mention King Lear, which I had read and not yet seen on stage. He had seen her on the stage of my imagination. “I have seen, in my imagination, many works that I have not seen on stage. I have read them differently from the way I read a novel or poetry”, the playwright tells us.
It is not surprising that his last published work is Himmelweg, one of the pieces that have had the greatest international impact, and that confronts us with the dangers of a representation that is mere simulacrum, a culture understood as an excuse and condition of possibility for barbarism. A Red Cross delegate visits a concentration camp, and there he finds the daily scenes of a community that knows how to hide the horror when the curtain falls before the eyes of the world.
It is precisely an updated version of Himmelweg, directed and performed by Raimon Molins, which can now be seen at the Teatre Akadèmia, where the author will participate, on January 4, in a discussion with the company. This is a work that Molins had already directed in the Atrium room almost a decade ago, and in which they have now wanted to fully explore digital tools as a means of artistic expression in theatrical language. “The work speaks of the present based on historical events of the past. Remembrance, memory and the appearance signified through the art of manipulation and populism are the fundamental themes”, maintains the director, who affirms that “we live in a society based on the creation of desired realities through networks and television".
"Mayorga's characters are always apparently clear but deeply contradictory," says Molins, something that, he says, helps us better understand the human being, "his nature in the face of fear, beauty, or the unknown."
Since Himmelweg premiered for the first time, in 2003, at the Alameda theater in Malaga under the direction of Jorge Riviera, the author himself has been discovering layers of reading. “It has been revealed to me that the fundamental issues are, in addition to the extermination of European Jews, the invisibility of horror, the manipulation of the victims and the place of theater in our lives”, explains Mayorga. “If I am the author of the character I represent, if I am really the one who chooses my words and my gestures, theater is life. But all that we do not to express what we are, but to mask it, is also theater. That theater that we practice to hide our interests or forced by the interests of others. Perhaps this masking theater is more important today than ever, given the public display of life to which not only celebrities are exposed, ”he concludes.
