There are authors, especially women authors, who wrote for generations after theirs. Or as Shelley said, speaking of poets and philosophers, there are those who are "the unrecognized legislators of the future." Like the Brönte sisters, Caterina Albert, Virginia Woolf, or even Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Yourcenar would be one. Or at least that's what Carme Portaceli thinks, who is bringing to the TNC the version she has done of Fuegos with the Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade, a work made up of short prose inspired by Greek mythology. “Yourcenar was a transgressor and like all those who truly are, the society of her time did not accept her,” says the director.
Previously, Michael de Cook has staged his version of Obra negra with the title of L'alquimista in the same theater. It is the first time that we can see a piece staged by the Belgian director after he provided Portaceli, as a playwright, with a correct adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf and an extraordinary Bovary by Flaubert. From Cook, who studied literature before theater, he came to Yourcenar through his passion for the author and after a long conversation with the Catalan director about what she could do at the TNC with a Catalan cast. For him, although set in Bruges in the 16th century, Obra negra "talks about current things, such as freedom, religion, fanaticism, in an apocalyptic period very similar to ours."
“Yourcenar tells the story with a lot of perspective, like he wants to kill all the fascinating moments, and with a lot of philosophical undertones,” says De Cook. For him, the theater was the ideal medium to intervene in the novel, since it is the art where he can mix "the plot, poetry, reflection and, at the same time, talk to the audience." “The theater allows you to do what you want and, furthermore, provide a work with a certain moderation”, he adds.
The Belgian, however, is not the first to adapt Obra negra. It has been done in France for a decade, as well as other novels by Yourcenar, such as the famous Memoirs of Adriano. This one, De Cook, has her pending and she has no doubt that one day he will dare. De Cook also really likes postmodern literature and believes that Yourcenar is one hundred percent. And with her, as with Woolf and other iconic female writers and characters, he has been able to take on female authors who "have not been represented very much."
Portaceli reaches Yourcenar by another route. From Europe they asked him for a work related to the classics and he thought that there was no one better than her to refer to the classics in a contemporary way. The director came through Simone de Beauvoir and that mythical phrase from The Second Sex that says: “The day a woman can love with her strength, not with her weakness, not to run away, but to find herself, not to give up, but to affirm itself, then love will be for her the same as for man, a source of life and not mortal danger. She has liked "the very personal journey" that she takes through the history of love through the Greek classics. “When you read it, everything seems to be made up of big phrases and you think that it can't be done, but you immediately realize that Fuegos has a very intense emotional journey, which is what we are interested in showing in a theater,” she indicates.
Portaceli is not surprised that Yourcenar is back in fashion, like so many novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has adapted Charlotte Brontë and Woolf, among others. In addition, when you dedicate yourself to the theater and you are a woman, there is not so much to choose from. Most directors go through, what a remedy, the great female characters of Chekhov and Ibsen (The Three Sisters, Nora...), some classics (Medea, Antigone...), but the list soon ends. On the other hand, there are many magnificent novels written by women in the last two centuries. Woolf said, remembers Portaceli, that the novel is where the woman can develop her imagination.
What happens, however, with contemporary theater, where there are many excellent authors? “Contemporary theater speaks of the human being with thick brushstrokes and the novelists give it a philosophical value, which allows to build a theatrical structure that represents you better,” says Portaceli. Yourcenar, who rescued what interested him in classical Greece and Rome, speaks to us face to face at least half a century ago about some of his masterpieces that today storm the Catalan and European theaters.
