CONSTANTE

Calderón is a surname that sounds like theatre so long as you are close to the performing arts either through work or pleasure. This production takes a new twist and presents a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, one of the most prominent literary figures of the Spanish Golden Age. The version was written by the Chilean Guillermo Calderón and the Uruguayan Gabriel Calderón, who also directs the play, and is his return to the Festival de Otoño after the tearjerking Ana contra la muerte at last year's Festival. With a cast made up of actors from one of Latin America’s oldest cultural institutions the Comedia Nacional de Montevideo, the Calderóns light up a new artefact with El príncipe constante. Comedia Nacional was founded in 1947 by Spanish stage actress Margarita Xirgu. Picking up on that lineage, closely linked to the Spanish Golden Age, each season the company puts on classics without losing the opportunity to put them in dialogue with contemporary poetics. Festival de Otoño and the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico now has the perfect excuse to put the seal of approval on their first collaboration and bring tradition closer to contemporary theatrical linguistics.

This is a work where not many verses of Calderón de la Barca's original remain, but much of his imprint does. This is the identity of the language used in Constante. The Calderóns explain: "Making a classic involves discussing and reaffirming its validity, putting yourself in the line of its tradition, but pointing in a direction that is in the future.” In keeping with the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s idea, a vast number of books can be read in an even vaster number of combinations. The natural world is full of ‘codes’ of which we need to study to make it make sense. Maybe they were dreaming it badly and translating it worse, perhaps betraying the author, but being faithful to the theatre. Goethe once wrote in a letter to Schriller: “If all the poetry in the world disappeared, El príncipe constante could be used to rewrite it all”.

Calderón de la Barca’s El príncipe constante tells the story of Don Ferdinand of Portugal, who in his conquest expedition through Moroccan lands, takes prisoner General Muley, with whom Fenix, the daughter of the King of Fez, is in love. Moved by compassion and pity, Ferdinand frees Muley. Then it will be the Portuguese prince who falls prisoner in the North African country. He is tortured to death and becomes a myth. Practically none of this appears in the Calderóns’ version, who set their pìece in a small city in a small country in Latin America. There, Russian money of dubious provenance made it possible to make an international co-production of El príncipe constante. After some time, when the play has already failed, a bed (the same one where the prince was tortured) is the crux of bids, fights, claims, dreams, investigations, and crimes.

It is about talking about the constancy of art, the constancy of faith and love, of violence and wars, and above all the constancy of Calderón de la Barca. With an air of mysterious, chiaroscuro thriller, the work evidences the police clumsiness of agents searching in a 17th century text for evidence of a murder in the present. It is a direct reference to those military officers who would look for subversive activities in works of art in past dictatorships. In fact, torture, sadly almost synonymous with infamous periods of dictatorship, becomes a central theme of the work. As Gabriel Calderón states: “To test the limits of constant faith, one of the historical procedures used is torture.” It is the way to break anyone's integrity and dignity. The theatre within the theatre, the Calderóns place, remove, and replace layers of an onion in which five characters move around a bed to interpret what happened in it and with it. Constantly.