The night we applauded a hope

One thing should be made clear: the Teatre Lliure did not appear like a mushroom. The Teatre Lliure was the splendid and lucid consequence of a major collective combat. 1976: the first year with Franco gone couldn't just be any old year. Before the inauguration of the Lliure took place, on 2 December, the theatre business had been shaken by significant corporate manifestations, the main roots of which dated back to the self-management experiences of the Sindicat d’Autors Dramàtics Catalans (Catalan Playwrights’ Trade Union) in the years 1911-1912. With a literally exceptional Grec festival, the Actors and Directors Assembly (AAD), which had been constituted in the spring, gave a fantastic performance of the “rupture”, an exciting and unique liturgy that took place when the process that fatally, day after day, would decant the political class towards navigation through the stagnating and obliging waters of "consensus", was already foreseeable. Rather to the contrary, the Montjuïc affair could seem like the mobilisation of culture soviets who managed to turn all power relations and all stage production systems upside-down. This is the very essence of all performances: the Montjuïc “affair”, in effect, “could seem to be” many things, but, fortunately or unfortunately, there was no winter palace conquered, nor any prospect that such a thing might happen, nor any political will to allow the theatrical profession any protagonism beyond the summertime celebration.

The AAD, in spite of everything, was very conscious of the strength the sector could muster according to the circumstances at hand: “This year's Teatre Grec season,” its first manifesto read, “has acquired a truly unprecedented character within the panorama of our theatre. For the first time it is not an impresario taking on its organisation, but a collective that in a short time has exhibited a most unexpected combative nature and imagination (...)”.

It is important to remember all this to be able to minimally contextualise the inauguration of the theatre on Carrer Montseny de Gràcia. Given the proven track record of its main promoters and the lack of identifiable immediate precedents, some of us saw the opening of the Lliure as an important event, even though we could not imagine the essential role that the new facility would play in the future. Others, more distrustful, simply saw it as an operation by a group of "independents" who were slightly more daring than others.

The starting shot came with Camí de nit, 1854, a show written and directed by Lluís Pasqual, with scenography by Fabià Puigserver and music by Lluís Llach. It brought together, with very few absences, the entire founding and stable team of the Lliure: Carlota Soldevila, Anna Lizaran, Imma Colomer, Muntsa Alcañiz, Lluís Homar, Fermí Reixach, Antoni Sevilla and Domènec Reixach. Some of us who attended that unique first performance found the proposal disappointing. Deeply and doubly disappointing because we had been so extremely enthusiastic about the new theatre's first session and about a show that promised powerful ideological content: an evocation and a tribute to the struggling workers at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

“Before the first performance of Camí de nit, 1854, a session for theatre professionals, journalists, friends and the odd special guest such as Rafael Vidiella, the audience gave a long standing ovation... to the venue. An ovation that readers will judge was well-deserved as soon as they visit the new theatre, something which we unreservedly recommend. There is no doubt that for lively and communicative theatrical action, this venue is the best that Barcelona has ever had”.

My critical comments on Camí de nit provoked all kinds of rebukes. Naturally, I could never take back what I said. However, I did feel bad about the raucous tone my newspaper, El Correo Catalán, adopted when it published the criticism, exceptionally spreading the title across the page as if looking to put a loudspeaker on a cultural event that was not very successful. Lliure Night: what a sad night screeched all five columns of the newspaper, ever-faithful to that urge to find the most sensationalised way of providing news using a typographic format that often has nothing to do with the author of the information. It is worth saying that, on that same page, a box was inserted highlighting an aspect that I felt and still feel was fundamental. The lighter side of the matter was the title of the complementary note which included the significant anecdote that I translate below: “Before the first performance of Camí de nit, 1854, a session for theatre professionals, journalists, friends and the odd special guest such as Rafael Vidiella, the audience gave a long standing ovation... to the venue. An ovation that readers will judge was well-deserved as soon as they visit the new theatre, something which we unreservedly recommend. There is no doubt that for lively and communicative theatrical action, this venue is the best that Barcelona has ever had”. Thirty years later, I get the impression that something similar was said by Àlex Rigola, the Lliure’s current director, who we must count among those we consider as irrepressible defenders of the historical premises.

The last performance of Camí de nit took place on 30 January 1977 and on 11 February the baton was handed over to the Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) of Ascensió i caiguda de la ciutat de Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) with music by Kurt Weill. Brecht was, therefore, and not by chance, the first contemporary classic to visit the Carrer Montseny venue in a production that categorically asserted the reasons why the new theatre’s name was the “Free” Theatre. The new theatre, in effect, unfurled the freedom banner, not so much to practice an adolescent experimentalism that achieved ephemeral enlightenments, nor a "minority theatre, reserved for a series of initiates, but a theatre of art for everyone", as the founding manifesto stated.

The city of Mahagonny, a metaphor for capitalism and its implacable rules, was imagined by Fabià Puigserver as a boxing ring. This is the place where the weak fall under punishment by the strong. In addition to designing the set and costumes, Puigserver directed the staging of the text, translated by Feliu Formosa, in a production where the action permeated the entire theatre and the audience was addressed by a rally of exploiters who openly exhibited their obscene voracity. Regarding the core cast, which was the same, more or less, as that of Camí de nit, I believe I remember that Anna Lizaran was beginning to stand out with signs of a chutzpah precursory to the great roles she would later play. Given the primordial function of the music by Weill, Ascensió i caiguda de la ciutat de Mahagonny allowed visualisation of the Lliure’s will to combine, whenever necessary, collaborations of the highest artistic level. In this case the show enjoyed choreography by Agustí Ros, with interventions by the Grup Instrumental Català and the music director was Carles Santos
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La Cacatua Verda (The Green Cockatoo) by Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) opened on 14 April, with a translation by Feliu Formosa produced some time previously for El Globus in Terrassa. The director of the show was Pere Planella, one of the Lliure’s founders, and along with Puigserver and Pasqual, a member of the new theatre's trio of directors. Planella worked in depth on the most lively and colourful situations that took place in real time in a sordid Paris tavern on 14 July 1789, i.e. the day of revolutionary triumph, when the Bastille was stormed. Schnitzler, a psychoanalyst and friend of Freud, proposed an analysis of the possible reactions of some decadent noblemen who took refuge in the sordid Green Cockatoo tavern where actors performed revolutionary incidents, inspired by what was happening on the streets, and whose main victim would be that audience. In referring to this especially malevolent aspect of the game, I wrote: “The masochist ingredient of the noblemen flirting with their tragic destiny makes this work a forerunner of the modern psychodrama (...)”. The author was very interested in mental processes and very little in the epic that could be breathed within the context of the anecdote. The story ends after a nobleman dies at the hands of a citizen, not as an event arising from the revolution but due to a question of jealousy. I remember how well Puigserver set the scene of that tavern space and have confirmed that in the comment published in El Correo Catalán (21.4.1977) I wanted to highlight Pere Planella’s care in dealing with the gestuality of the diverse groups of characters that were so socially opposed. From the extensive cast, I underlined the work of Josep Minguell, Carlota Soldevila, Enric Majó and Fermí Reixach.

In June 1977 Leonci i Lena (Leonce and Lena) opened. It is one of the three works written by Georg Büchner (1813-1837), all in the last two years of the author’s very short life. It was directed by Lluís Pasqual, and I get the impression, from what I commented at the time, that the production was a rather good reflection of the complexity of a play that, in the words of Ricard Salvat “appears to be a simple comedy without much dimension and in reality is one of the darkest, most desperate, bitter and harsh works that have ever been written in all of European drama” (Leonci i Lena, Ed. Robrenyo, Mataró, 1977). The Escola d’Art Dramàtic Adrià Gual (EADAG) had performed Leonci i Lena at the Cúpula del Coliseum in October 1963 with a text translated and directed by Maria Aurèlia Capmany. The Lliure used the translation by Carme Serrallonga, the subject, in addition to that mentioned, of the edition that would be produced by Edicions 62 and La Caixa within the MOLU collection (February 1985).

Humour, irony and sarcasm hover over the story of the disenchanted prince Leonci and the princess Lena, abandoned to her limp gestures. In an informal way, with the grotesque of the court of King Peter, of the kingdom of Popo, and
the fidgety ways of his friend Valerio, a character with traits of the commedia dell’arte, Büchner launched a deep charge against romanticism while at the same time cruelly sketching a panorama of tired and sceptical characters. I believe that Lluís Pasqual was totally accurate in his treatment of these disentranced creatures. Regarding its staging, we remember very clearly the scenography by Fabià Puigserver, which ironically depicted an atmosphere of nobility, faithful to their leisurely and banal ways and oblivious to the worm of bitterness that was undermining it. Lluís Homar and Muntsa Alcañiz shone brightly in the play’s lead roles.

With Leonci i Lena the Teatre Lliure’s style was confirmed as ambitious and demanding, and the path was beginning towards an artistic and professional success that would become exemplary beyond its immediate cultural and geographical sphere. And, curiously, as the years ran by, and one after another, the seasons, and some special anniversaries were celebrated, that initial standing ovation of the night of 2 December 1976, which arose as a spontaneous act that released sensations and emotions that were still not completely formulated, gradually took on meaning. A meaning that was increasingly more understanding and congruent with the energies that many people had invested in the autochthonous stage scene, in such a way that, now, that first burst of enthusiasm recorded at the Lliure before it started to perform, we can understand as a frontier-instant with important historical significance. And it is so because there is a before and an after of that moment, which stands, therefore, at a crucial point within the process lived by Catalan theatre towards modernity and maturity.

Joan-Anton Benach - (article belonging to the commemorative publication of the 30 years of the Teatre Lliure)