"Two words: Cervantes and Mayorga, why more?", this is how Josep Maria Pou began the press conference for Palabra de perro, the new play that Juan Mayorga is premiering at the Teatre Romea. A press conference that, as Pou also said, could have been a play in itself. Why? Well, because talking to Mayorga is talking to a restless, creative, reflective, poetic mind... He is the kind of person you would spend the whole day with sharing a coffee.
But, as he pointed out at the press conference, a playwright's work is not complete until they have their team by their side. In this case, Rakel Camacho, the director of the piece, has found meanings in the work that he didn't even know were there. Mayorga was inspired by Cervantes' El coloquio de los perros to write this play that starts completely from scratch, but it is not the first time he has tackled a play starring animals. The reason is that, as he himself said, "I believe in the poetic and political value of the animal on stage."
We talk to Juan Mayorga about this Cervantine re-reading, about the poetic and political value of the animal on stage, and about the need to find one's own voice to defend freedom.
— You based it on Cervantes' work, but what of it is in your theatrical proposal? Have you taken some scenes or is everything completely new?
— It is a work born from the enthusiastic reading of Cervantes' Coloquio de los perros and the impression that there was a lot of theater there; this text awakened in me the desire to imagine Cipión and Berganza represented by actors and speaking words. The Cervantine novel is structured according to the picaresque model: a narrator tells which masters he has served and the vicissitudes of his life, which allows the author to present a critical view of the society of his time.
In my fiction, Cipión and Berganza have hidden their speech and accepted silence because a dog that speaks like a human is in danger, both from humans and from other dogs. When this unusual encounter between two talking dogs occurs, each finds someone to whom they can tell their life and, therefore, tell it to themselves.
Berganza rediscovers the word and, in doing so, rediscovers his past: he tells his life for the first time, but he also tells it to himself and discovers who he has been and who he is. I am indebted to Cervantes' work, but I have taken great liberties to write a work that I feel is my own. The masters Berganza speaks of dialogue with our time and the spectator will recognize them. Furthermore, I did not want Cervantes' compassionate gaze, nor the light of his wonderful word, nor his paradoxical humor to be lost in my rewriting.
I did not want Cervantes' compassionate gaze, nor the light of his wonderful word, nor his paradoxical humor to be lost in my rewriting.
— In the end, what you do is take the anecdote from the story and give the character a bit of self-awareness...
— Probably, this is already in Cervantes' work, but of course it appears very prominently in this piece. Berganza begins by not wanting to speak because he feels ashamed of his gift of speech, he understands it as an anomaly. However, Cipión —who is in a way the psychoanalyst of the play— asks him to give voice to his past. He slowly leads him to this abyss of the self that appears when we approach our memory.
— What are Cipión and Berganza like, broadly speaking?
— Berganza has gone through very diverse circumstances and, without knowing it, has made his greatest virtue the ability to identify what each master wants him to be. Therefore, he has lived no other life than the one others have allowed him to live. Little by little he becomes aware of how abnormal this is and that another past —and another future— would have been possible. He is a naive being, with little consciousness, who has docilely accepted the violence of others upon him and who, precisely in this story, comes to understand who he could have been. Before him is Cipión, who asks him for the courage of memory, because remembering requires courage, especially when a life has been unfortunate. Before Berganza, Cipión is an enigma.
Perhaps you'd be interested to know that, many years after writing a first version of Palabra de perro, I learned that Sigmund Freud, in his Viennese adolescence, had a secret society with a friend called "Sociedad Española". The friend called himself Berganza and Freud called himself Cipión, which is extremely interesting. Freud detected that there was a psychoanalyst in Cervantes' text, and in the play we have brought him to the forefront.
Remembering requires courage, especially when a life has been unfortunate.
— Is Cipión's story known at any point?
— We don't know Cipión's story. Berganza tells him: "You tell it now, I've told enough." But Cipión insists no, that Berganza must reach the end. Berganza asks him if he's keeping a secret, but this secret is never revealed. After all, the psychoanalyst doesn't have to tell us his life story.
— You mentioned that before starting this project you had to rewrite the play. How was that process?
— It's life itself that rewrites: time erases or asks you to incorporate one more sentence or develop words. I sometimes say that time degreases and bleeds texts; it tells you that that sentence you thought was so important is not significant and that, on the other hand, another one is missing, or that you should find an action to accompany the word. I must say that Berganza and Cipión are fundamental characters in my own life: I haven't stopped thinking about them, they have accompanied me all these years and I have imagined situations and possibilities for them that have led to this last version.
— When did you first start with this text?
In the late 90s, perhaps 97 or 98. I had read the Novelas ejemplares and at one point, almost 30 years ago, I suddenly started to desire theater. But this is common in my experience: when they ask me how long it takes me to write a text, I answer that it takes a lifetime. I am in a permanent joyful combat because the characters live with you. I could go out into the street now and Cipión and Berganza could probably be there telling me: "Listen, we'll talk about this." This has made the text diverge from the original Cervantine, but at the same time I believe it is intensely Cervantine.
When they ask me how long it takes me to write a text, I answer that it takes a lifetime.
— How does your craft as a playwright work when you revisit a text from years ago? Do you keep it stored until a director asks for it?
— Sometimes, that happens. When a director asks me for a text, I reread it and usually this rereading makes me feel dissatisfied, I feel there are possibilities that I only notice at that moment. But other times it's the characters themselves who demand you. There are texts with which I haven't stopped fighting, whether or not there has been a staging in between.
— You have spoken on occasion about the political and poetic power of animals in theatre. Could you explain it a little better?
— Palabra de perro predates other works of mine that arrived earlier in Barcelona where animals also appear, such as Últimas palabras de Copito de Nieve, La tortuga de Darwin, La paz perpetua or La gran cacería. These are my five attempts with the animal on stage. As for the poetic value, if the spectator accepts that there is an actor playing an animal, the framework is broken and an extraordinarily fertile situation is built. If the spectator accepts that the animal speaks, what word do you give it?, what subject does it deal with? This offers enormous freedom in the use of language and in the imagination of how these animals move on stage.
And then the animal on stage has a political value, because the actor who represents the animal is at the same time a representation of the animalized human being. This has a key importance in a time like ours, in which so many human beings are treated as animals. In Palabra de perro there is a meeting between Cervantes and Kafka: if in The Metamorphosis they call you an insect, you end up transformed into an insect and believing you are one. Here we end up discovering that it is not about animals that speak like human beings, but about animalized human beings who have been stripped of their word.
The actor who represents the animal is at the same time a representation of the animalized human being.
— The play also has room for humor. What does it contribute to a story like this?
— Humor is already in Cervantes' Coloquio. I believe that humor is a form of thought that allows for a desacralizing view of matters, no matter how serious they may be. For me, theater must be capable of presenting the complex as complex, and humor has the virtue of disarming the spectator: while they laugh, you can smuggle in something hard and powerful that demands their reflection. Of course, the best humorists are also aware of the limits of humor and that there are things one should not laugh about.
Humor is a form of thought that allows for a desacralizing view of matters.
— Regarding social criticism, what themes do you address today?
— First, it criticizes the hypocrisy and falsehood of a good part of the masters, who defend one discourse but live in a contradictory way to it. But, above all, there is a severely critical view of the way the dispossessed are treated and animalized: those who have no other property than their body and who are stripped of their word, their consciousness, and reduced to silence. There is a criticism of abusers, but also of systemic abuse.
There is a constant battle for words, and that indicates the strength they continue to have.
— In this work, the word is used as an instrument to question reality. Do you think it still has that strength today or has it lost its value?
There is a constant battle for words, and that indicates the strength they continue to have. Power and the powerful dedicate many resources to controlling the word and occupying us with theirs; we are bodies occupied by words. It is up to us to resist and find our own word, because freedom begins there. Before with discourses, freedom is defended by practicing and exercising it, and in the construction of our own word, much is at stake.