2023-05-25 19:04:58
Doctor Burgueño tries to find out the reasons that have led Pacífico Pérez, a hypersensitive being, to kill. That guiding search ‘The wars of our ancestors’, the theatrical version of the novel by Miguel Delibes, which we can see this weekend in Bilbao. The Arriaga Theater hosted this Thursday the presentation of one of the milestones of the season and which has led to the Talía award for best leading actor for Carmelo Gómez (Sahagún, León, 1962). The actor shares the scene with Miguel Hermoso in this piece adapted by Eduardo Galán and directed by Claudio Tolcachir.
-You can be awarded the advertising slogan for a beer, the one that says ‘where it goes, it succeeds’.
I don’t drink beer, but I like it. Triumph? It has been very difficult for me to succeed in the theater, because, although I had done it before, it is now, in the last stage of my career, when I wanted to throw myself into it. It has been very difficult for me to receive awards and I don’t even tell you that my classmates come to see me. Recognition has come to me with this function, but I have done things that were at the same level. ‘A vueltas con Lorca’ was a before and after.
-What did that role entail?
-Understand myself as a theater actor, which I am and always have been, but the cinema diverted me. It interests me from performance art, not from a conception of Italian-style theater in which you are a character. You are the transmitter of something that is a poet who has many characters, many ideologies and many views of looking at the same event. You feel a bit like God moving all that.
‘The wars of our ancestors’.
-Cinema and theater seem like watertight compartments without flows of performers.
-We are pigeonholed and the production calls you for certain things. If you’re dramatic, dramatic until you’re done. You have to demonstrate more records leaving the commercial structure. The only way is like I did, with a trailer and on my own. I never thought I could do a monologue, now I am qualified, although it is not what I like the most because it involves a man with himself, it is very little, and I want to handle hundreds of characters in one.
-Does the work speak of war or violence as an integral part of our nature?
-Talk about war as a fundamental issue. Delibes knows that there has to be a central theme and everything else revolves around that. The objective is to address violence against man, man against man and against nature, and how it is violent with man for having treated it badly. Also against animals, there is a plea in favor of him, you cannot have empathy for life if you do not have it with animals. I am the son of a farmer and I have seen them treated with sticks to get more yield. These ways are normalized because they are that, animals, but if we start like this, we will say that they are raised or because she is simply my wife, in short, someone other than me. In this brutal hedonism in which we are involved, it seems that others do not exist.
-Pacífico receives the warmongering inheritance from his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Have we broken that ancestral chain?
-No, now we have infinitely more precise and destructive killing machines, but the goal is the same, to kill the other who is not like me. Something we thought eradicated has returned, nostalgia, the idea that any past time was better when the truth is that there were bad things that should not be repeated. Populists use it, but it’s a lie. The cultural fact has a commitment with the beautiful, but also with the social and must count what we do not like. The function offers us a good walk in this regard.
-Some candidates in the current electoral process have brought us back to times of violence that seemed to have been overcome.
-The angel of the story, a character rescued by Walter Benjamin, insists on awakening the dead. When there is no speech, politicians cling to the idealization of what did not happen. It is sad and unfortunate.
Carmelo Gómez and Miguel Hermoso at the Arriaga theater.
mireya lopez
-What does he share with Pacifico, his character?
-Almost everything has to do with me. We have not made an external and distant drawing, but we have entered the reason for those behaviors. It is psychology, not just a simple story. That man finds himself in an environment where if you don’t have a war he is not a complete subject, an eccentric behavior that may remind us of García Márquez in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.
-The name of Carmelo Gómez refers us to the cinema, but you seem to mention it with some resentment.
-Resentment because they called me, not I them, and then they told me to leave. You turn yourself in and then the company blames you for having rheumatism, and you say listen that this job consists of spending all day in the water, but they reply that they don’t want you with rheumatism and it bothers you because you did it by those acronyms. It sounds like frustration and I don’t want to suffer from it. People are afraid to say something bad about cinema as if it were an untouchable entity. Right now it’s blatantly a profit thinking company, I have no sense of creation. I would have liked to continue, but I would have missed Lorca, Delibes and everything that is happening to me.
-The protagonists of the screen are now young, handsome and very active in social networks.
-And they don’t have rheumatism! There is a social issue. We are in the society of the spectacle, constantly building a discourse that has to do with the spectacular, simplifying everything due to the needs of globalization. The messages are powerful and brief. The cinema costs a lot of money and you have to get it back or it disappears. Today there are no Buñueles because there is no room for them.
-Have you closed the door to the cinema or do you keep it ajar?
-The possibility of me returning to the cinema as an actor is closed. I don’t feel like it. The ways of working today are incompatible with me. I need to rehearse, mature the characters six months before shooting, and if they don’t give you that you can’t be there. I conceive of cinema as a goldsmith’s work.
Can you imagine a more cooperative and less violent humanity?
-If we continue to exist it is because there is a need for the other, otherwise we would have eaten each other a long time ago. I would encourage young people to return to the channels of culture because they will find a different version of events. I see them bored, they just have fun being the beast or with sexual excess. I don’t see them in theaters and museums. Do you know what you are missing, guys?
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