Known to the general public for ¡Ay, Carmela!, the playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra (València, 1940) is the subject of a series of tributes by the theater that he founded in Gràcia in 1989, the Sala Beckett (now in the Poblenou ), which extends to other venues in the city and also to Madrid, to the La Abadía theater. The Tardor Sanchis is in turn a tribute to the Tardor Pinter that the author himself organized in 1996 in Barcelona to introduce the Barcelona public to the English playwright who would later be recognized with the Nobel Prize.
Sanchis Sinisterra confesses his “overwhelming” feeling for the cycle, but recognizes “a certain complacency due to the link with La Abadía de Juan Mayorga, with whom we have a very beautiful friendship.” The playwright also feels comfortable with this Madrid-Barcelona bridge, because it is a reflection of his life, although there is a but: “In Madrid, where I have lived for twenty years, I opened the Teatro Fronterizo in a temporary location, a corsetry shop in Lavapiés , with the hope that by generating a whole series of activities that are not very frequent in the Madrid theater scene, or I would even say Spanish, there would be a reaction from the institutions, but there has been none and we have been shipwrecked. Now I am trying to relaunch a similar project with another name, Teatro del Común, but I am also afraid that in Madrid I am going to have a difficult time,” he admits sadly.
It has premiered at the Tantarantana Ñaque o de lice y actors, and at the Beckett it has just been shown Vitalicios, and the performances of The reader for hours continue. “For an author it is a very stimulating value because one always believes that works from another time, from other decades, may have become more or less obsolete. The option that Carles Alfaro invented for The Reader for Hours seemed very daring to me, because it gave another bias to the text. And so far I have not yet been embarrassed by any of the works that are being presented, because the directors have done an interesting job of fertilizing the texts with a sensitivity closer to the present moment.”
This conversation with the playwright takes place in the Sala Beckett, during a break in the rehearsal of the dramatized reading of Running after a Wounded Deer, which he directs with Aina Tur and in which, at 83 years old, the playwright continues to experiment: “ In this piece, the narrative, the poetic and the dramatic intersect and therefore something quite unusual remains. But it is true that on a personal, private level I would say, when I already know how to do something, I am no longer interested, and I prefer to investigate other aspects. And another thing that is very important to me is sharing research. I have a motto, because I make a list of mottos to guide me in this chaos that is life, which is that you only have what you share.”
Starting from the theory that he deploys in the first scene of The Reader for Hours about how to read aloud, Sanchis Sinisterra goes further and explains: “I studied, when I was older, a current of literary criticism called the aesthetics of reception, that precisely what it says is that the one who gives meaning to the work is the reader. The author only writes a kind of map, a score. I had discovered that in my rereadings of Kafka, for example, linked to different vital moments. The reception was different and then I realized that it is true that it is the reader, with his biography and with his present situation, who interprets the text.
Sanchis Sinisterra also acknowledges having drawn a lot from narrative: “I have extracted from narrative a freedom that theater normally does not have, because it is more subject to canons. First to the Aristotelian canons, which in reality were not such, but which were taken as canon. And then the conditions of the representation, the aesthetics of the theater era. On the other hand, I say that the novel was born wild, it was born from minstrels, from popular storytellers, and it has been invented throughout history, therefore it has an original freedom that theater hardly has.”
When the interview ends, Sanchis wants to add: “When I decided to settle in Madrid to spend more time with my daughters and grandson, I offered Toni Casares the helm of the Beckett, and I am very happy with that decision. Furthermore, this place is magnificent, it is a marvel, with this architectural arrangement that shows the mark of time,” he concludes.
