Lope de Vega. Lo fingido verdadero

Abstract

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) is in crisis, but it clearly finds itself at a difficult impasse. Lluís Homar was a controversial choice to succeed Helena Pimenta as artistic director in 2019. One of Spain and Catalonia’s most respected actors of the stage and screen, as well as a founding member of Barcelona’s mythical Teatre Lliure, he has experience staging (as both a director and player) Shakespeare, but had no background with the Spanish classical tradition. The artistic directorship of the CNTC had traditionally been a political appointment but, in an attempt to implement more transparency, Pimenta was appointed through open competition in 2011 as was Homar eight years later. No other applicant matched his CV for prestige and theatrical experience, but the somewhat endogamous world of comedia performance greeted his appointment with a degree of hostility. Personal and professional resentment aside, the stable cast model on which the CNTC was founded in 1986 has ceased to be tenable in Spain. Since the directorship of José Luis Alonso de Santos (2000–2004), there has been an intermittently tense stand-off between the heavily unionised technical crew and management of a Madrid-based institution, whose remit is to keep alive Spain’s classical patrimony at the national, not just municipal, level. The principal explanation for an increased number of co-productions and invited companies is that it allows productions to tour without prohibitive labour costs.There is, as such, an additional pressure on the reduced number of in-house productions to maintain certain standards and to establish an identity without which the CNTC’s very raison d’être falls into question. At the Madrid press conference held in January 2022, just prior to the premiere of Homar’s directorial debut of a comedia with Lo fingido verdadero, the newcomer was surrounded by actors who had history with the company. Arturo Querejeta is an institution within the institution, cast by founding-director Adolfo Marsillach and elevated to the role of leading man in multiple productions from the period (2004–2011) Eduardo Vasco was at the helm. Israel Elejalde, who made his professional theatrical debut in a 1997 CNTC production of Lope’s El anzuelo de Fenisa directed by filmmaker Pilar Miró, has over the last decade become one of Spain’s most sought after actors, familiar (like Homar) to international audiences from being cast by Pedro Almodóvar. Elejalde was juggling publicity duties for the Manchegan film director’s Madres paralelas (2021) with those for Lo fingido verdadero. Also present at the CNTC press conference was actress María Besant, an alumna of the Joven Companía (an initiative for actors under 30 created by Vasco and nurtured by Pimenta, which continues albeit with reduced support and visibility) before graduating to appear in the adult company. Homar stressed that drawing on such collective expertise, alongside the gender-neutral casting of experienced actors in multiple roles, was the closest realistic approximation the CNTC could make to the stable continuous working practices of yesteryear. Whilst lamenting that Spanish classical drama is sidelined at home, Querejeta highlighted that Homar at least has a pool of actors from which to choose, a luxury denied to Marsillach who, the veteran actor said, had to start from zero.Given all these constraints, Homar introduced an additional complication into the mix. Lo fingido verdadero might be described (unwillingly hijacking a Shakepearean term) as a “problem” play. It is an undoubted masterpiece, whose profound meta-theatricality tests the limits of the performable. At the heart of what makes it so complex is that it is not a single play, but rather three plays in one: a political dramatization of Diocletian’s rise to power; a meditation on the relationship between theatre and power; and finally a saint’s play. Thematic unity is provided by its exploration of the metafictional, from Carino’s gains and assertion that being emperor is so much more than a mere role or performance to Ginés’ manipulation of his play script to write in an amorous tryst with the actress Marcela who he longs for in real life, before finally his performance as a Christian martyr becomes all too real. The title could be a description of theatre itself. Truthful feigning, and hailing from around the same time that Lope wrote the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, the play contains numerous reflections on acting, theatre, and performance. Most radical and problematic is perhaps the exploration of religion’s inherently performative nature in the third and final act.Marsillach had considered staging the play, but disregarded the idea. Homar claims prize-winning playwright, and frequent Pimenta collaborator, Juan Mayorga recommended he take a careful look at Lo fingido verdadero. Veteran academic Felipe Pedraza was also instrumental in supporting and encouraging Homar in persisting in the quixotic adventure of putting this play on stage (with real people) for what appears to be the first time in Spain since the early modern period. (A puppet theatre company La máquina real staged an Ágora award-winning version in 2010 and there was a mash up by Palmyra and Katum Teatro from 2018, both at Almagro.) One of the fundamental problems confronting any director of the play is how to stage the scenes in the final act when Ginés initially comforts himself that the angel he has been in dialogue with is in fact just the actor Fabio playing the part of the angel, a confusion that becomes axiomatic during the performance in front of the emperor Diocletian when Fabio enters to deliver his lines to be told the angel’s part has already been performed. In this second encounter with a heavenly emissary, Ginés’ confusion is shared by the onstage spectators as well as perhaps as the off-stage audience. A fundamental decision needs to be taken in terms of staging about how and whether to distinguish between Fabio and his angelic double. The parts could be played by the same actor distinguished through costume or lighting or two different actors perhaps visually identified by some shared token.The solution chosen by Homar, however, to distinguish them completely, seemingly misses the fundamental point that the performative is at the heart of spirituality, faith being required to bridge the difference between appearance and reality, necessary to the transcendence of the physical, visible, and material. In the Baroque, this was precisely through the visceral, bodily display of suffering flesh whose annihilation and denial are what leads to salvation. This paradoxical aesthetic was notably brough to life in the National Gallery exhibition, The Sacred Made Real, whose opening essay underlines how the “hyperrealism” of the period’s polychrome wooden sculptures brought theological concepts like the incarnation to life through their very mundanity and attention to gory detail. In response to a question about the decision (made as part of a round-table discussion at the Jornadas de Teatro Clásico the day after an invite-only rehearsal performance), the director underlined that it was key to making the play comprehensible to the audience. However, in making the angel distinct from Fabio, the on-stage action ceases to make sense: “yo / y todos te habemos visto” (l. 2854–5). Surely this confusion is essential to the miracle we witness, leading to Ginés’ conversion and martyrdom. Elejalde was, unfortunately, not available to appear as Ginés for the Almagro run, with this key role delegated to Ignacio Jiménez instead.With a two-and-a-half-hour running time (and no interval), the CNTC’s production was a test of faith for even the hardiest of comedia aficionados. The costume, staging, and lighting moved between the ancient and modern, from the use of swords in the military scenes in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) to Ginés’ appearance, like a latter-day existentialist, in black turtleneck sweater and long overcoat. Querejeta seemed miscast as Diocletian, while the camp antics of Álvaro de Juan as Carino threatened to steal and undermine the show with his sudden and unexpected murder moments later by disgruntled senators. Thinly veiled personal attacks on Homar at the aforementioned roundtable, couched in relation to the purported lack of professionalism as regards verse-forms, departed from the simplistic premise that there is a correct standard form of delivery. That said, the lack of consistency between different actors appeared, like the sartorial smorgasbord, to be indicative of a lack of an overarching vision. Several inherently difficult long speeches (such as Rutilio’s description of exotic animals and the theatre of cruelty that was the Roman arena) needed tighter direction, whether by being cut, curtailed or delivered in a way focused more on sense and understanding than strict form. Making sense within the play itself of then-contemporary debates and controversies surrounding the comedia nueva, its violations of Classical precept, use of stage machinery and special effects, different types of plots and versification is an inherent challenge given today’s audiences’ lack of familiarity or interest (?) in the niceties of the comedia nueva as practiced at the outset of the seventeenth century. The final tableau possessed considerable impact even if the impaled figure of Ginés, to perhaps underline the conversion theme, was hoisted aloft on a cross symbolizing his martyrdom in a manner which brought to mind James Bond hanging from a helicopter as much as Christ’s ascension. Lo fingido is a profound and challenging piece that we can be grateful this production has begun to confront, even if many of its most fundamental questions and puzzles remain unanswered and unsolved. A director more au-fait with the comedia would likely never have taken on such a complicated play. A failed experiment in many regards, Homar’s Lo fingido proffered few solutions to the myriad of challenges facing the CNTC. Neither, however, did it provide ammunition for detractors who accuse him of gearing up for his retirement by taking on a lucrative institutional role for which he is ill-prepared and little interested. With an almost adolescent imperviousness to risk, there was something reassuringly old-fashioned about a state-funded theatre using the resources at its disposal to challenge audiences and not to rely on more tried and tested formulae and texts.