PARS.- At 91 years old, he writer and author of spanish theater Fernando Arrabal prepares for a new production of The car graveyardone of his best-known works, starting this Thursday at the Parisian theater L’Epe de Bois.
The theater will also pay tribute to him during the weekend, under the motto Viva Arrabal!, with readings and simultaneous chess games, like those that the author of Letter to General Franco.
“Last time I won them all. Maybe this time I’ll lose,” Arrabal, author of a hundred plays, 16 novels and seven feature films, declares with a smile, according to his own count.
“There are works that work very well and others don’t. This works very well, I don’t know why,” Arrabal explained to AFP in his Paris home, packed with African figures, paintings, chess boards and souvenirs.
The work
Initially published in French in 1958, The car graveyard depicts a group of bohemians who make a pile of abandoned cars their home. There is no coherent plot, the play is simply a playground for the actors, in the words of the director of this production, Gil Galliot.
“More than a text, it is a pretext,” explains the director to AFP.
The work belongs to what is known as theater of the absurd, as Waiting for Godot (1952) Samuel Beckett o The lesson (1950) by Eugne Ionesco.
“The word absurd…” Arrabal meditates out loud. “One day I’m at Becket’s house, playing chess. And his wife comes with a package that she had just arrived. She opens it and inside is a book by Martin Esslin, The theater of the Absurd“.
“Until that moment they only called us avant-garde theater. And well, Beckett was focused on the game, and so was I. And his wife, Suzanne, wanted us to react. And Becket reads the title and tells me: how absurd,” adds the writer with another mischievous smile.
“I don’t want to speak on behalf of Beckett, or Ionesco… but I think we wanted to make the best theater possible. And of course none of them wanted to provoke. Provocation seems foolish to me. To provoke is to think that I am superior to you.” “he adds.
The Breton wine glass
But Arrabal provoked, and a lot, based on the reactions it aroused.
The Franco regime prosecuted and imprisoned him in 1967 for blasphemy and outrage because of a dedication written in a book. When he was released from prison, Arrabal returned to France, where he had arrived in 1954 hitchhiking, to see a play.
In 1971 write a Letter to General Franco in which he reminds the still-living dictator of the tragic fate of his father, Lieutenant Fernando Arrabal, loyal to the Republic and disappeared after escaping from prison in 1941.
In 1983, faithful to his independent spirit, he published another open and critical letter, Card to Fidel Castro. “I am the only survivor of the four avatars of modernity: Dad, surrealism, pataphysics and Panic,” she says with pride and a touch of sadness in his eyes.
In October, surrealism marks the 100th anniversary of its first manifesto, published by the French poet André Breton.
Arrabal joined the group in 1961, a few years before Breton’s death.
“We always meet in a café called Venus’ Walk. At six o’clock. Breton was very punctual. He ordered a glass of red wine. And the waiter had the obligation to fill it to the top,” he recalls.
After sipping the wine making a lot of noise, the meeting began. And a surreal meeting was nothing but a game. “Mostly we played. But when things got serious, he could get angry,” he explains, alluding to Breton.
From surrealism, which he abandoned because he considered it too constricted, Arrabal jumped to found his own movement, Pnico (in honor of the pagan god Pan), together with the Chilean Alejando Jodorowski and the French illustrator Roland Topor.
The game continued, and still continues. “I do not believe that the world can exist without God or confusion. What we do not know is if there was confusion first and God came, or if it was the other way around,” he adds.
FUENTE: AFP
