The controversy that has exploded this weekend as a result of the work Cacophony, by Molly Taylor, although it premiered at the Beckett Hall in Barcelona on January 24, has crossed the fourth wall and has splashed into the real world. As happens in the work, adapted to a Barcelona reality in the translation signed by Oriol Puig Grau and Anna Serrano Gatell, a tweet has ignited a controversy that has become a great stir on social networks, with a statement from RCD Espanyol and a counter statement from the Beckett room. And what is worse, very serious threats against Serrano, who also directs the piece.
The trigger is the reference made in the play to a RCD Espanyol footballer who is accused of rape and is acquitted, but he is not a character in the show. “It is an anecdotal reference, because the plot goes in other directions,” explains the director of Beckett, Toni Casares. If it were Dani Alves, who is from a first division team, the translation would not work, because to make the scene play, it has to be a second-class team, to make the reference to a second-class rapist."
In Taylor's original version, the reference club is Queens Park Rangers. Is it a second-rate team? Yes. Have you had players accused of rape? If two. Taylor didn't make a casual choice. The playwright and director Marc Artigau points out: “If it has exploded because there is a student who goes with the school to see the play and her classmates laugh because she is from Espanyol, what we have to do is work on that in the classrooms. But holding the artist or the work of fiction intended for an adult audience responsible for the education of minors seems misleading to me.”
Artigau praises the criteria of the adapters and adds: “On the other hand, I do not share the statement from the Beckett room. I think it is not correct that a good part of the text is dedicated to saying that Espanyol's statement is unfortunate, to mentioning the death threats against the director and to constantly flaunting the ignorance that we have found on the networks. This means that, in the end, and here is the poetics of everything, the thesis of the work ends up being right.”
The playwright and director Victoria Szpunberg, who is about to premiere L'imperatiu categòric at the Teatre Lliure, considers: “In this controversy, many things are mixed, such as the complex difficulty between fiction and reality or, even better, current events. . We are contaminated by an immediacy of current events that forces us to give opinions without reflecting, and the networks take us to exorbitant, ephemeral places. The difficulty of adaptation is also evident. What is enormous is the disproportionate reaction and threat towards a small and precarious group such as the theater. On Sunday I went to see her and there were police officers at the door: it seemed like a joke in bad taste, but the threats are real.”
Casares declares: “The networks explode, but we propose to do nothing and wait until Monday. Then a communications person from Espanyol calls me telling me that they will release a statement. I tell them to be careful because the threats can multiply. They thought about it and told me they would do it anyway, mentioning freedom of expression. That aggravates everything even more and the threats multiply. It never ceases to surprise that if a work talks about a man who is a rapist, no one is outraged, and on the other hand, if it is about a football club, yes," Casares considers.
Sergio Fidalgo, a journalist specialized in Espanyol, explains: “It is another example of the little consideration that a large part of Catalan society has towards RCD Espanyol, a historic club in our football. It would be unthinkable for a play to be made with a Barça player presented as a rapist. I have the feeling that the theater and those responsible for the play were looking for easy publicity by messing with what they consider a weak club.”
“If the work is about how things are distorted on the networks, that must be a practical demonstration,” reflects Pau Carrió, director of Macbeth at the Teatre Lliure. “The meanings that a work takes are not only the responsibility of the creators, and are difficult to calculate, the spectators are also part of it. Hamlet says: 'I have often heard it said that many a guilty man, in the theatre, moved by the realism of a scene, has felt his soul so exposed, that he has been driven there and then to confess his guilt.'” he concludes.
