Two years ago, the premiere of Pack, the work of Jordi Casanovas written from the transcripts of the trial to the Meaning, shook the national scene with an unprecedented impact for several decades. Since then, the production of Kamikaze It has been seen in more than sixty cities in Spain and Latin America, has served as inspiration for documentaries and other plays and has given wings to the dramatic genre par excellence of the 21st century: documentary theater. On the occasion of the representation of Jauría next Sunday 17 in the Cervantes Theater, within the Malaga Theater Festival, with a cast made up of Fran Cantos, María Hervás, Ignacio Mateos, Javier Mora, Raul Prieto and Martiño Rivas, its director, Miguel del Arco (Madrid, 1965), points out some keys about the work and, incidentally, about the announced closure of what for five years has been the headquarters of his company: The Pavón Kamikaze Theater.
-What is the most difficult thing when directing a work like Pack?
-When Jordi Casanovas passed me the text, I was immediately scared. Not so much because of the harshness of what he was telling, but because, directly, he did not know what to do with it. It was written in the most faithful way and, therefore, with a dry and direct language. But to that text you had to put, as Lorca said, a poetic costume. You always have to look for that suit, you always have to invite the viewer to look, but this time we were inviting the audience to look at a cesspool, we knew that what we were going to find at the outset was the reluctance of many people, so there was to be especially careful. It was about applying salt to the wound as we were opening it, and it was not easy. Given that the text contained very short sentences, I understood that there was a musical structure there and I chose to direct the cast as if it were a string quartet, with the same precision. And as for the treatment of the subject, since we only had one woman in the company, the actress María Hervás, I considered the contribution of other women essential, so I invited the stage director Chus de la Cruz, the lawyer, to the rehearsals Lucía López and the journalist Isabel Valdés, among others. Their input was invaluable and helped define the project.
– At some point did the actors show reservations to do or say something foreseen in the text?
-Each and every one of the team members has had doubts, we have threatened to leave or we have broken at some point. From the beginning I made my intentions clear: it was up to us to try to understand, stick with the characters, not judge them. The easy thing would have been to start from the assumption that the five people on trial were monsters, sons of bitches, but the text we were working with was not Manichean and we had to stick to that. So much so that there are those who have accused us of being on the side of the rapists, or at least of not positioning ourselves against it with sufficient vehemence. But our intention was different. We wanted to understand the difficulty involved at the social level to assume that a certain custom becomes a crime from one day to the next. The culture of rape is deeply ingrained in Spain and elsewhere, and not everyone finds it easy to change perspective. We are talking about a victim who was 18 years old at the time of the events, on a night during the San Fermin festivities, at three in the morning. She met those five men and she showed the same attitude that I would have shown myself or anyone else her age. Only when they put her in that portal did she understand what was going to happen. So, he did the only thing he could do: he closed his eyes and waited for everything to pass as before. Even the prosecutor of the trial, Elena Sarasate, affirmed that in what head could fit that those men were going to do what they did. The problem is that we share a culture that holds women directly responsible for this: it is she who has to protect herself, be careful, not stay alone and avoid strangers. The victim’s mother confessed to me that in the hardest moments she came to think that it was her fault for raising a free woman, not a fearful woman.
-Have you ever missed the fact that more time had passed since the events to mount the work with a little more distance?
-No. I am more and more convinced that we did it at the best time. It is true that they came to label us opportunists, but it strikes me that journalists are not accused of the same when they come to the fore on issues that they have not even been able to know in depth. What we do at Jauría is the same as we always do: take a topic and invite reflection. Juan Mayorga says that the public must leave the theater with more doubts and questions than they had when they entered, and of course at Jauría we don’t give a single answer. I remember a function in which we invited fifty judges: in the subsequent debate, each one showed his position and we could see very different reactions. But that’s just it. That each one can make their own reflection. Without screaming.
“If in order to make our way of doing theater sustainable we have to corrupt it, we are not going to go through there”
-Juan Mayorga also affirms that the theater is responsible for making what is complex in itself seem complex. Was it inevitable in a play like Pack?
-Yes, or like Strindberg’s mandate: the theater has to look where others look away. If all the men who think and act like these rapists were to be killed, very few would be left alive. The case of the Pack is terrible, but it is not the most serious that we know of. We are talking about five hunters who viewed everything they did with absolute normality. When one of them was asked at the trial if it seemed normal to him to record his partner with his cell phone while he was raping the victim, he answered yes, he did not see anything strange in that. But, on the other hand, the lawyers of the five men asked the victim quite naturally, for example, if she was well lubricated while they were raping her. This is also seen as normal, which says a lot about the court proceedings in this country.
-Actress María Hervás, who plays the victim, has a notable emotional charge in the play. How was your work with her during rehearsals?
-The American director Anne Bogart talks about the need to create spaces of complicity in rehearsals so that later the functions can be dangerous. That has been my commitment, with María and with the rest of the team. She also had her moments of rupture, her crises. At one point, in the middle of rehearsal, he gave a cry, said he couldn’t take it anymore and left. My response was to go for her, give her a hug, show her all my support and include that cry in the work.
-What will become of your company, Kamikaze, without the Pavón?
-The truth is that I have not stopped to think about it yet. It has been hard to keep the house open these years, but it has also been a unique, unrepeatable shared experience. At the moment, we are still open until the 30th. I would have liked to do a farewell show, but with the pandemic it is impossible. I don’t know how we will manage to do theater without a house, but we have works on tour until next summer and that will be when we make a decision. It seems clear that our way of doing theater is unsustainable. But if the way to make it sustainable is to corrupt it, we are not going to go through there.
– Did you expect any solution from the public administration?
-I was hoping that some politician would call me to study it. But they have only done it to express their regret. Anyway, I am not naive. I am not going to propose formulas for public-private collaboration to our liberal politicians. It is not a plan to waste time.
