With L’imperatiu categòric, Victoria Szpunberg leaves no one indifferent. The latest piece by the playwright and director strikes a chord with the entire audience. And if the viewer is a mature woman, then the unease multiplies. The work, which premiered on Wednesday at the Teatre Lliure, tells the story of Clara, a woman in her fifties, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, who, in a chain of setbacks, after divorcing and in the middle of menopause , they are kicked out of the apartment because they cannot pay the new rent.
In the Gràcia theater, the scenery of panels that open and close to offer different spaces sets the rhythm of the play, in which our anti-heroine wanders like a soul in pain. Àgata Roca plays, in a great creation, this mature, disciplined, rigorous and compliant woman who, due to a series of circumstances, is expelled from the same system that she defends. Kafka's trial is the great metaphor for this entire nightmare.
The actress says: “This character is a gift, and for a long time I will not be able to complain saying that there are no good roles for mature women. We consider how young people have it, but also how older people have it. The associate professor is based on reality: she is on the street because the building has been bought by a vulture fund and she has a salary lower than what they ask for rent.
The categorical imperative “is a concept of Kant's that has a remarkable forcefulness, and I wanted to talk about these imperatives,” declares Szpunberg, who has titled the work that way and says that it came out “very feminist.” On stage, the antiheroine played by Roca is replicated by an actor who transforms into seven characters. The architect of this fregolism is Xavi Sáez, who, convincingly and without falling into easy caricature, represents a real estate agent, the head of the department, a flirt, a waiter, a noisy neighbor...
Sáez points out: “There are so many novels and plays about heroes and antiheroes, that I really like working with an antiheroine. Furthermore, having a director who is also an author is very enriching because it makes you feel that you are part in a certain way of the process of creating the work.”
Szpunberg describes her protagonist: “She is a teacher who finds herself on a tightrope. She is not an extraordinary person, she has done everything the system has asked of her, but she is about to pass to the other side without her being able to do anything. “First I thought of a young woman, but a friend of mine who was a teacher and my age was in a precarious situation, and that made me reconsider the protagonist.” And this is surely one of the keys to the greatness of this little wonder: the current precariousness, so associated with young people, exposed in a woman who should have her life figured out.
“If there is a philosopher who has generated a rigid and forceful system and, at the same time, extremely important, it is Kant,” continues Szpunberg. The categorical imperative is a concept that today we can say is very patriarchal, because it is a precept that can include everything from human rights to Nazism, since it is an abstract phantasmagoria. She encounters a series of men from different social strata, but all cut from the same cloth. I was interested in men being paradigms, so I could focus on the things I wanted to explain, because, if not, a lot of melons would open up.”
Szpunberg concludes: "The protagonist is disciplined and obedient until one day she finds herself with a sharp knife in her hands... I don't know whether to say that L'imperatiu categòric is a comedy, but it does have a lot of irony." More than one person in the audience left the performance on opening day with that symbolic knife stuck in their chest or wanting to stick it in someone's chest.
Catalan version, here
