‘Jorge Dandin’, our society through time

Published in the journal ADE Teatro No. 110, April-June 2006, section “Notas de dirección”

Molière wrote Jorge Dandín in 1668 in response to a situation that was becoming widespread in the society of his day, and that in many cases ended up as a headache and an inexhaustible source of problems and disputes between spouses: marriages of convenience. A noble family, decadent and ruined, finds itself forced to arrange a marriage for its daughter with a prosperous bourgeois in order to obtain the money it so longs for; in exchange, the bourgeois’s lineage will be rewarded and his descendants will enter the aristocratic circle he so longs for.

What do I rescue from that text today?

I cannot help having been born in this age; I belong to the most immediate present. The spectators, of course, share this condition with me. We both know the play belongs to a distant past, and even so we are willing to let ourselves be “deceived”, to allow our senses to be filled, to let those words from the past embody a reality in the present. Our present.

Jorge Dandín is a story of ambitions, a game of slippery powers resting on the delicate breasts of a lady who has nothing to do with such strivings, and who rebels and fights against a tyranny imposed on her against her will.

Jorge Dandín is the story of wanting what you cannot have, of an unstoppable urge to seem what one is not, to reach where one cannot reach, to buy what cannot be bought.

Jorge Dandín is also a love story… a love of money, of power, of what one does not have, of eternal youth, of the wildest passion and the shameless tumble.

Jorge Dandín is a game of appearances, of deceptions and disenchantments, of half-truths, of lies and mockery.

Jorge Dandín is a constant provocation, a wink from the past that becomes plain to us, a yesterday that persists and reminds us, in our present, that we have not changed a great deal, that we have learnt little and forgotten much, that we are still lost in the same labyrinths, that our deeds betray our words and that, in the end, greed still corrupts us, ambition still eats away at us and avarice still tears us apart.

Today, more than ever, Jorge Dandín has reasons of its own to be staged. Society — ours, the one we build and destroy — sees itself reflected, distorted and caricatured in this beautiful piece that withstands time and its meanness.

How do I put it into practice?

I need the spectator to understand from the very first moment that they are attending a show that was written in a very distant past, and that this show they are watching today also speaks about us, involves them.

The first step is a dramaturgical process meant to bring the central conflict closer and make it clear within our society. To that end I make a series of interventions in the text to ease its reading on stage. Perhaps the most important, since it sits at the heart of the proposal, is the creation of a chorus in which the character–actors, playing with this duality, question, berate and lecture the character Jorge Dandín–spectator. For this I reshape Jorge Dandín’s monologues, in which he wonders about the viability of his actions, and place them in the mouth of this chorus, rescuing the ultimate sense of the text and subjecting it to a formal, distancing process that leads me irresistibly to song.

Once this convention is established, all that remains is to reaffirm it. For that I surround myself with a young cast, so that the spectator subtly understands that the actors, in playing their roles, are nothing but instruments of a narrative process. To strengthen the proposal I decide that the character of Madame de Sotenville should be played by a man, thereby setting up a new duality in this game of appearances.

During the analysis of the literary-dramatic text I toy with (and later carry out) the idea of cutting the character of Colin, placing his actions in the hands of Lubín. In this way I considerably reinforce Lubín’s character and his function within the frame of the play, while quickening the scene.

The music and all the sounds that appear in the staging cannot be pre-recorded; they are created by the actors. I do not want the spectator to slip away from me: I want them to be aware at every moment that what they are watching is a performance.

The stage and set concept is likewise subordinated to this proposal: a modular design, changed by the actors themselves, allowing multiple spatial combinations, meant to place the spectator in a rococo garden synthesised in such a way that all the modules are identical, in a single colour, white, present on the floor as well. Nor can we forget the vertical structure on which Molière’s text rests, which leads us to build a simple staircase that serves as a balcony but which, continuing the game of conventions, stops being one in order to become an element at the service of the stage narrative.

The costumes place us in the seventeenth century, but they present a gradient that starts in white at the shoes and gains colour as it rises, folding itself into this game of appearances where not everything is what it seems and what is does not seem so, thus establishing a link between the society of that age and our own. The characters, dressed this way, seem to emerge from the set. In truth they are part of it. Likewise, a delicate play of colours brings out the different interrelations that join and divide the characters.

This is the starting point; from here, 42 rehearsals enjoying a cast of 7 actors, asking of them and demanding of myself a little more each day, outlining, tacking, erasing and fixing the constant discoveries, cleaning every gesture, every movement, losing ourselves so as to find ourselves at the end of the rehearsal with a renewed material, fresh, in some way ours.

Acknowledgements:

Aníbal Fernández: Jorge Dandín. Pedro Casas: Lubín. Javier Laorden: Sr. de Sotenville. Diego Velázquez: Sra. de Sotenville. Mario Sánchez: Clitandro. Enka Alonso: Angélica. Isabel Alguacil: Claudina.

Costume design: Vanesa Bajo. Set design: Juan Manuel Álvarez. Music composition: Mariano Lozano. Movement adviser: Esther Acevedo. Production: Julia Martínez. Miman Teatro.