You have to be careful with modern scenery. I entered the Fabià Puigserver room of the Teatre Lliure so confidently, when I decided to shorten the path to get to my seat sooner, passing right through the set. With the dim light I did not appreciate that the set designer Frederic Amat had created a space with several levels. When I wanted to realize it, my feet were already suspended in the air, and my knee stamped on one of the edges of the step that delimited the stage space. Before the sharp blow, all eyes turned to me. Without shedding a tear, I pretended nothing was wrong. I got up as fast as I could, and walked hiding my limp to my seat. There was certainly no better way to deal with a tragedy.
It was about Yerma, by Federico García Lorca, who will be at the Lliure for three more weeks. Then he goes to Madrid. Run, because it is one of those jewels that when you want to realize it is no longer on the billboard. With music by Raül Refree, who embroiders it again, at the head of the cast is a María Hervás capable of shrinking her soul when she is torn apart by the impossibility of being a mother. Hervás, that every time she goes on stage she reminds us that she is our best actress since Núria Espert, and that she overflows with not only stage intelligence, she has invented a way of speaking. She recites the text as if she had directed it herself, as if she had been gestating for some time some phrases that, if he had known her, Lorca would have written for her. With some Hervás trademark inflections of tone, you leave the theater with her melody in her brain, and very aware that an experiment like this can only go well for her. If they also put Camila Viyuela or Isabel Rocatti next to it, the result is more than five minutes of applause.
Lorca wrote Yerma in 1934. It has rained a lot (although now less and less) since then. And the interpretations that have been made of Yerma have been different depending on the interests of whom he adapted to the poet and playwright. Is Yerma a melodrama that sweetens a maternal instinct as well as a murderer? Or is Yerma an innocent victim of an oppressive society that stigmatizes those who stray from the path, even though they don't even mean to? Federico was not going to have children, nor did he seem to want to camouflage his homosexuality with an unwanted heterosexual marriage. How to survive such a conservative society? Were the winds of revolution going to free the spirits from so much oppression?
You always have to take into account the context, the most intimate passions and the merely objective conditions, also in our days. Whether in 1934 or 2022, it is advisable not to stay in the first layer of the political epidermis. This week Irene Montero has not only been a victim of machismo disguised as freedom made in Vox. Montero is the object of lynching as was Pablo Iglesias. It's not just her uterus that makes her the target of insults. She is the fact that she is on the left and promotes structural changes in society. What was being dealt with in 1934 in the Asturias revolution was profound, just as what Podemos claims in the Ministry of Equality is profound. Hence the attacks. Attacks that other ministers do not suffer even if they are women. Montero yes, some so coarse that they prey on her in relation to her husband.
Let's be smart, like Lorca was, and help found a society where we don't camouflage attitudes that mean a resounding fall into a fascist past. They want the left represented by Montero, Iglesias, Belarra, Colau, Gabriel or Díaz to disappear. Let's act smart. let's not be silent If not, they will happen again.
