The race of Antonio Buero Vallejo, one of the essential names in 20th-century Spanish playwriting began at the Teatro Español in 1949, a work with which he became known and which won the Lope de Vega award. She would return to the stage of the Plaza de Santa Ana on several occasions: ‘La tejedora de sueños’, in 1952; ‘A dreamer for a people’, in 1958; ‘Las Meninas’, in 1960; ‘The concert of San Ovidio’, in 1986; and there he premiered in 1999, a year before he died, his last work, ‘Mission to the desert town‘.
Since then, Antonio Buero Vallejo’s theater has not been seen again in the Spanish Theater (actually, there are very few professional stagings of his works in our country)… Until today, when ‘El sueño de reason’, a work premiered in Madrid in 1970, and which is now being presented in a co-production by the Teatro Español itself with Producciones Faraute (Celestine Arandto) with address of Jose Carlos Plaza. The cast is made up of Ana Fernández, Chema León, Carlos Martínez-Abarca, Montse Peidro, Fernando Sansegundo, Jorge Torres, Marta Heredia, Álvaro Pérez, Marco Pernas and Steve Lance.
Antonio Buero Vallejo placed ‘The dream of reason‘ in December 1823, the year in which he decided to leave Madrid and his Quinta del Sordo, on whose walls he painted his ‘Black Paintings’ and which, when he went into exile in Bordeaux, he bequeathed to his grandson Mariano. The playwright was inspired by «that deaf genius that he wrote, in one of his most profound engravings: ‘The dream of reason produces monsters’ -as Buero himself wrote in his day-. Words that show how, despite the nightmare that was the second half of his life, his reason did not allow himself to be devoured by sleep. In his art there was delirium but also the lucid reflection of a monstrous reality. Socially, this reality is that of the absolutist restoration of Ferdinand VII, that of reactionary terror, that of the oppressed and ignorant people, that of freedom crushed once again in Spain. Humanly, it is also the destructive reality of deafness, old age, danger.
Deafness
Deafness acquires a clear leading role in ‘El sueño de la razón’. On the one hand, dramatic: the scenes that take place in Goya’s presence are silent, except when the painter speaks; In this way, the viewers become the artist himself in those moments. «I think that the spectator will be able to understand this way more deeply -explained the author- that, when reason falls asleep in a country, his best men dream hopes without ceasing to reason. And I hope that the viewer is totally impregnated with this: not only through reflection, but through emotion».
His role is also symbolic, as Buero Vallejo said. «Goya comes to feel not only physically deaf, but also ‘deaf’ among ‘deaf’: victim of an unfair and negative social situation. But, as he says, he doesn’t feel ‘blind’. When there is collective deafness, not everyone is blind. (On other occasions -in my works ‘In the Burning Darkness’, ‘The Concert of Saint Ovid’, ‘Arrival of the Gods’- I wrote about ‘blind’ and it was the same: not all of them were ‘deaf’). You can always see or hear. And reflect. And act”.
“A big text”
Reflection is precisely what José Carlos Plaza proposes with his staging, to which -he assures- he does not contribute more than his intention that «the text has life; I do not intend to impose my ideas as a director, but rather that it is the text that imposes its own». The Madrid director says of ‘El sueño de la razón’ that it is «a great text, extraordinary for its ideological, literary and human quality. He is extraordinary because of the beauty of his morality. It is the text of a good man, an ode to goodness, reason, logic and wisdom».
From 1823, the year in which the work is located, to 1970, the year in which -after several months waiting for the Censorship to give the go-ahead- it was released, and a new jump to 2023. «From Goya to Buero, until today – concludes Plaza-, this is the trajectory that we want to carry out and that it be a mirror where our people see their obnoxious and stupid behavior. A hymn to thought, to reason, to the light of the mind that lets us see through the cloak of darkness that the lies that create us, shamelessly and the false tinsel of adulterated truths, tend to us.
