Everyone has etched in their retina the image of a militiaman at the precise moment he has just been shot down in the Civil War, with his rifle, now useless, in one hand; falling, as if in slow motion, backward. The name Robert Capa is the one one associates, almost instinctively, with photography. But what if he hadn't taken it? Although the death of that anonymous Republican soldier has become a universal symbol, it is not known for certain if Robert Capa, the pseudonym by which the Hungarian photographer Endre Friedmann was known worldwide, was the one who pressed the shutter and immortalized that moment. Around that doubt, Negatius has been built, a play that wants to vindicate the invisible and very unknown Gerda Taro, Robert Capa's partner, also a photographer and with a 50% chance of having been the one who portrayed the Republican militiaman.
Both Gerda Taro and Robert Capa were pseudonyms. The couple had invented them to better sell their snapshots, which were poorly paid coming from two Jewish refugees living in Paris. They thought they would be paid better if they said they were representatives of a very reputable American photographer who had come to work in Europe, with a name that, coincidentally, recalled that of film director Frank Capa. In turn, she went from being Gerta Pohorylle to Gerda Taro, wanting to emulate the musicality of Greta Garbo. They succeeded and the photographs that the two took interchangeably began to be better remunerated, but he took the credit and she was relegated to oblivion, intensified by her premature death in the Civil War, in the Battle of Brunete.
"I knew the figure of Robert Capa, but not that of Gerda Taro. The first thing that shocked me was: how can it be that I know who he is and didn't even know she existed?" explains Sílvia Navarro, author and director of Negatius. Navarro's discovery came through the actors who perform the play, Laura Riera and Roger Vidal. The two told her the story they would like to star in, convinced the playwright to write it, and she began to research to build the plot. In full lockdown, she finished writing it and submitted it to the Premi Frederic Roda, organized by the Diputación de Barcelona and the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona (ADB). To Navarro's surprise, they won, which opened doors for them and allowed them to start looking for a space to carry out the work. The chosen one was the small Sala Flyhard, in the Sants neighborhood, which allowed them to propose a very intimate format, in which communion with the public is necessarily guaranteed. In a first run, within the framework of the Grec festival, the play has been seen from July 14 until next Friday, August 12. For the next season, it is expected to be programmed again for another month, starting in mid-September.
With the rehearsals, which began in May, almost two years after closing the text, the author and actors realized that the external context had changed. Both Taro and Capa had been refugees, and she had especially portrayed the suffering of the population during the Civil War. The war in Ukraine had once again brought to the table images that seemed distant. Navarro has not introduced new elements into the play, but she believes that now her phrases provide a new reading. "We haven't touched the text, but the way of expressing an opinion when the two tell their experience resonates with today's refugees and we incorporate that opinion," she says. Perhaps because the play is very immersive and the Civil War has been deeply marked in the collective imagination, with such a distinct and differentiated entity, it is difficult to see these new similes on the Flyhard stage.
To raise the curtain, Negatius resorts to a slightly less recent event. Along with photographer David Seymour ---also a pseudonym to hide a Polish name, David Robert Szymin---, Capa and Taro kept in a suitcase between 3,000 and 4,000 negatives of snapshots taken during the Spanish conflict. Capa abandoned the photographs as best he could when he fled Paris before the entry of the German army, already in World War II. The negatives preserved in what is known as the Mexican suitcase were lost and did not appear until the late nineties. Navarro's play begins in the afterlife, when Taro and Capa reunite, both dead, upon learning that the blessed suitcase has appeared. Taking into account the age difference between both actors, the plot shows them at the moment they perished. She, shortly before turning 27. He, older, since from the Civil War he went on to report many more until a mine killed him in Vietnam.
From that original point, the work tells their story, personal and shared, revives scenes of their relationship and gives them the miracle of looking each other in the face again. A license that Navarro has taken and that heals, even if symbolically, the life they could have had if a Francoist tank had not taken the young, energetic and volatile woman that actress Laura Riera plays. On stage, represented as a light box, the doubt of knowing who Robert Capa really was, she or he, both... But, as Negatius demonstrates, there are questions that can never be answered. In truth, perhaps that is the least important thing and what really matters is memory and bringing out of the darkness, as if it were a negative, those who were trapped in it.