These days, La madre de Frankenstein, the masterful theatrical adaptation of one of Almudena Grandes' Episodios de una guerra interminable, can be seen at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC). Tickets for one of the highlights of the 2023/2024 season dedicated to memory sold out almost from the beginning, filling the hall completely for over a month after also doing so at the Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid. A play that lasts, no more and no less, three and a half hours, but in which one does not want the intermission or the end to arrive, in order to keep learning a little more about the hypnotic story of Doña Aurora, Germán, and María in that suffocating Spain of the 1950s, full of fear, repression, and pain.
"It speaks a lot about us, everything resonates with us and we know what it is saying. These are the roots of our country and it is important to know where we come from," says its director, Carme Portaceli. She never tires of seeing La madre de Frankenstein, at the TNC until Saturday, December 30, due to its "impressive depth," capable of reflecting how even today we feel love and desire, how we still live in a society that judges beyond its means. "Despite everything, life always ends up sprouting," she maintains.
It is not easy to bring to the stage one of Madrid's quintessential writers, with a very characteristic, sensory style capable of fusing present and past without batting an eye. Anna Maria Ricart Codina's adaptation has succeeded again, extracting the essence of the narrative, after having done so with other great narratives such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, or Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, even stepping into the shoes of Caterina Albert, the writer behind Víctor Català, a work with which Portaceli debuted at the helm of the TNC three seasons ago. "All were difficult to adapt, but this one has been the most difficult, Grandes was a very good writer. It has been a beautiful challenge," she explains.
It was the friendship between the director and the writer that allowed for this theatrical gift, made with respect and much affection. It all started with Portaceli leading the Teatro Español. At that time, she asked Grandes to hold colloquiums after the performances. "People would queue just to listen to her," she recalls. Grandes came to the Teatre Lliure to see Portaceli's Jane Eyre, where she discovered a Rochester she hadn't expected. It was then that Portaceli told her she would like to adapt one of her novels, with which she had had "a crush" as a reader before meeting her. Grandes remained silent, "an absolute silence," and went home. From there, she wrote to her on WhatsApp that she did want to, that it had thrilled her, but that she had felt dizzy. Portaceli had thought of Los besos en el pan and Grandes of Los aires difíciles. Neither of them quite saw it until one day the writer sent her the Word draft of a novel she was correcting, still unpublished. It was La madre de Frankenstein: "It's a beauty. I read it and saw that she was right," Portaceli remembers.
Grandes, who passed away at the end of 2021, did not get to know the text of the play, but both Portaceli and Ricart Codina believe she would like it, as her widower, Luis García Montero, also says, who has already seen it four or five times and is expected to also come to the TNC. "Her spirit is in it," says the director. And it comes to life with friends like Blanca Portillo, in the role of Doña Aurora, a woman who is confined in a women's asylum in Ciempozuelos for having killed her daughter, Hildegard. "Almudena's books are necessary. She had a vision of our country that needs to be revisited every so often because it is so profoundly applicable to today that it helps us remember. This story invites us to look and to raise our voice if necessary," defends Portillo, for the third time at the TNC and having already worked with Portaceli in Mrs. Dalloway, playing that complicated and rich character that Clarissa represents.
Portillo masterfully portrays Doña Aurora, who truly existed, skillfully conveying the passing years and mimicking the worsening of her health, which makes her shrink and pale, achieving that the audience empathizes with an intelligent female character who is much more than a parricide. "She is a great metaphor. In that Spain, there was something of an asylum that enclosed all of society," the actress remarks.
She is accompanied by a structuring and precise Pablo Derqui in the role of Germán and a lively Macarena Sanz as María. He returns to Spain after the Civil War, encountering a country he doesn't recognize and where everyone thinks ill of everything. He finds pockets of light, especially María, and, although they often end up being silenced and punished, as also happened outside of fiction, everything eventually gets cleared, if nothing else, ceasing to suffocate. There are more characters, all of them endowed with their own personality, as Ricart Codina intended, capable of portraying with a few brushstrokes the darkness and harshness of life during the dictatorship, giving agility to a narrative that spans decades without becoming heavy. Ferran Carvajal, Jordi Collet, David Fernández "Fabu", Gabriela Flores, Belén Ponce de León, and José Troncos complete the cast.
La madre de Frankenstein is the first co-production between the TNC and the Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN). Both cultural institutions hope it won't be the last, after its success, both for selling out tickets and for the long, emotion-filled applause they receive after each performance. The only drawback will be that it won't go on tour and, for next season, due to scheduling issues, it cannot be reprogrammed.