Twenty-first-century theatre practitioners in the west typically fear irrelevance more than anachronism: press releases rarely waste the slightest opportunity to highlight the pertinence to the present-day of new productions from the classical canon. Created in 1986, the year Spain entered the European Economic Community, the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico/National Classical Theatre Company (CNTC) was designed as a belated counterpart to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Comédie Française. On the one hand, the CNTC staging theological or palace dramas in recent years is testament to a commitment to the traditional remit of a public theatre unwilling to subsume the heterogeneous complexity of the Early Modern period to market demands. Conversely, however, an increasing number of new strategies have begun to take the presentism of audiences and critics into account.
In 2019, the Catalan-born Lluis Homar was appointed artistic director of the CNTC. During the heady days of Spain’s Transition to democracy, he had been a key player in the Teatre Lliure, founded in Barcelona in 1976, and a point of reference for innovative productions of Shakespeare. His appointment at the CNTC nevertheless came as a surprise given that his impressive stage and screen resume did not include titles from the so-called Spanish Golden Age. Homar and his advocates emphasised that he was keen to learn and, in the process, help others to (re-)discover the Spanish classics. Over the last five years, he has commissioned books on themes like “Love” and “Honour”, designed to make the “strangeness” (perceived or real) of the past more legible in the present. A 2020 production of Calderón de la Barca’s El príncipe constante/The Constant Prince (in which Homar appeared in the eponymous lead role) heralded the beginning of a new initiative by which new works are commissioned to act as counterparts for and dialogue with the classical CNTC repertoire.
Guest dramatists are given creative freedom on the condition that they can direct the play using a reduced cast with rehearsals lasting no more than four weeks (the standard length for public theatres in Spain is six). It is not, perhaps, surprising that auto-fiction has become the default option for these contemporary dialogues. The genre is enjoying a boom in contemporary theatre and literature, whilst the CNTC has savvily favoured playwrights with authorial brands closely linked to their public personas. Alberto San Juan’s Macho grita, a companion to a 2023 production of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer/Valour, Offence and Woman (the first time a female dramatist had been staged in the CNTC’s main auditorium) and Lucía Carballal’s La fortaleza – a response to Ana Zamora’s 2024 staging of Calderón’s El castillo de Lindabridis /Lindabridis’s Castle – offer a snapshot of discourses around Spanish classical theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in present-day Madrid.
In a 2023 book published by the CNTC on women in Early Modern-Spain, Canadian Hispanist Marta Marín-Domine takes the figure of Don Juan – with his origins in the Golden Age (to be precise, El burlador de Sevilla/The Trickster of Seville, often attributed to Tirso de Molina) – as the archetype of what we might now term toxic masculinities. Valor, agravio y mujer adopts a gynocentric view of a woman seeking revenge for being duped by a Don Juan-like figure. In Macho grita, stage and screen actor Alberto San Juan envisages the figure as embodying a malign national character: “The Spaniard doesn’t doubt. The Spaniard doesn’t enter into dialogue. The Spaniard enters into combat. The Spaniard in history is an Alpha-male, which doesn’t require being born a man. Only that the will to dominate be the number-one motivation in life”. With a strong partisan following, San Juan was the chief instigator behind the Teatro del Barrio cultural centre established in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Lavapiés in 2013 where, the year after, the progressive political start-up, Podemos, was originally launched. The theatre has been central to some of the most innovative and socially engaged productions (a number of which have been reviewed by Maria Delgado for The Theatre Times) of recent years on such subjects as anachronistic rape laws and political corruption, Macho grita is the latest in San Juan’s conveyor belt of productions (which he writes, directs and stars in) seeking to dissect the problem(s) of Spain.
Featuring two on-stage musicians, the eighty-minute performance was in most other respects a one-man show. San Juan recycled the diatribes he has incorporated into earlier productions such as España ingobernable/Ungovernable Spain (2018) and Mundo Obrero/ Worker’s World (2018) – marketed as a Marxist comedy with music by the former rock star Santiago Auserón – albeit with a newfound emphasis on the Golden Age. The Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) glorifying much of the cultural production of the country’s imperial past did much to turn progressive theatrical practitioners against the classical canon. An important rationale underpinning the creation of the CNTC was to dispel both the co-opting of the classics by conservative sections of society and the kneejerk rejection by the oppositional left. It was as such counter-intuitive to witness the prejudices of yesteryear resurrected in a production produced under the CNTC banner. This would have been less problematic had Macho grita been better researched and rehearsed. Unfortunately, however, potentially valid objections to the glorification of the imperial past became lost amidst a directionless rant. At its least imaginative ebb, the play resembled a Chat GPT compendium of the purported ills of the national character and past. In an increasingly divided political sphere, San Juan’s glorification of the “other” was, I presume, designed as an antidote to the xenophobic and misogynist populism of Vox, the most successful far-right party in Spain since the death of Franco. A potentially laudable ideological initiative was, however, undermined by the anachronistic and insensitive conflation of diverse phenomena such as Francoist mass-graves and the expulsion of the Early Modern Moorish population.
Macho grita purported to interrogate how such values might have been internalised even by individuals such as San Juan who ostensibly reject them. This might have resulted in a cathartic act of collective self-flagellation had it not been for repeated evocations of the image of two Spains – through, for example, the inclusion of pasadobles played at bullfights – which reconfirmed the prejudices of the progressive audience that hell is other Spaniards.
The ironing out of the complexities of history in favour of Manichean binarism inadvertently echoed the discourse of the dictatorship. Such glib triumphalism, by which audiences attend the theatre less to engage with the artistry and complexity of Golden Age theatre than to have their prejudices and beliefs reconfirmed, was the enemy of democracy and art then and is, to a lesser extent, now. San Juan’s admittedly charismatic stage presence only went so far and could not salvage a production lacking direction in which narrative momentum was jettisoned in favour of an increasingly frenzied and intense delivery, which built to a crescendo in which the fifty-five-year-old actor, mocking his own ailing athleticism, stripped to his boxer shorts whilst the musicians bashed away at their instruments as if they were a teenage garage band. A complicit audience rewarding this icon of the Spanish left with a standing ovation on the night I attended intimates a populist turn in theatre and politics.
La fortaleza, by Lucía Carballal, at Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, Madrid. Photo by Sergio Parra (CNTC).
Lucía Carballal, well-known for her work in television, and a charismatic teacher on postgraduate courses in scriptwriting, has a devout young audience – many of whom who will never have bought a ticket to see the CNTC – drawn to narratives inspired by her experiences as a thirty-something woman forging her way in a professional world which, despite cosmetic changes, remains in thrall to the gender hierarchies of yesteryear. The semi-autobiographical Los pálidos/The Pale Ones, starring CNTC veteran Israel Elejalde (who, like Homar, is best known to international audiences for his work in cinema with Pedro Almodóvar) about a veteran male scriptwriter and an emerging female talent in television, had a sell-out run at Madrid’s Centro Dramático Nacional/National Dramatic Centre in 2023.
La fortaleza was as accessible as El castillo de Lindabridis was obtuse – Zamora was less interested in narrative clarity (the plot summation of Calderón’s play at the outset of Carballal’s play is far clearer) or stressing contemporary relevance than the possibilities for cultivating ingenious strategies and props to resolve complex scenic challenges or incorporating different instruments for baroque music to complement different verse-forms. Inspired by chivalric literature, Calderón’s fantastical play – written to be performed at court – features an eponymous female protagonist travelling on a flying castle in search of a potential husband. Lindabridis’s father died without putting his affairs in order. Her brother takes it as given that he, as the eldest male, is the legitimate heir – he refuses to entertain his sister’s claim until she can secure a man who can act as a legitimate challenger on her behalf.
The fantastical aspects of the narrative reminded Carballal of David Lynch films, whilst the initial premise brought to mind the problems caused by her own father’s premature death when she was in her early twenties. He, by coincidence, had been a professional architect who admired the baroque style. Taking as its central narrative strand a hypothetical autobiographical dialogue between Carballal and her father, La fortaleza recalls the period when he left her and her mother in Madrid’s lower middle-class Tetuán district to embark on commissions such as designing a pseudo-baroque bus station in the coastal city of Cartagena.
The mapping of the two father-daughter relationships was sometimes forced, but the inclusion of three talented young actresses – Mamen Camacho, Natalia Huarte and Eva Rufo – who had previously formed part of the CNTC’s youth ensemble facilitated a proper conversation on the cultural significance and worth of adapting the classics for the twenty-first-century. A number of in-jokes about the company ran the risk of alienating audience-members unfamiliar with the CNTC or Carballal, but helped foster a sense of community for those who did. The production was less smug and certain of its convictions than Macho grita. Extended ruminations on whether it was necessary to make concessions to render art relevant for contemporary audiences (citing examples such as the decision by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to include drawings by school children in response to the nineteenth-century master) required a critical interrogation of the cultural value in resurrecting an idiosyncratic (and, if truth be told, fairly pedestrian) text such as the one chosen by Zamora for the CNTC.
The pre-recorded sounds of Bronski Beat’s classic 1984 hit “Smalltown Boy” acted in lieu of a climax given the absence of a traditional dramatic arc of La fortaleza. That the song, an iconic presence in many autobiographical films and television series, was released in the year Carballal was born was indicative of an approach which did not so much involve a conversation with centuries past as classical drama being used as a pretext for a dialogue between the playwright and her contemporaries. This is not problematic in and of itself, but, as Macho grita showcased, such an approach runs the risk of descending into a solipsistic presentism that eschews complexity and rejects difference. Many Golden Age plays require no special pleading: they are classics precisely because they retain the capacity to talk to us.
As this review went to press, it was announced that Homar is to leave the CNTC at the end of the year following speculation surrounding financial irregularities in which he reputedly paid himself for phantom roles. La fortaleza will have another run next season but, more generally, how the CNTC will continue its dialogue with the classics remains to be seen.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Duncan Wheeler.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
