The last scene alone is worth seeing this show. It is an aesthetic experience of those that transport you to abstract worlds where everything comes together and suddenly becomes understandable. Call it revelation, nirvana, happiness, or heaven, which is precisely what the scene is titled: Heaven, third part of the montage that Marta Pazos premiered last week at the National Dramatic Center starting from The Untitled Comedy of Lorca. The director has not limited herself to staging the text that the author left unfinished for his murder in 1936, just the first act of the three that he had planned, but has imagined the other two to give an end to the work, the same which Lluís Pasqual, Alberto Conejero and Sara Molina Doblas did before. But unlike all of them, Pazos does not propose a textual development, but exclusively plastic. And that is the great attraction of her proposal, because if there is something that she masters like no one else, it is visual language. Her great hallmark as a creator is her ability to synthesize ideas, plots and emotions in images.

Let us remember what Lorca wrote: an author bursts onto the scene to stop the representation of The dream of a nigth of summer, of Shakespeare, because he is fed up with fictions designed only to entertain, instead of showing what happens in reality; the spectators reply, they want to continue with their fun, but just at that moment a rebellion breaks out in the surroundings and the protesters storm the coliseum, much to the joy of the author. It was Lorca’s great cry against the bourgeois theater of his time. The metaphor of his desire to tear it down and build another new one stripped of artifice. All that hatches in the final act of Pazos. The stage, empty of bodies and half destroyed their sets after the revolt, is illuminated to expose its stage: the loom, the comb, the grills, the pulleys. We listen to the councilor give orders to raise a curtain, move spotlights, open hatches … and more things that we are not going to reveal here so as not to break the effect. The theater strips naked and shows the machinery with which it assembles its artifices. It is the essence of Untitled comedy. And the maxim that has guided all the avant-garde (and post-dramatic) theater after Lorca.

The act works because we have previously gone through the other two parts planned by Lorca, although in a very free way. In the style of Marta Pazos: techno music, strong colors, bright paintings. If Lorca wanted to demolish the sacred theater of his time, why sanctify him with clichés about how a theater should or should not be represented? lorca? With her overflowing plastic imagination, the director takes visual references from the poet’s time, especially from surrealism, but she does not assimilate them as they are, but instead dialogues with them, absorbs them and reinterprets them to create new ones. Impossible dresses, eclectic dances, naked bodies, a lunar eclipse.

The show begins with a large silver curtain falling that reveals a quadrangular space dyed in fluorescent orange in which the entire work takes place. It is like a canvas on which the director surface your scenes. In the first part, send the author’s text. It sounds hesitant in the mouths of the 14 young performers (all deliberately under 30 years old), except the most experienced Camila Viyuela and Alejandro Jato. In the second act, which Lorca had planned to place in a morgue, the word gives prominence to the bodies, which visually develop some phrases heard in the previous one. “Give thanks that you are in Spain, which is a country fond of death.” “It makes me want to address the audience and, in the most lyrical scene, suddenly shout a curse at them, the most vile.” Lorca also comes out, characterized by an expressive large mask that reflects all the symbolic charge of his murder and its mark on later Spanish culture. Accumulation of living pictures Similar makes this part somewhat redundant and long. But soon the third act arrives. Heaven. “Tell the truth about the old scenarios. Drive daggers into the old thieves of oil and bread. Let the rain wet the looms and shed the backdrops ”.

‘Untitled comedy’. Text: Federico García Lorca. Version and dramaturgy: José Manuel Mora and Marta Pazos. Direction: Marta Pazos. María Guerrero Theater. Madrid. Until December 26.

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