El lector por horas

It has been 24 years since this show was first performed on stage in Barcelona and then in Madrid. It was the resulting work of Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and Centro Dramático Nacional. At the end of the 90s, even going back another 10-15 years, the stage director was the hegemonic figure in Spanish theatre, following, a little behind the times and at the wrong time, European trends. Playwrights for the theatre suffered a lot during this period. They had to work tooth and nail to see their performances come to life. But then things started to change. A new generation of playwrights came onto the scene and, before long, there were no directors for a theatre where the word took on a new meaning. They had overtaken them on the right and without so much as putting on the indicator. Juan Mayorga, Antonio Álamo, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Laila Ripoll, Lluïsa Cunillé, Itziar Pascual, Sergi Belbel, and José Ramón Fernández: it’s the generation of all of them. All of them, in one way or another, owe something to José Sanchis Sinisterra.

He is a living classic. A man who is 83 years young that keeps us entertained and his time in enigmas and struggles in search of the frontier, of the step beyond the known, always expanding the power of the word in the theatre. It is a shame that the theatrical creation space the Nuevo Teatro Fronterizo de La Corsetería in Lavapiés had to close its door due to the pandemic, and the successive health and economic crises. And it is an injustice that he does not find a place in some other space that makes his endless and always stimulating research possible. After Mayorga and his colleague’s generation, many others burst onto the scene -here and in Latin America- infused with Sanchis’s influences, a man capable of setting a stone in writing. Author of the world renowned ¡Ay, Carmela! , which is always in the show schedule somewhere, he has managed to twist the limits of playwriting and narration and create masterpieces that challenge the audience.

Because the spectator, for Sanchis Sinisterra, is not a piece of furniture, they are a living being and, as such, active, thinking, and intelligent. And for that being he writes, without giving him anything chewed. El lector por horas is the paradigmatic example. The plot may interest us and even entertain us, but what is enrapturing are the invisible threads intertwined in the plot to fill the voids. The invisible tailoring fits pieces that do not fit at first, to play from the spectator’s seat. At the premiere in 1999, Sanchis commented: “What I was interested in exploring in this play is how literature and life interpenetrate to the point that one and the other feed each other.” This happens in two ways, between the main characters and between the scenes coming to life on stage and the audience. El lector por horas transfers to fiction some of the theoretical assumptions of the aesthetics of reception.

Carles Alfaro’s directed piece is the result of a co-production between the Sala Beckett in Barcelona, which was founded by Sanchis in 1989, and the Teatro de La Abadía. The cast is made up of Pep Cruz, who plays Celso, a businessman; Mar Ulldemolins, who plays Lorena, Celso's blind daughter; and Pere Ponce, who plays Ismael, a man hired by Celso as a reader by the hour (Lector por horasin Spanish) to entertain Lorena. The job requires maximum enunciative neutrality on Ismael's part, but the poetic force of the chosen texts and the situation itself lead the three characters into an uncontrollable emotional labyrinth. Little by little, the piece enters a perverse and enigmatic metatextual game, where the limits between reality and fiction are strained. Who reads to whom? What intentions does each text hide? What is the truth of the argument?