No author knows a priori the formula for success. Alfredo Sanzol, neither. However, in 2017 he premiered a comedy that is giving him much satisfaction at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid. This is La ternura, which since its premiere has been programmed for three or four months each season, now at the Infanta Isabel Theatre.
This July, in the Catalan version by Joan Lluís Bozzo, La tenresa can be seen at the Poliorama theatre. But there is more: the film version will be released in September. La Vanguardia talks with the Navarrese playwright, who was appointed director of the National Drama Center in 2020.
“With Andrés Lima we thought of working on Shakespearean comedy,” says Sanzol. It is the axis where all the classic comedy is condensed and contemporary comedy is created. I went through all his comedies and that's when it occurred to me that it would be nice to do a new play that was inspired by structures, characters and tricks from Shakespearean comedies, comedies from the 17th century”.
The success is such that in 2019 Dagoll Dagom and T de Teatre propose to do it in Catalan and now they are representing it again. It is already a repertoire work and now comes the film, directed by Vicente Villanueva, with Emma Suárez, Carlos Cuevas, Alexandra Jiménez, Gonzalo de Castro, Anna Moliner and Fernando Guallar.
Sanzol is satisfied with this adaptation: “I have not intervened directly, because Villanueva told me that he was interested in using the script, the structure and the characters, using a lot of dialogue material, and I told him: 'Well, what about the film adaptation? Do it yourself, of course, you'll know what you need as a director'”.
The funny thing is how the idea came about: “One day I woke up thinking that all women are the same. I had just had one of those silly, stupid thoughts, and then I thought I had to write something to get back at those patriarchal thoughts. I started thinking about a story with some guys, some misogynists, who go to an island because they don't want to know anything about women. Then there are some women who are fed up with guys and want to find a deserted island. And what if they meet there? Well, I'm going to tell this story using Shakespeare's resources. And that's how it starts.
“The first thing that women have to do when they arrive on the island is to dress as men, to protect themselves. Then they all fall in love thinking they are someone else, which is what happens to men, who fall in love with them thinking they are men, and you start playing with all the mistakes”.
Alfredo Sanzol considers that in the Shakespearean theater and also in the Baroque theater of the Golden Age “the most modern thing they have is that they are aware that reality constantly creates mirages, one after another; empirical thinking is in fashion at that time and, even so, reality deceives us”.
“All Shakespeare's comedies are about this –he continues–: reality cannot be caught, and neither can the heart of the other. Using all these resources, the substratum is very contemporary, because in the way I deal with problems it is clear that a contemporary author has written it. The work is also contemporary in that it is written for six characters: three women and three men, and, although there is a main plot, each of them has an important plot. In addition, it is written for the team of actors with whom I premiered it”.
Thus, the work is of a new plant, although Shakespeare breathes: "If the public knows his comedies very well, there are references that they can recognize from Love's Labor Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, with their coarse humor... That is also from Shakespeare, the mixture of very elevated moments and others of a more uncouth humor”.
Sanzol, who faces his time at the head of the National Drama Center with good expectations after overcoming the pandemic, considers working from Shakespeare “a pleasure”: “It is the same thing that happened to him with Plauto or Terencio. I think that these types of works are also important because they question the issue of romantic originality. It's more of an organic thing, getting into the life course of cultural tradition, and it's also very humbling, about the job and everything."
Sanzol confesses the greatest compliment he has ever heard about Tenderness: "Some ladies come out of the Abbey and one says: 'I didn't know this work by Shakespeare, and it's very good'".
