En un lugar de la Mancha

The idea is a simple one: to bring theatre to the places it seldom reaches or, at worst, simply never reaches. The thought that this production may be many people’s first contact with theatre makes your hair stand on end — but you also think that audiences have changed a great deal in recent years, that their cultural habits bear no resemblance to those of the past, that news travels fast out here, that the train goes by at full speed and the roads carry us in no time at all to sprawling shopping centres, bargain-basement cinemas and virtual paradises that blind our senses and lull, when they do not offend, our drowsy intellect.

Villages are no longer what they were. The audience, like it or not, has changed. We have changed.

How do you reach such different people, gathered together almost by chance? One because he is from the village, another because of a girl, some out of sheer habit, a man from Valencia who lives in Madrid and another from Cantabria who lives in Seville, a girl born here and her friend, from Valladolid…

What do we do, where will the performance take place, with what technical and human resources? How do we make up for the lack of a decent stage? How do we manage to ensure that in every town the production is seen exactly as it was designed, avoiding those hateful “adaptations” to the lighting design, the set and a long list besides?

These are the premises this stage project set out with. Two years ago Iñigo Benitez, Llanos Campos and Rosa Herrera, of Armar Teatro and Falsaria de Indias, called me to direct a production that would tour tiny villages over the summer. “We’ve got a lorry! And we want you to direct a production for us.” I accepted, delighted, without a moment’s hesitation.

What better author than Cervantes to plunge us into popular theatre? I chose three interludes: “La guarda cuidadosa”, “El viejo celoso” and “La cueva de Salamanca”.

The same old question, the blessed question, the tiresome one that whispered to me between the sheets, took shape with every reading: what do I rescue today? How do I bring onto the stage those situations that are still alive in our society?

There is always a commitment to the original text, but we cannot forget our commitment to the contemporary audience. I needed an approach that would hold the scene at a distance and present it from a new angle, so that these extraordinary stage toys could be told here and now, across the distance the centuries impose on us, without losing the wonderful life Cervantes knew how to breathe into them.

That is how I came to a commitment to form, to rhythm, to an absolute cleanness of movement, and so, from a distance, to telling a story that more often than not belongs to the past. Because form too is a powerful tool: it lets us tell what the text keeps quiet or leaves sleeping, it sharpens the intentions and reveals new shades that the dust of the years buries and distorts, and it offers us a renewed view to set beside the yellowed page.

Once that step is taken, we arrive inevitably at work with masks, because masks let us play with apparent reality and take it apart; they create another order and establish differences that alter the many relationships at play with the audience.

The result, in the spirit of Lorca and his La Barraca, travels to those places where the roads narrow and you have to pull onto the verge. A lorry works its way through the winding geography of Castilla-La Mancha and settles for a few hours in the square, on the threshing floors, or simply at the entrance to the village because it cannot get through between one street and the next. In twenty minutes a set of hydraulics raises the roof and the side panels, turning this lorry into a stage — a corral de comedias, to be precise — with everything needed to give a performance.