You can be the author living Spanish more represented of the time and, in spite of this, to be nervous before a premiere. Last Tuesday, in the shadows of a corner of the Teatro Valle-Inclán in Madrid, about to begin one of the last trials of The magician, Juan Mayorga (Madrid, 1965) was. Has published about forty works, but it is only the fifth time he addressed one of them, after The tongue to pieces (2012), Reykjavik (2015), The cartographer (2016) and Intensely blue (2018). “If I always struggled to call myself a playwright, yet I hardly consider myself a director. One never ceases to feel an outsider. In fact, I only dare to direct pieces of mine”, he explained to THE COUNTRY.
The mage, as the entire production of Mayorga, was born out of the enlightenment. Everyone who knows him knows that at any moment you can pull out of the trouser pocket of one of those libretillas lower case letters (always the same) in which points, ideas, thoughts, possible themes for a work, a phrase to a dialogue… a couple of years Ago, in a fit of courage, the playwright, he volunteered to be hypnotized at a magic show. “But after tests, I was declared unfit and I was sent to my site. Right away I noted several questions: why have I been rejected?, how do I know that I am not hypnotized?, what would happen if that people that has been supported back home still hypnotized? I saw something powerfully theatrical in all of this, and I felt the desire to write this work”, she recalled Tuesday.
It came out a comedy fantastic. “Well, as you look at it. It is true that things happen that go against the logic: that woman who comes home flying and ensures that it continues to mesmerized. But the work is structured in such a way that invites the viewer to question if what you are seeing is an extravagant fantasy or something that can happen in any home. In any case, the intention is that it is able to, as the protagonist, to look at reality in another way, to challenge routine, to protest against the inertia,” explains the author. Something of Ionesco, Beckett, Celtabet and until Jardiel resounds in all of this.
A scene from ‘The magician’, by Juan Mayorga. MARK G. POINT
Account Mayorga, when he began to write theatre, very end of the eighties, a sad atmosphere enveloped the profession. “There was No faith. A lot of people I advised to do novels or me to engage in the film, that there was no future in the theatre,” he recalls. Today, however, the atmosphere is effervescent. “We live in a very interesting time, there is a new generation of authors very dynamic and the scenario has turned to be an appealing place for both creators and the public,” he says.
Part of that change, although his modesty prevents him from recognizing him, is due to the work in these last three decades have developed creators as the own Mayorga. Works as The translator of Blumemberg, love Letters to Stalin, Himmelweg, or The cartographer, translated, and represented in all the world, are proof of the dramatic writing is a genre of living that you can reach the highest level of literature. Even also to make it worthy of its author to a chair in the Spanish Royal Academy, an honour that was granted last April, but has not yet entered officially because it is still preparing the inaugural address.
The theme of this discourse it is clear from that he knew that he had been elected: the silence. “This being an entry in the house of the words, I wondered what word would be most essential for me. And the answer was clear: silence. Not only for the value it has in the theater, also in life. The silence is the medium of the words and at the same time its border. I think also of the great utterances of the silence in the theatre, for example, in The house of Bernarda Alba. It is the first thing and the last thing he says Bernarda in the play,” he summarizes.
tonight, in the meantime, the voice of Mayorga will be heard in the big house, teatro español, the Centro Dramático Nacional, an institution that this year fulfills its 40th anniversary and the playwright adores —“Here I saw my first theatre, Dona Rosita the spinster—, because it considers essential in the development of the performing arts in this country. “With its lights and its shadows, of course, but there is no doubt that it has contributed immensely to the current ferment. The stakes for the new drama that has been done in this last stage, with Ernesto Caballero on the front, has been instrumental,” he says.
however, he warns: “As I do not think it is good to fall in the euphoria, I always like to remember that there are peaks, difficult-to-achieve: Lope, Calderon, Valley, Lorca. They keep me with the feet on the ground”.
