When 25 years of the first comedian entry into the Royal Spanish Academy, Fernando Fernán Gómez (Lima, 1921/ Madrid, 2007), a theatrical work rises again to the scene to the actor in a assembly full of reverie and based on his admission speech and his constant fight for the word. The actor himself already said in that speech, pronounced on January 30, 2000, replacing the grammar Emilio Alarcos: “For a worker of words, as can be the comedian who today directs these series of them, it is a joy to travel the roads open by Alarcos.”
The dramatized theatrical version of this emotional speech is released in the room that bears his name, the Fernán Gómez Theater, in Madrid, in a montage with dramaturgy and text by Raúl Losánez and directed by Juan Carlos Pérez de la Fuente, also artistic director of this municipal center. Nancho Novo and Marta Poveda star THE ADVENTURE OF THE WORD which can be seen until June 22.
“Since I took charge of this center I was clear that I wanted Fernán Gómez to be the identity of this house,” explains the director about this project, which considers “the main course of the season.” In a very white scenario dotted with desktop objects and theater models, a central table and the keyboard of a computer, the encounter of a speaker who rehearses the writing of his speech in the SAR (Royal Spanish Academy) and the Word takes place, which comes to the aid of that troubled man who seeks in the language the best way to express himself.
Known his passion and tenacity for the word of Fernando Fernán Gómez, – “I am a pawn of the word,” he said – the author and journalist Raúl Losánez has focused all his energies on making that poetic and fantastic encounter, but with an earthly point, he becomes a burning defense of the greatness of the word.
“When I read the speech I had many doubts about the dramaturgy to find. I did not see the theatrical work was not a biopic of the actor.
“My claim focused on humanizing the character to face a vulnerable and fragile man,” explains Losánez, who confesses his admiration for confessed and radical love and the commitment that the actor felt for the word and language. “He always felt a vassal of the word. I understand his passion and his struggle to always find the most precise, fair and beautiful word and also defeat because you never reach it,” he adds.
All the real speech of Fernán Gómez in the academy is contained in THE ADVENTURE OF THE WORDalthough not linearly and in its original order, to which Losánez has been introducing fiction additions. “It is clear that the comedian was not in a comfortable place for him, he faced a very different audience than he was accustomed and that created situations of doubts, fears and uncertainties.”
This assembly is, in the words of its director, Juan Carlos Pérez de la Fuente, the necessary look at Fernán Gómez from the stage. “Everything in Fernán Gómez is theater, even his cinema is theater. Without it the twentieth century in Spain is not understood. He is a contradictory and complex character that we feel tremendously proud. His speech in the academy was an event. He was the first comic, a restless comedian, who entered the institution. The speech of this comedian in the academy is not He did with fear, nothing less than replacing Emilio Alarcos.