To speak with Àngels Gonyalons is to speak with the living history of our theatre, but above all with a living artist, curious and constantly seeking challenges and learning. In this edition of the Festival Clàssics and Temporada Alta, the actress lends her voice to four stories signed by Caterina Albert in Mentida, ignoble i punyent, a show directed by Sergi Belbel and adapted by Blanca Llum Vidal.
I sit down with her to learn the keys to this staging and to ask ourselves an inevitable question: what lies are we willing to accept to survive?
— The motto of this year's Festival Clàssics is "Everything is a lie," but seen as a pact and a tool of fiction. How do you work on stage with this thin line between the lie that protects us and the one that harms us?
— Wow, that's complex, isn't it? What I do is put Àngels aside. Àngels is when she's at home with the texts, reading and rereading them to transform myself into those characters or into a narrator of those stories and catapult them towards the audience.
But yes, when I work at home, with these texts. . . Look, we worry a lot about physical exercise. Now, while listening to this, I had a kind of epiphany while at home: what about mental exercise? These texts provoke mental exercise. In this meeting we had, our minds were stimulated, and we started to put perceptions, positions, or open up discussions on the table. This is very stimulating for me. My father was a philosopher and philologist, and everything that provokes debate is very stimulating for me.
If the audience leaves and, after listening to the story, keeps thinking. . . There's a first reading where you stay on the surface, but you keep thinking about it and you see that it goes further. Because we always have the thought of "this one is good and that one is bad," no, no, wait: nuances, nuances, nuances.
— Precisely Caterina Albert had to sign with a man's name to be able to write. Do you think there's a poetic point in talking about lies through an author who had to live under a mask?
— Absolutely, but she lived under a lie for survival. She was denied the Jocs Florals at the time, and it was from then on that she adopted the name Víctor Català. Implicit in this is also a feminist message. People make many interpretations of this issue; my interpretation is one of concord, let's say. It's not an attack, but a claim for our space, which has been historically denied to us. And that's how it is.
For this reason, there have been authors with this masculine pseudonym. The great lie of literature and of everything that has been written throughout history are the anonymous works: the vast majority of anonymous works are so because the person behind them was a woman.
The great lie of literature and of everything that has been written throughout history are the anonymous works.
— What is the common thread or what kind of "lies" unite the stories?
I believe that what unites the stories is deceit, which goes beyond lying. You can talk about a lie as a single event, not as a pattern of behavior. When it becomes a pattern of behavior —whether it's systematic self-deception, or deceit and treachery towards others— then deceit comes into play, which is much bigger than a one-off lie. And I believe that the common link is deceit.
— Víctor Català has a wild and very raw writing style. What is it like to give voice and body to stories loaded with such mordancy and such poignant truth?
It's raw, but it has a great sense of humor and is very intelligent. I think there are some stories that I don't know how much fun she must have had writing them, because it's cruel precisely because of this sense of humor, because of the caustic wit and irony she puts into it. The first story, for example, is brutally cruel.
— Which is the first one?
— The first one is L'amoreta d'en Piu. It talks about the abuse of the working class due to the indolence and lack of culture and judgment of social strata to whom it was denied. This leads to a great defense of education and the humanities. It is very important in society to be able to have judgment and know what you are voting for.
It is very important in society to be able to have judgment and know what you are voting for.
— At the reading, there will be talk about how lies produce violence and even political consequences. As an actress, how do you bring to life characters who move in this dark moral terrain?
— With a lot of empathy and without making judgments. Because at the first reading you might say "this one is such and such," but no: you have to do three or four readings. Thought leads you to see that good and evil are inherent in us. We choose and decide when we support our will or when we close our eyes and let ourselves be carried away by wickedness, which doesn't have to be with premeditation to do harm, but rather out of selfishness or insecurity.
— And Víctor Català's characters often move between desire, guilt, and deceit. Is there any of these stories that has particularly struck you?
— All the paintings are very striking because they are very different, although they converge on the theme of deceit and implicit lies. All of them are very poignant. There is one, the second, La Pepa, which has the least sense of humor and is the rawest.
Thought leads you to see that evil and good are inherent in us.
— What is the theme?
— It's a rape and the consequences of that rape, which end in marrying your rapist. Here, there is no sense of humor at all. The others are very cruel, but the funniest is the last one, the dialogue between the two men. But if you stop to think about it, what it does is leave them as two simpletons. It's a man who confesses that he understands the evolution of women, but that he is not ready for this evolution, he cannot. And from a lack of precision in a dialogue with his partner, the consequences are horrible. He allows it with brutal nonchalance because he is not capable of it. It's wonderful.
— The Clàssics Festival poses questions like why we lie or what truths we are capable of enduring. After rehearsing these texts, what do you take away?
— I take away a stimulus for my thought, a mental exercise. Every time I have a conversation about these stories, I leave pondering many things, and that is very stimulating for me. Learning is what I like most in this world.
Learning is what I like most in this world.
— And finally: after delving into these texts, do you think lying is a tool that destroys us or a necessary evil to coexist?
— Like everything, it has both sides. The question is balance.
The cracks of lies through Víctor Català and Montserrat Roig
The Clàssics Festival and Temporada Alta consolidate their five-year alliance with two dramatized readings starring Àngels Gonyalons and Anna Alarcón. And, for the first time, they focus on Catalan literary heritage, also featuring the voices of two women.
How much truth are we capable of bearing? With this question, the Clàssics Festival and Temporada Alta have presented their fifth joint collaboration in an already consolidated cycle that this year places lies at the center of the debate. As Sira Abenoza, director of the Clàssics Festival, explained, "the lie as a theme seemed very necessary to us because today we live with a constant sense of discredit (...) artificial intelligence has only served to reinforce this feeling of doubt." For this reason, this cycle goes back to the roots of literature and thought to understand why humans lie, and whether it is a tactic of survival, self-protection, or manipulation.
The great novelty of this edition is the shift towards Catalan literary heritage and, more specifically, towards the voice of two authors from our tradition: Caterina Albert (Víctor Català) and Montserrat Roig. Both, from different eras and perspectives, serve to dismantle moral readings and offer a view on how deception has conditioned human relationships and, specifically, the female condition.
The word lie, ignoble and poignant by Víctor Català is a selection of short stories made by the poet Blanca Llum Vidal and directed by Sergi Belbel and actress Àngels Gonyalons. There are a total of four stories where deception is shown as a device of oppression and violence against women. The staging moves through four different spaces and Gonyalons embodies the multiple voices of the stories.
Actress Anna Alarcón stars in Tell me you love me even if it's a lie, an adaptation of articles by Montserrat Roig by Gemma Ruiz Palà and directed by Magda Puyo. This reading shows another side of the coin: the lie as a refuge and a tool to endure the harshness of the world. "She doesn't make an ode to the lie, but she does say that life would be very hard raw without this capacity to invent," Alarcón explained about Roig's thought, adding that the text also addresses how women have been "relegated to the shadow of men" until they could empower themselves and assume their own voice.
With these dramatized readings, the Clàssics Festival and Temporada Alta will bring great texts to the general public to invite us to reflect: to what extent do we lie or ask to be deceived so as not to have to face the harshness of reality?