The theatre is constantly nourishing itself on memory since it manifests itself as a ‘present experience [that] is always surrounded by the ghosts of previous experiences and associations’. This is felt both by actors and spectators, who are subject to continuous recycling processes in which reminiscences are at play. The theatre is ‘chased by the ghosts of repetition’ through ‘a continuous recycling of certain narratives and certain characters’.Reference Carlson1 When it also deals with history, it adds a new category to its mnemonic nature with works that are known as ‘historical theatre’, a term that I prefer to replace with ‘theatre of memory’: ‘one of the places in which it is possible to conjure up oblivion, to revisit the past to understand the present better, and maybe to help us choose the future […] or even fight for it’.Reference Sanchis Sinisterra2
Among current Spanish playwrights, Juan Mayorga (Madrid, 1965) and Antonio Álamo (Córdoba, 1964) are prime examples of this tendency. For Mayorga, theatre was ‘the first way to make history’. It is, he believes, the sacred place in which events and situations that live on through the centuries are recovered and engraved on memory. In accordance with this idea, Álamo believes that ‘history has nourished an important part of the best universal theatre’. His works attempt to ‘look back so as to be useful today’, because when a scene shows a certain past and not another ‘theatre participates in the present’. Thus, it ‘says more about the time in which it is taking place than about the time it represents’ because it speaks about ‘the desires and fears of the time in which it is staged’.Reference Mayorga3
The works of Mayorga and Álamo offer multiple aspects into which research can be undertaken. In their work, we try to analyse and interpret the expressive features of a poetics of memory through different resources – humour and parody, monologue, metatheatricality, intertextuality, the ‘cartographic’ structure or the esperpento 4 – that work as ways to represent the humiliation of man. From a multidirectional perspective, they relate the Civil War to Stalinism, the Holocaust and the Warsaw ghetto, thus strengthening our ‘watchfulness and resistance to current forms of domination’.
Antonio Álamo
The Trilogy on Power: Humour and Parody
Los borrachos (The Drunkards, 1993), Los enfermos (The Infirm Ones, 1996) and Yo, Satán (I, Satan, 2004) are considered a trilogy since they ‘display certain stylistic unity’ and also because of a clear thematic connection. They intend to question the power of science, politics and religion respectively, in a penetrating and often scathing reflection on the arbitrary acts and excesses of power and on man’s dominant behaviour. Álamo points out that ‘there are not as many messages as images, metaphors, a certain atmosphere and a look in which tragic and colossal characters are not exempt from humour’. Irony, humour and parody are ‘as effective as, or even more effective than, outrage and open denunciation to impact on the evils of the time’.Reference Perales5 The author prefers ‘to work with characters more than with ideas and sheer emotions’. Thus, in the trilogy, the characters are remarkably human and have a strong theatrical identity due to the detailed psychological and physical features they display as well as the pragmatism of their stage discourse. The three works question and challenge the principles of the official and monolithic history, and reveal its hidden aspects – what is not revealed in order to denounce a canonical way of reading history through a critical kind of theatre that reconsiders ideas and concepts, whilst opening up the possibility of inquiry and analysis on the part of the reader/spectator. In Los enfermos,Reference Álamo6 which deals with the enigma surrounding Hitler’s death and what happened to his corpse, the characters and situations are degraded into an absurd and macabre game full of ambition and arrogance:
STALIN […] I will make the world believe that those are the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. […] I will make the world believe it and doubt it at the same time. […] No State can survive if the threat of chaos does not float in the air.
[…] Fear is unconditionally provided by the State. Fear and death, Mr Churchill, and in that corpse that is both there and not there, we have a great amount of death and fear. And we should not stupidly waste it with too many certainties. […] We must administer the fear, not waste it. (Ref.Reference Álamo6, Act. II)
In Los borrachos, which refers to the ‘celebration’ of the scientists in los Álamos at the success of the atomic bomb, the techniques of humiliation typical of the esperpento (irony, violent contrasts, theatricality) combine the verbal with the theatrical as a distancing technique through which the author re-writes history from some demythologizing presuppositions.
KISTIAWSKY. Do you know what our role is in this comedy? […]
That of idiot wise men! Fakes! Nobody understands anything completely! We can grasp only parts, small parts […] But our knowledge is just partial […] ignorant knowledge. (Ref. Reference Álamo6, Act II, Scene VI)
OPPENHEIMER. […] FEAR, FEAR, FEAR! […] INTIMATELY, I …try to defend THIS, these lines that somebody has written, the best way I can, and I say to myself: ‘What for?, What message does it want to convey? What do I have to REPRESENT? […] WHERE IS THAT BRILLIANT ENDING, DIRECTOR?! (Ref. Reference Álamo6, Act II, Scene VIII)
The borderline between what is real and what is not blurs. The characters make hazardous journeys in which references to the world of the theatre, on the one hand, show the parodic nature of the work and, on the other, sharply exhibit the extreme situation of these men with sarcasm. They are extolled due to their scientific and intellectual capacity, whilst at the same time destroyed because they know that they are responsible for the worst massacre in history. Reality/fiction, truth/lies, tragedy/farce, are the two faces of a mirror that forms and deforms these ‘tragic and colossal’ characters, as Álamo has noted.
Álamo chooses to rummage in European history and brings to light certain circumstances that have never been revealed, as well as possible encounters that never took place. The objective is to account for an exercise of power that is constantly crouching behind the nuclear danger that threatens the world and leaves it permanently fragile. The frequent ‘summits’ that reveal the arbitrary and capricious domination of some countries over others and that even seem to have the power to question religious dogma within the Vatican, where the ambition of Yo, Satán Reference Álamo7 is dominant.
Everybody’s living a horrible lie, and why would the Holy Father be different? Is he better than the others? This need to be pure is nothing but arrogance. […] who can live in truth? Deep inside this is nothing but pride, arrogance… (Ref.Reference Álamo7, Act III, Final Scene)
Singing under the Bullets: The Forcefulness of Monologue
This work shows a staggered view of the first official act of Franco’s supporters that took place on 12 October 1936, in the Main Hall of the University of Salamanca. Several personalities were present ‘but two of them became famous after being protagonists that morning: General Millán Astray and Don Miguel Unamuno, who quarrelled with unexpected violence to people’s dismay’.Reference Álamo8
The monologue builds the theatricality of the character and of the story from the voice and the perspective of General Millán Astray (‘obsessive founder of the Spanish Legion and Franco’s first commander in the African campaign’) who talks and sings about his life through harangues and songs, using inflamed, arrogant and redundant language.
The character is presented as degraded, rendered esperpentesque (in the scene ‘sitting, with a different expression […] seven corpses, one of them belonging to General Millán Astray’) changed into ‘human waste’, a ‘great and macabre rag doll’. He speaks in the first person and ‘confronts the public inquisitively’. The addressees are on stage or in the auditorium, the borderline between reality and fiction is blurred, and the ‘fictionalised audience’ is an ‘undetermined addressee’ to whom he speaks as follows: ‘Dear Spain’, ‘Legionaries, my brave soldiers’. In the climax of the play, the subject of the enunciation reconstructs the opponent’s discourse mediated by the third person and the introductory verb:
Unamuno says he will speak because he has to. He says that to win is not to convince […] Unamuno says he is incapable of remaining silent. He says that to remain silent means to lie. [...] He says I am a symbol of death.Reference Álamo9
In a work where intertextuality is part of the dramatic construction, this brief intertextual intervention by Unamuno, between direct and indirect speech, develops unexpected force.
You will win but not convince, says the old man. (He mimics the man). You will win because you have more than enough brute strength. But you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. […] To my mind, to ask you to think about Spain is in vain. I have said, he says. He has said, I say. (Ref.Reference Álamo9)
From his admiration for Unamuno and his need to look into the ‘ingenuous and contradictory support’ of the writer for the uprising in 1936, which ends in the event to which the piece is referring, Antonio Álamo constructs a play that centres on the opposing figure. He fuses memory and words in the hallucinated look of a character and of the historical circumstances that enter the fictional world through Valle Inclán’s concave mirrors, which establish the theatre as a place of memory. The esperpentic vision brings multidirectional memory into the scene when it creates a space from which the audience can think of new ways of oppression since ‘more than seventy years later, nationalist speeches, very similar to these ones, keep on working as an alibi for the murderers’ (Ref. Reference Perales5).
Juan Mayorga
Cartas de amor a Stalin and Himmelweg. The Theatre within the Theatre
In both Cartas de amor a Stalin (Love Letters to Stalin, 1998) and Himmelweg (2003), Mayorga rehearses metatheatricality through his technique of ‘theatre within the theatre’. This discursive strategy tries to reveal both Stalinism and Nazism’s use of simulation and deceit in order to provoke reflection on the spectator’s part. The works make reference to two historical events: first, to the letters that Bulgakov untiringly wrote to Stalin asking him to stage his plays and outlining the silent and brutal persecution he suffered; second, a visit by a Delegate of the Red Cross to a concentration camp, where the ‘representation’ of an idyllic life is accepted as real for the purposes of his report, as he makes no attempt to enquire any further.
Bulgakov, ‘representing’ Stalin, constructs a figure that materialises on stage and develops such strength that he dominates the dramatic and psychological space ‘since the artist’s mind and life end up colonised by the tyrant’ (Ref. Reference Mayorga3, p. 220).
STALIN. None of your actors has understood you as I have. […] Because nobody knows you as I do. As nobody knows me as you do. That is why I feel so much at ease here, with you. […] I stand the Kremlin less every day. […] I am surrounded by intriguing people.Reference Mayorga10
It is the same as the ‘representation’ Gottfried has prepared for the Red Cross Delegate, in which he masks reality within fiction:
GOTTFRIED. I know you can do it. It will not be the first time. Who has never feigned? At work, in your familt […] Everybody has pretended once, we should not be ashamed.
Silence.
Focus on what you are doing. I know it is difficult, due to the trains. Try not to listen to them. […] Pay attention to the words and gestures and you will not hear the trains.Reference Mayorga11
‘To overcome pain and laughter’ is possible due to the metatheatricality. It becomes the most adequate resource to represent a situation that would, otherwise, make the spectator feel to the point of nausea. Not only does the author distance himself from the horrendous and sinister events, but he also addresses the spectator and places him/her in the centre of the dilemma: s/he doubts if s/he is facing a reality that looks like fiction or rather facing something fictitious that looks very much like reality.
El cartógrafo: History in the Key to a Map
The 37 juxtaposed sequences of the play are presented as instantaneous scenes, without indications to locate them, except for the first one, which is very general: ‘In Warsaw, between 1940 and the present time’. The characters’ interventions reveal not only their relationships (husband/wife, grandfather/granddaughter, for example), their ages and jobs, but also the places and dates of their interventions. The absence of indications, the fragmentary structure, and the ambiguity of the dialogues seem to complicate the dramatic concretisation of this text. The following anecdote summarises one of the characters:
Once upon a time in a ghetto, when everything died around him, an old cartographer decided to draw a map. But, as his legs were so weak that they could not hold him up, as he could not look for the information he needed, he asked a girl to do it for him.Reference Mayorga12
That part, which touches us, moves us, shakes us up and, at the same time, fills us up with mystery and surprise, claims to be read – and seen – in the key to a map and, to do it, the text itself provides the necessary indications:
On a map, certain details are visible and others are hidden. Maps hide and uncover, form and deform […]. A map always takes a side. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 5)
A map must speak at first sight. We do not draw it for us but for those that will look at it someday, maybe in a thousand years’ time. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 8)
Mayorga admits that he does not want to ‘reconstruct the past as it really was […] but he wants to draw maps out of it that highlight points, lines, relevant accidents for contemporary man and, maybe, for man of the future’ (Ref. Reference Mayorga3, p. 219). If we unfold the sequences, grouped by the main characters, as a map, there are three superimposed stories that could be distinguished due to their temporal reference: in the present, Blanca (visiting Warsaw, she discovers some photographs in an exhibition of the synagogue that trigger her search for documents of the ghetto); in the distant past, the ghetto Old man/Girl); in the near past, Deborah (perhaps the girl from the ghetto). The stories are intertwined, their times and spaces overlap and alternate with other sequences, which are frozen or pantomimic, which have been built with no verbal signs that anticipate the following scenes and concentrate the meaning of the previous ones. The frozen sequences work as mnemonic registers of the piece, as footprints, as ‘residues of memory’ (Ref. Reference Carlson1, pp. 11–22) since together they play a relevant role in the composition. To understand the internal logic of the play and the way reality is represented, Mayorga suggests Leibiz’s idea of the monad as a philosophical reference; ‘a point that gathered all the other ones’.Reference Gabriele13 W. Benjamin says: ‘[w]hen the flow of thought suddenly stops at a saturated constellation of tensions, it causes a shock through which it comes together and forms a monad’.Reference Benjamin14 The frozen and/or pantomimic scenes form a revealing vision, a signal, the meanings of the whole and of each part of the work as a monad that condenses the whole of that particular story that gathers all the stories and works as a document or register of horror; as a silent space that says much more than words. The dramatic discourse speaks also through the forcefulness of images since these express what cannot be named. The silence – ‘the shadow of language’ and its border – seems to be the most appropriate way of seeing what is invisible, since ‘words should not have life, should not have a neutral sanctuary in the places and the time of bestiality. Silence is an alternative’.Reference Steiner15
Words and images alternate and complement each other in a fragmentary structure that has its connections, its relationship, so that ‘the spectator himself can construct the logic that articulates what is presented’ (Ref. Reference Gabriele13, p. 169). If we draw a line that organises the story, there are some revealing repetitions – anaphoras – which connect the two planes of the story that refer to the past (The Old man and the Girl as Deborah), united by the current search for Blanca. This involves the reader/spectator since we are all looking for her.
Old man: The most important aspect of space is time. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 5)
Deborah: To see is not enough, we must make memory. The most difficult to see is time. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 35)
Old man: If you can escape, your duty is to tell the world what you have seen. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 34)
Deborah: I walk slowly, remembering, as if I had to recount what I have seen to somebody who is waiting for me. (Ref.Reference Mayorga12, Sequence 35)
The repetitions of the penultimate sequence (Deborah) concentrate the meanings and serve as a guide to understanding the piece as a whole. They work as the ‘monads’ that allow us to see the universe of the play whose secret passages have, for us, an internal design; an implicit relationship that gradually puts the story in order and produces the action, despite the fragmentarism and the spatio-temporal dislocation of the scenes that generate tension between them. The verbal aspect –the discursive axis – strings the story together (Blanca, Old man/Girl, Deborah) and the scenic aspect – the dramatic axis – fits those fragments together and integrates them in the composition. Two spaces and two times come into conflict: Warsaw (the world)/today versus Warsaw (the world)/ghetto) and the need to tell the horror generates tension between substance and form, and content and representation. The mission of art, to reproduce what cannot be reproduced and to describe the terror of the most terrible and savage atrocity, is once again manifested.
The Old man’s mandate to the Girl (‘your duty is to tell the world what you have seen’) reaches the spectator and changes his or her perspective, from which the whole world can be perceived. The key to the theatricality of this piece is in this reader/spectator’s cooperation, since we can ‘jump the continuum of history’ when a hidden and scary side is revealed to us. The theatre allows us to contemplate it ‘from a totally different perspective. The past and the present change when that happens’ (Ref. Reference Mayorga3, p. 227).
The (Im)Possibility of Representation
For Michael Rothberg,Reference Rothberg16 the representation of the Holocaust – and, to my mind, of any other traumatic event – is supported by a triple demand of documentation, of reflection on the limits of representation and of compromise with the audience. The works that have been analysed here have, as starting points, characters and facts that have been historically documented and are materialised on stage through resources such as the esperpento, parody, humour, theatre inside the theatre or just silence. These give the spectator time to process the information on stage and, after some reflection, to interpret horrible and scary facts that resist their re-presentation. He will not place the spectator in the role of the witness, because he or she is not, but he will boost the construction of an ‘experience of loss’ in the spectator from a perspective that is critical, albeit at the same time compassionate, brave and attentive; one that faces the actual forms of domination. This kind of theatre does not speak in the name of the victims but makes ‘their silence heard’ (Ref. Reference Mayorga3, pp. 227–228).
The author of the theatre of memory feels motivated to write by ‘a moral dilemma and not because of an aesthetic drive’. As Mayorga himself points out, this dilemma is triggered by the belief that ‘every man is my brother’ and it is part of a theatre of memory that goes beyond temporal and spatial limits. In the plays, different memories interact in a multidirectional way where the ‘crossed references’ and the ‘borrowings’ articulate and generate a common space of domination, suffering and horror.Reference Rothberg17 The transnationalisation of memory is clearly presented in this kind of theatre, the conflicts of which centre on the European memory of totalitarianism and repressive power. Álamo explains this, referring to Los enfermos: ‘my work is a representation of power in its purest state; it buries its roots in the soil that has been fertilised with Hitler’s corpse: that is Europe’ (Ref. Reference Perales5). Similarly, Himmelweg (translated into and staged in many languages) and El cartógrafo (having been presented as a dramatised reading in Warsaw in 2013 and with its premiere in 2014) are clear examples of the way in which the memory of the Holocaust works as a medium to connect different torturous stories. Mayorga (Reference Mayorga2011) also sees it in this way and points out that ‘the memory of the Shoah is our best weapon against old and new ways for the humiliation of men by men and the theatre cannot stay on the side-lines of that fight’. In the same way, ÁlamoReference Cabal18 states: ‘we often read something that is not connected with us at all, but it reaches us deep inside […]. I think Primo Levi is a very important writer, although I have never experienced anything like Auschwitz’.
The authors dive into the vast framework of European memory, the subject matter of which works as a ‘screen memory’ for the memory of Spanish people since it throws light on the Civil War and Francoist Spain, a frequent perspective among recent generations of Spanish writers. Thus, Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the Warsaw ghetto, amongst others, work as icons of a transnational memory that places the readers/spectators as co-participants of an introspective exploration that will unsettle them forever, in which there is a right amount of emotion that is not solved with catharsis, but rather with reflection, with a permanent question, with urgent anxiety around some truth that is hidden behind disproportionate lies and greed. The simulation and pretence displayed and revealed on stage constitute the most appropriate form of denunciation, accusation and warning used by the authors as resources to show and name what cannot be described.
Mabel Brizuela is Professor of Spanish Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. A specialist in theatre, her most recent work examines the discourses of memory in modern Spanish theatre. She is author of numerous publications on the plays of Juan Mayorga and Antonio Álamo, the most recent of which is La escritura en acción. El teatro de Antonio Álamo (Córdoba: Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, 2014).
