Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An English History Play in Spain: An Interview with Adrián Daumas, Director of the Spanish Premiere of Richard II (1998)

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10486800903209901

1477-2264

Laura Higgins,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Abstract Adrian Daumas has directed Shakespeare in both Spain and the United States. His work with Shakespeare and other classical playwrights is characterized by an economical, but powerful visual aesthetic which functions as a bridge between the historical moment of the text and its new performance context. In the mid-1990s, following his success with Twelfth Night, Daumas directed the Spanish premiere of Richard II. Daumas's Richard II also stands in counterpoint to Shakespeare productions performed in regional languages, and those which sought to resituate the plays through the incorporation of references to local culture or the appropriation of the texts to comment on current social and political issues. In this interview Daumas discusses his desire to veer away from a conscious exploration of the play's contemporary resonances towards an interrogation of its universality and an engagement with the play's profoundly human themes and emotional content. He comments on the challenges posed by his decision to ‘respect’ the play's very singular genre and discusses the search for a corresponding classical aesthetic which would bring the poetics of tragedy to the stage. He openly re-evaluates his work on the play and reflects on the potential of Richard II to create new meanings in different geographical and historical contexts. Notes Laura Higgins, Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX UK. E-mail: L.Higgins@rhul.ac.uk 1. El Cultural, 29 January 2004. 2. When Daumas decided to direct this particularly problematic tragedy the play had not been staged in Spain since 1984 (Periódico Extremadura, 13 August 2003). The controversial moral issues explored by Lope led to the play being withdrawn from the stage after only one performance in 1632 and it has continued to be regarded as a difficult play. 3. El Guía de Europa, 247 (December 1996); see also Guía del Ocio, 1,095, 9–15 December 1996. 4. Three productions of Twelfth Night were staged in 1996: a production directed by Juan Pastor was performed at the Festival of Classical Theatre in Almagro and a version directed by Gerardo Vera ran concurrently with that of Daumas in the Madrid Festival. For a full consideration of Vera's and Daumas's productions see Keith Gregor, ‘Spanish “Shakespeare-mania”: Twelfth Night in Madrid’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.4 (Winter 1998), 421–31. 5. Guía del Ocio, 1,095, 9–15 December 1996. 6. José Manuel González Fernández de Sevilla, ‘Spanish Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 13 (2002), Shakespeare in Spain, 1–16 (p. 6). 7. This phrase is used repeatedly to refer to the English language in press articles relating to a wide variety of topics and in quotations attributed to people from vastly differing walks of life. 8. Gregor, ‘Spanish “Shakespeare-mania”’, p. 429. 9. The production opened in Madrid in 1989 and toured other cities, running until 1991. 10. Rafael Portillo and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara, ‘Shakespeare in the New Spain: or What You Will’, in Shakespeare in the New Europe, ed. by Michael Hattaway, Boika Soklova and Derek Roper (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), pp. 208–20 (pp. 218–19). 11. El País, 10 July 1993. 12. The CDN was founded in 1978. Its primary aim is to promote contemporary Spanish theatre, though the repertoire has included plays by modern Spanish writers such as Federico García Lorca and Ramón del Valle-Inclán and classical works by Shakespeare and Calderón, http://cdn.mcu.es/qs.php?leng=es[accessed 6 October 2008]. 13. José Manuel González Fernández de Sevilla, ‘Shakespeare in Almagro’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 9 (1999), 244–60 (pp. 246–47). 14. Eduardo Alonso, ‘Some Galician Stagings Based on Shakespeare's Plays’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 13 (2002), 342–59 (p. 347). 15. Ibid. 16. González Fernández de Sevilla, ‘Shakespeare in Almagro’, pp. 248–49. 17. Ibid., p. 249. 18. El País, 5 July 1997; El País, 28 September 1997. 19. For a discussion of Bieito and the significance of his work, see Maria Delgado, ‘Journeys of Cultural Transference: Calixto Bieito's Multilingual Shakespeares’, Modern Language Review, 101.1 (January 2006), 106–50. For a discussion of Catalonian Shakespeare see Helena Buffery, ‘Shakespeare and the Cultural Dream in Catalonia’, Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 6.1 (June 2000), pp. 5–18. 20. El País, 28 September 1997. 21. El País, 24 September 1996. 22. El País, 28 November 1994. 23. El País, 24 September 1997. 24. Adrián Daumas, ‘Directing Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 13 (2002), Shakespeare in Spain, 278–85 (p. 280). 25. El Cultural, 29 January–4 February 2004. 26. El País, 24 March 2001. 27. Lanza, 24 July 2003. 28. Lanza, 25 July 1998. 29. The interview took place in Madrid in October 2007. It was conducted in Spanish and the translation is my own. 30. Adrián Daumas, La dirección teatral como vínculo y vehículo (Theatre Directing as Link and Vehicle), section 4, ‘Motivos por los que he elegido Ricardo II: una obra que perturba’ (‘Reasons for Choosing Richard II: A Disturbing Play’), http://escena.ya.com/adriandaumas/articulos.html[accessed 6 October 2008]. 31. The PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) came to power in May 1982, partly as a result of the adoption of a more moderate centre-left stance which drew the party away from its original Marxist roots, making it more attractive to the electorate. When the main opposition party, the AP (Alianza Popular) (People's Alliance), hampered for many years by its associations with the Franco regime, was re-launched as the PP (Partido Popular) (People's Party) in 1989 it was clearly moving towards a more centre-right position. This modification, combined with the dissatisfaction engendered by various political scandals in which the PSOE was implicated in the first half of the 1990s, led to the PP's election victory in 1996. 32. Fiona Shaw played Richard in Deborah Warner's 1995 production for the National Theatre, London. 33. Daumas, ‘Directing Shakespeare’, pp. 282–83. 34. Daumas re-ordered the text placing III.1, the scene in which Bolingbroke orders the executions of Bushy and Green, in the middle of III.2, the scene in which Richard receives a series of messages through which he learns of the desertion of the Welsh troops, the defection of York and the deaths of his favourites. 35. The space clearly did work symbolically and Pedro M. Víllora (ABC, 24 July 1998) commented ‘Adrián Daumas dispone su montaje a partir de un estrado y una estructura vertical de madera sobre la que se eleva el rey, como expresión física de su alteza, y que en el segundo acto aparecen desmontados, indicando el caos y el desorden que se avecinan sobre Inglaterra’ (In his production Adrián Daumas uses a platform and a vertical wooden structure, by means of which the king assumes an elevated position as a physical expression of his majesty, and which in the second half is dismantled suggesting the chaos and disorder that are encroaching on England). For a more detailed description of the set and further observations about the ways in which it worked in production see Keith Gregor, ‘The Spanish Premiere of Richard II’, in Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. by Ton Hoenselaars, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 213–27 (217–19). 36. Since the mid 1980s Ángel-Luís Pujante, Professor of English Language at the University of Murcia and Honorary President of the European Shakespeare Research Association, has been a leading figure in the translation of Shakespeare's plays into Spanish. Of parallel importance in the field is the work of Manuel Ángel Conejero, the President of the Shakespeare Foundation. 37. When preparing to direct Twelfth Night Daumas read versions translated by Pujante, Conejero and Luís Astrana (whose complete translations of Shakespere were published in 1929) and workshopped all three versions with the actors he auditioned. He ultimately opted for Pujante's as he felt it was ‘el texto más directo’ (the most direct translation), but he also felt it was ‘el que mejor suena’ (the one that sounds best') (El Nuevo Lunes, 25 November–1 December 1996). 38. See Gregor, ‘The Spanish Premiere of Richard II’, p. 223. 39. In the production programme Daumas's describes Richard II as a play ‘lleno de situaciones intensas, donde subyace una violencia interna y de un gran vigor emocional’ (full of intense situations with undercurrents of internal violence and a great emotional energy), and this vigorous training throughout the rehearsal process suggests an attempt to activate these ideas physically. 40. Jeremías Clemente describes the production as taking place ‘en un escenario abierto, donde palacios, conventos, casas solariegas y espadañas evocan desde la pura realidad arquitectónica parajes de la propia obra, como el castillo de Flint, refugio imaginario del Rey Ricardo’ (on an open-air stage, where convents, palaces, ancestral homes and steeples evoke, through their sheer architectural reality, places in the play itself, like Richard's imaginary refuge, Flint castle) (El País, 20 June 1998). 41. Daumas's thoughts on directing A Midsummer Night's Dream from the perspective of immigration recall Pimienta's 1993 production of the play referred to above. 42. Since this interview Adrián Daumas has announced his plans to direct Henry V. His website describes the forthcoming production as ‘Una versión polémica y contemporanea sobre las guerras y las nacionalismos (A controversial and contemporary interpretation about wars and nationalisms), http://escena.ya.com/adriandaumas/[accessed 6 October 2008].