Pablo Remón / La_Abducción
| Cast: | Ana Alonso, Fernanda Orazi, Francisco Reyes and Emilio Tomé |
| Written and directed by: | Pablo Remón |
| Assistant directors: | Raquel Alarcón and Rennier Piñero |
| Light and sound design: | Eduardo Vizuete and David Benito |
| Produced by: | Silvia Herreros de Tejada |
| Created by: | La Abducción Producciones |
| A play co-produced by: | Festival de Otoño a Primavera of the Community of Madrid |
July. Not the slightest breeze. Concentration of hot air. Altitude: 600 metres above sea level. Strident and monotonous sound of the cicadas. The Central Plateau of the Iberian Peninsula is scorching. We are in the garden of a run-down manor house in the midst of La Mancha plains. A shabby garden covered with weeds where the characters (the family members plus a Romanian maid) lie sunbathing, dozing off. They let time go by, as if everything important had happened long ago’. This is how the new piece by Pablo Remón starts. The great scriptwriter has decided to take the plunge into playwriting and thrilled both audience and critics last year with his first drama play, The Abduction of Luis Guzmán, premiered at the Madrid Fringe Festival and also staged with great success at the Lara Theatre in Madrid.
40 Years of Peace intends to be four plays in one: four plays that cover 40 years of our country’s History seen through the life of a family. Four main characters. Four narrators. The characters are protagonists of the stories of their own lives, while also secondary characters or narrators in other ones, forming a wheel in which they pass on the baton to each other. “We narrate while we are narrated”, as Borges’ phrase says. Those 40 years of peace in the title mean different things for each of the characters that give meaning to the play: for Natalia they are her age, about to turn 40 without having fulfilled her purpose of having a child. For her brother Ricardo, 40 are the millions he owes his company. And so on with the rest of characters. Forty is a number ringing in the head of every member of the family.
Pablo Remón is one of the most reputable screenwriters in present-day Spanish cinema. He and his brother Daniel form the creative team responsible for films like Casual Day (selected for the San Sebastián Film Festival and awarded as best film and best screenplay by the Film Writers Circle) or Cinco metros cuadrados (Five Square Metres), both directed by Max Lemcke. His short film Todo un futuro juntos (A whole future together) was nominated to the 2015 Goya Awards. The Festival de Otoño a Primavera will witness the world premiere of his keenly anticipated third theatre creation, 40 Years of Peace, in which Remón has performers Ana Alonso, Fernanda Orazi, Francisco Reyes and Emilio Tomé as accomplices onstage.
How to keep on storytelling at this stage? Does it make sense to continue narrating, recounting our stories? How does a country’s recent History affect our personal stories? What fiction is still worth being performed, where and in what manner? These questions form part of the origin of 40 Years of Peace, a play built on the desire and pleasure of storytelling. The urge to recount our stories, to keep on creating fiction, in order to bring out to light what we are and what we could be.