Alfredo Sanzol (Madrid, 1972) was drawing up a new work in which a woman got into the head of her partner. It was a suggestive approach to sign a comedy of his, with surreal and touching humor. was going to headline Mainly fantasies. But then Putin he struck out at the Ukraine. “And there I blocked myself. For three weeks I was paralyzed. But at that time I realized that what I needed to write was about the war”, explains the director of the National Dramatic Center to El Cultural.
[Alfredo Sanzol: “Si perdemos el humor, no sabremos entender ya la realidad”]
“The persistence of Ukrainian artists in continuing to create Despite everything, it pushed me. In fact, the protagonist is a playwright and director from there who does not give her arm to twist ”, she comments. She is Patricia, embodied by Natalia Hernandez, determined to make theater against all odds, against bombs and drones. When Sanzol had already more or less written the start, she came into contact with Anabel Sotelofrom the Ukrainian company Pro English Theater, which came to Spain in May to present The Book of Sirensmontage curdled in a shelter in kyiv.
Sanzol read Sotelo what he had. “That she liked it gave me a lot of encouragement to continue. On the other hand, she told me something that I haven’t stopped thinking about: that art is one more instinct. Doing theater for them was the way to stay alive and help the people around them”. That is, a valuable wreck in the middle of the shipwreck. Here is one of the core of a work that kept the title of the project relegated to his desk but added the tagline for resistance.
A ‘Fundamentally Fantasies for Resistance’ moment. Photo: Luz Soria
Because art, in Sanzol’s opinion, rearms us once torn to pieces. That is the underlying thesis, that the author of tenderness puts in the frontispiece of his text through a quote by Michael Ende taken from a conference by the German writer (The endless story) on children’s literature: “True art, true poetry, are always born from the totality of the head, heart and senses, and restore that totality in the people who have access to them, that is, they restore health, they heal.”
Sanzol is an expert in this matter. He himself has recovered from deep setbacks through writing and stage direction. Setbacks like the death of his father (the magical calm) and the separation from his wife (The breathing). Now could be thought to change the scale. That who he intends to cure is not himself but a community, a country devastated. But he doesn’t see it that way. “When I focused on my traumas, I was offering something to the public, which would include people who had also faced loss and breakups. The intimate also has a social dimension. And, likewise, the community can affect us in the most intimate, as it happened to me with this war”. So don’t think that now you move on a different plane. There is no demarcation possible.
“In ‘Fundamentally…’ there are two plots, one comic and the other tragic. The first one ends up being imposed”, affirms Sanzol
Talking to Sotelo was doubly inspiring for him, because the Ukrainian actress and translator of Nicaraguan origin also told him that humor was absolutely essential to maintain the presence of mind in the face of so much adversity. That confession was a moral support for the Navarrese playwright’s bet, which implied his risk. Because his efforts to make a new comedy – that of the woman immersed in her husband’s psyche – did not decline when he decided that he was going to delve into the barbarism unleashed in the Ukraine. “Hearing that about humor helped me put aside the prejudices that made me question my impulse. It was validation,” he admits.
laugh against the violent
Although Sanzol is clear that humor has been a parapet to protect himself from violence for many years. He lived in the 70s in Pamplona, hard years for ETA. Already then he sensed the potential of a smile in the face of savagery disguised as ideology. And he applied it in some of his texts such as great days y couscous and churros. He was one of the pioneers because in the way of wielding hilarity against terrorsomething that here in Spain we have been slow to assimilate, until massive successes such as Eight Basque surnamesby Emilio Martínez Lázaro, on the big screen, or Burundanga by Jordi Galcerán, on the tables.
“In Fundamentally fantasies for resistance [que estrena el día 24, cuando se cumpla un año del comienzo de la guerra] there are actually two plots, one tragic and the other comic, and the latter ends up dominating the first. Although more than fighting, what these two forces do is dance together ”, he explains. The startling story is that of a Ukrainian company trying to maintain vital signs under the Russian siege and, on the other hand, the one that incites us to laugh is that of a Navarrese baroque choral ensemble that is invited to the Kremlin to sing in front of Putin because he has fallen in love with them watching a video of his on YouTube.
Thus we enter a delusional journey whose objective is to put an end to the bloody leader. Another crazy journey in the style of the one he showed us in The bar that swallowed all the Spaniards: that of the two priests who go to the Vatican so that the curia gives them the necessary bull to relinquish their habits. “This one is even crazier,” says Sanzol with a half smile, who has surrounded himself with a cast of his recurring accomplices: apart from the aforementioned Natalia Hernández, paco deniz, Elena Gonzalez, Juan Antonio Lumbreras…
[‘El bar que se tragó a todos los españoles’, de Alfredo Sanzol, mejor obra de teatro de 2021]
For them, like a tailored suit, he wrote this daring comedy in which the characters rebel against the author, as in Pirandello (Six characters…), Unamuno (Fog) and Woody Allen (The Purple Rose of Cairo). And the fantasy turns against a fierce reality.
Russia-Ukraine War
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