2024-01-20 07:31:00
The Castells family is quite an institution in Catalan theatre. The twins Josep and Jordi Castells they have created, with their hands, scenographies for some of the great productions of the last decades. Comedians, Dagoll Dagom, La Cubana or La Fura dels Baus have dressed the stage with the creations of the two brothers, painters and set builders, and of a second generation, that of the set designer and costume designer Lluc Castells. All three are now breaking the silence preserved for years in Cals Castells by bringing to the scene the experience of the grandfather, Pepe Castells i Pubill, during the civil war, a War paperswhich arrives today at Rerelteló de Porqueres with sold-out tickets.
The experiences of the soldier, only nineteen years old, collected in a diary of his daily life at the front and the letters he sent homerevive in a show in which the Castells team up with the actor and playwright Pau Vinyals (Ravós del Terri, 1986) for shape the old envelope wrapped in newspaper and sealed with painter’s tape that has been running around the family home for decades without anyone ever opening it.
Vinyals, who also stars in the production and signs the direction with Rita Molina Vallicrosa, had already approached family taboos with The pine giant, an award-winning autofiction centered on his grandfather’s Francoist past. It was precisely this project that attracted the Castles when they entrusted him a material that has also become an editorial project at the hands of the Enserio de Banyoles design studio.
Pau Vinyals brings the transgenerational heritage to the Planet
From the first idea of turning those notes into a book, it went on to a dramatized reading, and from there to a production premiered in October at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the headquarters of La Perla 29, which today he arrives at the civic center of Porqueres to start the Rerelteló cycle, this year dedicated to memory.
El Rerelteló looks back with Marala, “Papers de la guerra” and “Rojos”
Scenographers on stage
Day by day on the Republican front between Teruel and Castellón, with banal moments and others more intense; the feelings when there are casualties or, already in Madrid, where he arrives wounded and feels the fear of having to return to the trenches are some of the moments that Pepe Castells recounted in the newspaper.
“The will from the beginning has been to be very respectful of the material and the moment the family is in, in the joy of sharing it, which is why I wanted the Castells brothers to be on stage. I’m not doing the exercise of being a character, but of thinking that we could all find ourselves in this situation and that, in reality, it’s an experience that would be good for the whole country to experience, because talking about the civil war means talking about now and the traumas we still carry», says the actor and playwright.
Vinyals, who already experienced a similar process on his own skin with The pine giant, details that it was Lluc, the third generation, who uncovered the silence. “The children want to know because they feel that there has always been pain in the house, but they have a healthier place from which to look at it”, he explains, although he points out that one of the objectives of the assembly has also been to vindicate the children of those who lived through the conflict.
“There is a whole generation that has lived in silence, running away from pain but still doing things. They haven’t taken the step of speaking because maybe they didn’t know how to do it, but they have fought in their own way: speaking Catalan, generating popular culture, raising again a Catalan culture that had been swept away… all this has also happened to claim”, points out the Ravós actor, because at each function one of the two Castells brothers accompanies him to create the scenography live.
Jordi and Josep Castells alternate for paint on stage the arid landscapes of the Master described in the diary, showing the public the art in which they are masters: «Love is one of the engines of Papers de la guerra, along with admiration for the Castles. They taught me what it means to look at the theater from the love of the profession, and their father had taught them this before.”
#Painting #silenced