If someone simply pronounces it People, places and things… Three ambiguous terms resonate. However, this nebulous trilogy of concepts is realized between hope and despair in Ducan Macmillan’s work of that title. Spectators will be able to see it in preview on November 25th at the Teatro Español in Madrid, with Irene Escolar (Madrid, 37 years old) as the protagonist and Pablo Messiez (Buenos Aires, 51 years old) as director, leading a cast of 10 performers. Two people who have long wanted to meet in specific places, in any context, to do something they have long wanted: working together.
And they achieve it in a complex montage, based on a production that the actress put together with the complicity of Eduardo Vasco, director of the Spanish theater in Madrid, to address her fall into the abyss of addiction. They do this as a basis for what the work is really about: “Pain,” Messiez says, “because we hurt ourselves and we hurt others too.”
When Irene Escolar decided to delve into Macmillan’s work, she had no doubts about who she would send it to first. I knew Messiez – playwright, actor, director – had been working with his people for years, but I didn’t want to stop trying. He discovered it 15 years ago at work Rock’n’Rollby Tom Stoppard, in the version by Álex Rigola. “He always seemed very unique to me, extraordinary,” says the Argentine. “Now he’s shown me that he knows what he wants.”
The rehearsals were an intense process. Messiez shows himself to be skilful in every indication, applying a method that mixes exigency and extraordinary delicacy. He thus led everyone towards the place of necessary reconciliation in the different areas of life. The day they took over the main stage space, a tumult of altered excitement gave way to harmony without barely saying two things and without ever raising the tone of their voices. Desperately enlightened characters, severe healthcare workers and drug addicts on the verge of self-destruction converged on the tables without fixed decoration. A choir without the strength to bring many other Sisyphus stones into life but which, unconsciously, is open to hoping in the environment that Macmillan proposes and which the director creates with the help of Max Glaenzel, as set designer.
“Pablo helped us a lot to move on to the other side, from a place of affection and rigor,” Escolar says. Something that Sonia Almarcha, who has to play three different roles, also shares: “It takes you to a good port and makes you feel free to follow your own course,” she says. The two work with him for the first time, as does Brays Efe: “He makes us aware of our body to populate the space we occupy in a different way”, says the actor, who knows Duncan Macmillan’s work very well after having also performed his monologue. The extraordinary things.
They all make up a cast that also includes Claudia Faci, Mónica Acevedo and Javier Ballesteros – who had already collaborated with Messiez – and Tomás del Estal, Daniel Jumillas, Blanca Javaloy, Manuel Egozkue and Josefina Gorostiza, who was also in charge of the physical preparation before the rehearsals and essential during the editing. The director applied his method to each one. Almarcha defines it as a permanent creative horizontality about which the director constantly shares his doubts. From there, real milestones of the Madrid scene of recent years were born, such as two of his texts which he himself directed: The songs AND The will to believe or the extraordinary collaboration he formed with Alberto Conejero in The dark stoneamong other titles.
It was in front The gesturesanother work he signed, when Escolar proposed to him: “I liked it because I went from a work that slipped in quicksand to one that seemed to be built on solid ground,” he says. And what is the creative difference in both cases? “The works in firm territory are those considered perfect,” says Messiez. “They are put together with a solid structure, they work like a clock and tend to create closed systems. Those in motion are imperfect and open systems, where the law of approach, center and end does not govern. I like both and in this one, moreover, the ending is morally very open, it does not impose anything.”
What he deduces, few can doubt: “There is a moment when one character says to another: get out, don’t hurt yourself and don’t hurt anyone either. Now, that’s the point, don’t you think?” The school shares it. Even more so after having delved deeply into the universe of black holes of addiction to prepare for her role, that of an actress in a state of collapse who decides to enroll in a rehabilitation program: “I wanted to get to know this destructive spiral in depth and learn what a process of permanent listening can help you with, simply to deeply recognize the other by holding their gaze and accompanying them without shame, sense of guilt or judgement”, says the interpreter.
Also knowing that we can’t do it alone. “They made me think about addiction in a general sense. I’m not addicted to drugs or alcohol, like the protagonist, but it helped me understand some behaviors in my life that are reflected in similar patterns. Drugs are a symptom of other things that you can see yourself reflected in.” Even duplicated, because the viewer cannot clearly distinguish whether what he sees is real or, as Brays Efe points out, “happening in the protagonist’s head”.
The work came to Escolar several years ago. She bought the rights, certain that the time would come to play Emma, the protagonist, but decided to wait. Boldness defines great actresses, like her. But caution, in certain moments, is even more so. “I just didn’t feel prepared to take on this character then. I had to go through other experiences first,” she says. Prepare yourself and learn through pieces of strenuous intensity, such as Sisters AND FinlandFor example, the two works that the playwright Pascal Rambert created together with Bárbara Lennie and Israel Elejalde. “After walking through there I knew I had a body capable of lasting the two and a quarter hours I need to support this character on stage.”
Resurrect a soul and its crushed physiognomy from the abyss with the help of another drug that is much more beneficial for physical and mental health: vocation. When you watch Escolar in the middle of a rehearsal, immersed in her role, repeating it over and over to herself in a majestic manner while leaning into any corner, you understand much better. Much reading has been added to Macmillan’s vision to understand the role. “Leslie Jamison and The trace of the days, for example, or the poet John Berryman, an alcoholic, who proposes to climb out of the abyss by clinging to a creative life dedicated to love for others.”
That faith in the vocation that sustains them is also shared by Messiez: “It’s what makes me endure everything, it takes away the fear of life,” he confesses. Theater as a means of survival, while also questioning its foundations. Pillars such as Chekhov, Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare, present in the original of the work, through which Macmillan creates style distraction games Alice in Wonderland. Or Lorca, who was incorporated into the Spanish version due to the closeness and influence that his telluric genius exerts on Escolar and Messiez.
But without sanctifying them, the playwright assures: “What would happen if we stopped making certain works?” asks the director. Do we feel that weight of the great like chains? The fact of questioning it, in itself, represents a complete liberation.
