2023-09-05 22:50:39
The theater is a weapon loaded with the future. That’s what happens in First Facethe production that has opened the season at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid in which the actress Vicky Luengo gets Suzie Miller’s play on sexual violence, premiered with great success in Sydney in 2019 and in London in 2022, to sell out seats and borders.
Luengo achieves something as theatrical as it is exceptional thanks to a millimeter text. The script by the Australian playwright -and jurist- Miller is a perfect machine: a monologue of almost two hours that never loses rhythm, endowed with a theatrical language made for the actress, with a classic structure that reflects the tension of the best stories. theater and cinema of the court subgenre. In addition, it addresses consent, a central issue in the current legislative debate on sexual crimes.
But First Face It is more than that. And it is because the actress allows the pain to pass through her; she risks exposing herself, not controlling, and she lets the character occupy her body. The representation disappears, the pathos and everything breaks The bustle of the present is left aside and the woman’s body reigns on stage, an exhausted body that has spent years, decades, centuries, being laminated and humiliated. The director, the Peruvian Juan Carlos Fisher, the lighting by Ion Aníbal López and the sober stage space by Lua Quiroga Paúl, decide to know and simply accompany, allow.
First Face addresses the story of Tess, a junior lawyer, successful, hyper-prepared and ready to act, who is cut short when she herself suffers what she has been fighting for years in court. Tess specializes in defending sexual offenders, finding loopholes in the legal system so that there is reasonable doubt and her defendants walk free. Everything changes when Tess is raped by a fellow office worker. There everything turns around. The complaint, the police, the reaction of co-workers, the 782 days until the trial and the judicial process itself in which the victim will be questioned until exhaustion. The strength and resolution of the lawyer becomes pure fragility.
When the applause sounds different
This newspaper was able to attend the third function in Madrid after its premiere in Avilés, the sixth function in total (the one on Sunday the 3rd was canceled due to the weather alert and will be compensated on another date). Then, already in the first scene, she makes a demonstration of interpretive capacity, of dynamism of gesture and energy, of acting tricks established in this actress who has been doing theater since her youth, be it with Alfredo Sanzol, Andrés Lima, Sergi Belbel, the recently deceased Salva Bolta, Gerardo Vera, Àlex Rigola or Josep Maria Flotats. Then there will be more than a hundred minutes of performance in which that exultant and confident body from the beginning will gradually become a devastated body. When the show ends, electricity runs through the entire audience. The applause is immediate, delivered, bravos are heard, but also words of thanks.
Luengo is aware that something special is happening. “The applause I am receiving in this performance makes me cry with gratitude and emotion every day,” he explained to elDiario.es. “When I finish the show I feel very open on the channel, very vulnerable. And it is as if everything that I have emptied is returned to me as love. I do not know how to explain it. When people applaud, instead of bravo, they shout thank you. It never happened to me. The first day I heard it, I started crying. There was a woman in the second row yelling ‘thank you, thank you!’ And they are not only women, but also many men, ”he adds.
But far from falling into the folklore of theatrical success, that applause denotes that something else has happened on stage. Vicky Luengo had been warning. In her last two theater roles, one in a supporting role, beginnersand another as the protagonist, in the Golem by Juan Mayorga at the Centro Dramático Nacional, had shown that she is a solvent, capable actress and that she “steps well”, but also that she has a strange relationship that is typical of getting closer to the characters. A rare combination of technique and smell. Something that she has also demonstrated in her work for the screen, both for television (Anti-disturbances), as for the cinema (Sure).
The power of the monologue
In theater it is common for the industry, when it believes that it is before an actor or actress of depth, is offered a monologue. Without being the acid test, in many cases it represents a before and after. It is logical to think that this is how the actress faced it at first, but the risk with which she faces it, the degree of exposure in moments of fragility point to other reasons. When asked about this, Luengo replies that he is aware that something happens to him in this role that had not happened to him before: “Normally I am clear about where I am going to go, I usually have more control, in this one I do not,” he confesses.
When asked if he is aware that there is something exceptional in this work at an interpretative level, Luengo affirms that it was in Madrid, in the general rehearsal, when he began to realize ―the premiere in the capital coincided in the middle of the Rubiales case―, but he says that he cannot give him a clear explanation: “I don’t know if I still understand what is happening, I only have a few functions, if I had to explain it I would say that I promised not to be above the story, to try to put all my honesty and all my truth on stage. It’s not about me working with my personal stories, I don’t believe in that way of acting. But in this case there is something that touches me so viscerally that I felt that I had to be honest with what was happening to me. That’s why I asked the director for permission so that we didn’t know what was going to happen every day. Honesty resides in allowing what is happening to me at that moment to happen on stage every day”.
Honesty and truth are something that every actor always tries to put into their work, by inquiring a little more into the causes, Luengo talks about control: “That is an issue in my life, not only as an actress, and here I allow myself not to have it. What touches me in this work is different from previous works. I could seek distancing, I know how to do it. But I decided to get wet, get my hands dirty, get into the mud no matter how well the work turned out, making what mattered was letting out all my pain, all my hatred, but not like Victoria Luengo, but all my pain and all my I will go as a woman, all my experiences and those of my friends, my relatives, of all the women that I have had around me living that experience”, she affirms emphatically. “I felt that the fairest way to explain this story was to get the viewer to see and feel what a body feels when it suffers something like that,” she concludes.
Thus, Luengo confesses that every day he goes out in fear, affirms that he does not know if First Face It will be an after in his career but there is a before and after in his life, he vindicates the political capacity of the theater: “If not, why would they be canceling so many plays,” he points out; and she is happy with the tour that does not stop growing and has already secured the cities of San Sebastián, Vitoria, Pamplona, Logroño, Zaragoza, Alicante, Albacete, Las Palmas or Bilbao in the coming months in which the actress is also waiting for the premiere from the series Red Queen.
After the performance, in the bars around the theater, you could find circles of spectators commenting on the play, debating the various issues that Miller’s text raises: consent, the difficulties of proving events that often occurred in private, the legal and procedural rigidity that a victim has to go through or how this has changed in the recent yes is yes law. On stage Luengo, with a broken body, has just said that we cannot continue questioning the victim and not question the very assumptions of the law, that something has to change, that one in three women has suffered a sexual assault, that the law turns on the wrong axis, that a woman’s experience does not fit with the system defined by men.
Tickets in Madrid are already sold out for all functions. Last Sunday, due to the weather alert, the function was suspended but it will be rescheduled soon for these 400 sold locations. It is shaping up to be one of the successes of the season as it is an intelligent and precise work on a subject that today is going through and transforming our society. With it, the spectators witness the incomparable power of theatre, capable of changing consciences and widening the lungs of “how many, suffocated, ask to be, ask for rhythm, ask for a law for what they feel is excessive”.
When in that meeting space that is a theater the theatrical act occurs, as Gabriel Celaya said of his poetry, the theater is not a “beautiful product, a perfect fruit, but the air that we all breathe, the song that space what we carry inside ”.
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