Three hours and forty minutes (with intermission). You have been warned. It is not one story, but several; it is not one situation, not even a conflict: it is an intergenerational, exhaustive, and complex portrait of how the Civil War and Francoism continue to navigate our present.
Well, it must be said that there is little of the present: the protagonist —more than a protagonist, Alba is the link to the past through her university research— is set in 1992, surely because, if the action took place in 2026, the connection with the Transition or with Francoism would be too distant. A close link, or at least not too distant, with the trauma was necessary. Barcelona. 1936, 1939, 1944, 1976, 1992. Collserola up there, with persecuted republican militiamen. Not a single mention of the Arrabassada (it wouldn't have cost anything), but, in short, the losers of the war deserve their just homage, especially in light of the atrocities of Francoism. And in the end, the big question: if we are a synthesis of all that, if the trauma has really remained hidden under a great silence, to what extent have we been marked, damaged, and unresolved?
In the Library, the spatial arrangement is semi-enveloping: stage in the center and audience on three sides, with a scenic narrative constructed through projections, videos, photographs, very little furniture —tables and chairs— and abundant supporting props —flags, rifles, guitars—, along with costumes that recreate each era and, above all, intertwine them. We see a militiaman crossing a conversation set in 1992 or Lluís Llach singing in 1976 while a Francoist militant has just said goodbye to his wife. The message is that ghosts continue to run among us and within our veins, whether we want it or not, and that resource is accurate and effective. Perhaps, then, the dialogues could be shorter and more direct, the scenes more to the point, and the emotions, the empathy with the characters and their situation, more intense. The historiographical will, and the attempt to find a fair balance between eras and mentalities, perhaps neutralize emotions and the necessary love for the characters too much. Sometimes, not always, but on occasion, scientific research seems to become the objective, when it is through emotion, through intense storytelling, that we can learn the most. *La letra con sangre entra* (Learning comes with pain), as they used to say.
Silence, shame, and taboo constitute the great theme of the work. However, it does not give the impression that in this country little has been said about the Civil War; it is understood if the reference is to Francoism or to the family, intimate, and personal reluctance to relive the experiences of the war. The narrative, by necessity, I suppose, becomes Hispanized: there is much talk of the history of Spain, of the two Spains, of how the Popular Front was an almost peninsular cause. Catalanism, to be clear, appears little as a historical agent of the time, and that is not entirely unfair either: it was diluted between the two blocks and, therefore, the result is what it is. A Collserola divided into two sides, where what identifies us as a national community barely appears in the form of persecution of the language and evocations of the Nova Cançó. In fact, in the synopsis of the work, the word Catalonia is not even mentioned, and I insist that this is not completely unfair. It is what it is: we don't come out particularly well in the Olympic Games either, if we stop to think about it.
"If the trauma has really been covered up by a great silence, how messed up and irresolvable have we become?"
The interpretations are impeccable, the staging works and, in any case, perhaps it is the text that seems to get unnecessarily entangled. It is not complicated for Natàlia to adopt Alba as a war name, nor for the Alba of 1992 to be an orphan for obscure reasons, nor for the eras to overlap. No, that, more than complicated, is precisely the charm of the work. When I say that the text gets entangled, I refer to what was pointed out before: it turns out to be more instructive than moving. Occupied with tying up loose ends, it sometimes forgets to tie our hearts. Not everything needs to be so perfectly explained and justified: in fact, in a war and a post-war, that is impossible.
The general feeling is that, as always, Oriol Broggi has masterfully handled a story that perhaps carries too much weight on its content. But it soars, oh how it soars; oh how necessary it is; oh how talent overflows everywhere. The play begins by speaking of faces that no longer exist, of people who cease to exist because no one remembers them after death. They are people as if they had never lived, because we walk over centuries of anonymous dead. The true challenge of the text should be that these people remain forever etched in our memory and that we take the scar, more than the knowledge, back home. When the text doesn't quite achieve this, Oriol Broggi's direction and the impeccable performance of the actors do. I take them with me, as always when I go to the Biblioteca, in my heart and in my retina.