The spiderweb over Guimerà

In the essential prologue of Àngel Guimerà's Deu Obres, edited by the very militant Arola, our splendid writer-reader Toni Sala recalls that L'Aranya is a magnum opus that delves into one of our national playwright's favorite themes: paternity and family. But, Toni continues, if in works like Pólvora or Sol, solet... the author discusses the moral sense of this theme as a source of problematic ties, where children pay for the faults of their parents, in this demented text "there is the danger that it is the children who make the parents sin... before being born." Indeed, Guimerà grew up outside of marriage and, as an old man, took refuge (who knows if erotically, as Xavier Albertí and Albert Arribas explain in their excellent Guimerà; home símbol) in the warmth of the Alabert family; he lived, in short, the uprooting and the hypothetical dangers involved in deviating from the biological order.

L'Aranya is a masterful piece of tremendous moral violence, where the reproductive difficulties of a couple become the breach through which all the cynicism and Machiavellian sexuality of city life seep in, with a protagonist (now that's an empowered woman!) who decides to leave in the Ibsenian manner of a prison where there are only scoundrels and tortured souls. In this sense, the first moments of the adaptation made by Jordi Prat i Coll for the TNC ---which can be seen until March 9--- may discomfort those who have the text in mind, and the more Cuban-Berlanga references risk the viewer being distracted from the core drama of the work. But the director knows what he is doing and works hard on the patrimonial texts he re-dimensions; again, the traffic from early 20th-century Barcelona to Francoist (and phonetic) Girona of the sixties may distract us for a few minutes, but Prat i Coll's conviction dynamites our prejudices.

It is a great joy to admire a group of actors in a state of familial grace, with Mima Riera and Paula Malia spoiling us by seeing them in a permanent state of grace. And this work by Albert Ausellé (who has reminded me a lot of Albert Prat, one of my favorite actors) is a handcrafted work, between the naive and raw animality, that very few corporal-vocal shells can manage to deliver. Everyone is great, but we must praise above all the courage of a director who has treated Guimerà's magma with respect and, precisely because of that, has regurgitated it with total freedom. Sadly, this play is one of the few newsworthy joys of a centenary that has been dispatched in the Catalan way; namely, without the author's critical work published as it should be, accessible to everyone, and with only one title (one, yes!) from his immense corpus programmed in a theater that they say has an "N" in its name.

I know it's very tiresome to remain in complaint, but it is incomprehensible to celebrate an important commemoration like a centenary of an author with the delirious fact that his readers do not have his corpus available and, small detail, without performing his fucking plays! Let everyone look for a similar equivalent internationally; whatever the country, this ostracism of Guimerà is incomprehensible. I recommend the reader to rush to the volume I mentioned before, the Deu Obres, where, in addition to Sala's wonderful introduction, you will find texts that are world-class. Some cretins still label them as "minor work"; after delving into them, you will see that minor... your aunt on a scooter. In fact, if these pieces were programmed often, even in traditional versions, theatergoers would enjoy recreations like L'Aranya even more.

But this will not happen, because from Guimerà we can make very frequent documentaries (though absolutely dispensable) or university volumes in abundance (essential, but too far removed from the non-specialized reader). Anything, in the end, but moving our butts to bring the country's heritage to the stage for an audience that, seeing it well represented, would realize the treasures it holds! In the absence of the whole loaf, travel to the Nacional and listen to this text by Guimerà in a stimulating recreation. I have some reservations (I would have given more transcendence to the rape scene and would put a little more adagio in the lunch fights and in the final firecracker, as so much speed perhaps makes one lose attention in some replies, and even more so in a place of ill-fated acoustics like the Sala Gran); but all this is nonsense and the director knows more than I do, which is why he stages plays and I shoot pedantic articles of high expiry.

In another exception to Barcelona's centralist-theatrical policy, the TNC will tour L'Aranya throughout the country until June. Prepare to see it, I beg you, because it doesn't matter if he had the Nobel or not; Guimerà is an author of the highest world stature. It's a shame that, for now, we have him imprisoned on a spiderweb.