France and Spain, twinned by the theater

[KEPY™]

The same text in two languages designed specifically for two pairs of actresses. This is the new adventure that Pascal Rambert (Nice, 1962) embarked on this season, in an unusual theatrical experience that links France and Spain. The French playwright has written and directed in parallel in both countries the play Sisters, a devastating fight between two sisters, to represent the two versions almost simultaneously: the French one appeared at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris on November 23, with Audrey Bonnet and Marina Hands as protagonists, while the Spanish premieres this Friday at Central de Sevilla (until Sunday), starring Bárbara Lennie and Irene Escolar, before doing season in January at Pavón Kamikaze in Madrid. The author is also preparing a third version in Portugal.

"It has been four bodies and four voices that have nurtured the writing of this work," Rambert said last week to this newspaper in a rehearsal room Pavón Kamikaze, of which he is an associate artist and where he has already directed in previous seasons The closing of love and Essay. It was precisely The Closing of Love, starring Israel Elejalde and Barbara Lennie, the germ of this new work, because that was when the playwright conceived the idea of writing a specific piece for Lennie. The Spanish actress asked her to have Irene Escolar as her companion on stage, and that is how Hermanas was born. But the project did not stop there, then Lambert thought of two other French actresses to make a parallel version in Paris and already began to write with all of them in mind.
 

The author, piercing eyes, disheveled hair and black glasses, confesses that he would not have been able to write Sisters without thinking of someone. "I depend on the body of the actresses, their vocal power, their energy and their ability to travel far away. I need interpreters who go very far with me. The theater that interests me is the one that has effects on the bodies, I want to see the effect that the words cause, how they can destroy you ", explains Rambert, disturbed by the commotions that have already been experienced in the theater of Paris. "I have no difficulties writing. I've been writing since I was 16 and I'm already 56. I do it every day, every morning, every night. The more I do it, the more I want. I can not imagine stopping. My life is linked to my work and that's why my work will end when I stop living, "says Rambert, a resistant, a man of overwhelming energy who has his professional agenda covered until 2022.

It is the theater of Pascal Rambert, theater prize of the Academy of France, direct and dry. Punching of words that hurt. A theater that does not pretend, that does not joke. A stage where the actors find their vital energy and become co-authors of a show about the power of language. On a stage with forty brightly colored plastic chairs, there is an entire dramaturgical feat, a dialectical and painful battle, full of grudges, hatreds, resentments, rivalry and frustration, in which the actresses are called by their real name . "Do you realize what we have arrived? For the word sisters to tear lips, cut them, "says Barbara in one of the phrases of the work. "Can some sisters wish each other death? Yes, we are that kind of sisters, "says another Irene function.

One does not come unscathed from Sisters. Neither of its reading, without points or commas, and even less of its representation. "When the show ends [in Paris] I spend a lot of time responding to all the messages and emails I receive from viewers. I had never lived this. Since I was young I opposed the bourgeois theater and I fight every day for it. What happens with The closing of love or now with Sisters is a great victory for me. It supposes the demonstration that this theater is possible, a theater in which the human being can not pretend, a place where one does not joke and for that one must have endurance and resistance