After four weeks of rehearsals, working on a character from the play all birdsa small cataclysm occurred. Núria Espert’s abandonment due to illness forced Vicky Peña (Barcelona, 70 years old) to assume the character of the grandmother in the work of Wajdi Mouawad, the Canadian playwright of Lebanese origin, a central figure in international dramaturgy. Directed by Mario Gas, All birds, an overwhelming and intriguing love story in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which explores identity and violence, premieres today, Friday, at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, where it will be performed until the 29th. Registered nurse and committed citizen , National Theater Award in 2009 and recent Fine Arts Medal, Vicky Peña opens up to talk about everything in a meeting at the Spanish Theater, where last season she coincided with Núria Espert in The island of airthe day after the first rehearsal with an audience of All birds.
Ask. How do you deal with this sudden change of character?
Answer. With disgust, because it meant giving up the presence of Núria Espert, with fear and with a lot of responsibility. I also admit that I felt a certain delight and pleasure.
P. From the mother to the grandmother, a significant change at an interpretive level. Do you see it that way?
R. They have very different dramatic densities, in addition to what it means to pass from one generation to another. It is a very substantial change.
P. A grandmother who hides a shocking secret.
R. I let myself be carried away by the pattern of suspense that the author proposes in the work. The author reveals, giving small doses of information that may surprise the viewer at first, then annoy him and finally offer him a complete mosaic of what the truth is. In this feature, the author writes almost as if he were dealing with a crime novel.
P. Replacing Núria Espert is no nonsense. Did your degree of responsibility increase?
R. Definitely. Each assembly, each award implies a greater degree of responsibility. Replacing Núria and playing a character like this is something very serious. The work has social, historical, family and also humorous aspects. It is a very powerful text.
P. Yesterday, Núria Espert attended the rehearsal and applauded passionately at the end of the performance. Was it something special for you?
R. I appreciate Núria in an extraordinary way. I have had few opportunities to work with her. I did it in Doña Rosita the single and last season in The island of air. Núria is a great teacher of life, of attitude towards theater. His know-how, his calm passage through the text, the interpretation, is very instructive. That it was there yesterday was very stimulating, very scary and very gratifying. She is the heart of this company and we miss her greatly.
P. Looking at his most recent career, it seems that he has no shortage of work. Did you imagine reaching 70 years old like this?
R. It seems like I don’t lack work, but I spend seasons doing nothing. Everything comes out at once and public appearances overlap. I have been lucky that the things I do are widely seen and appreciated, so it may seem like I am always in the limelight, but that is not the case. In any case, I’m not complaining at all. In this job we are starving or we are dying of sleep. It has always been like this.
P. Don’t feel like retiring?
R. I am administratively retired, because I have contributed to Social Security as an entertainment worker. As long as there are roles and I have the ability and desire to do them, I will be there. This profession is emotionally nourishing for me. In a scenario I feel that I serve a purpose in society. As long as I can, I plan to continue at the foot of the canyon.
P. But spending three hours a day on stage is not nonsense.
R. No, of course not, but it is harder to work in a mine or be a kelly making beds with infamous schedules. I recognize that acting is a complicated profession. The kind of concentration and emotional dedication that live performance requires of you is really very demanding. I enjoy a lot, but I also suffer.
P. Do you consider yourself a disciplined and obedient actress?
R. I think so. I am demanding or strict, but very disciplined if given good reasons. Sometimes, it seems to me that I am a bit answerable or critical, because I consider that what is asked of me does not fit, wrongly perhaps, with what I believe about the character.
P. Even with a director like Mario Gas, whom you know so well and with whom you have worked so many times?
R. Especially with him. Sometimes I’m a pussy because it’s clear that where there is trust, it’s disgusting. I am fully aware of his great theatrical wisdom and I put myself in his hands.
P. Has theater changed much since you started?
R. A lot. The theater continues to be what it is, a place where people come together to listen to the same story and find an echo that circulates among them. But there are many things that have changed. When I started there were very few public theaters. There were company entrepreneurs and wall entrepreneurs, those who had theater buildings. Now, there are private and public theaters that exercise competition with each other that could be positive, but which, in my view, is not. The private theater is assuming land that should belong to the public theater and the public theater is sort of relegated or trying to emulate what the private theater does. Nowadays a lot of theater is written. There is some very interesting authorship, but also much that I describe as navel theater, with very little significance. There is a kind of generational and individual anxiety that I think has a very short flight. Theater bars are disappearing and therefore those moments of reflection and feeling in common with the spectators or your own colleagues disappear. There are theaters today that could be a gym or a bank or a multinational chocolate bar and that seems terrible to me. I like theaters with their dark velvets.
P. What do you ask of public theater?
R. I ask you for responsibility and repertoire, to be attentive to tradition and current events. I also ask that you be warm and welcoming to the public and workers. The productions of a public theater such as the National Dramatic Center that I pay for living in Barcelona, just as a neighbor from Aranda de Duero or Tolosa pays, do not reach our cities. The same thing happens with the Classic Theater or the Zarzuela Theater, which all Spaniards also pay for. National theaters should have the obligation to tour, to do repertoires and performances with 20, 30 or 40 performers, especially after the pandemic that was devastating for our profession, and thus provide work for many people, including technicians. They continue to make shows for one or two actors in large rooms and this seems fatal to me.
P. all birds It is a show close to reality that also coincides with the current violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Do you experience it like that on stage every afternoon?
R. Of course, and, furthermore, one lives with the awareness that some of the things that Mouawad announces in the text, released in 2017, which sound like threats, are real and are being fulfilled.
P. “We are not made to know each other and live together,” is heard in the work. Is it a conflict without a solution?
R. Mouawad maintains this. What is happening in Palestine is unsustainable. How did we get to this situation? How has it been growing in a terrible way? How has Israel become a genocidal country? The Palestinian people are being destroyed due to our impassiveness, preventing food and medicine from arriving. Children are dying of hunger, of hunger. This is not anti-Semitism. My respect and love for the Jewish people, their religion, for the horror they suffered in the Holocaust, but that does not give them the right to do this barbarity. It moves me and horrifies me that we are not taking to the streets and mobilizing as we did for the Iraq war. What the hell is happening now that we don’t mobilize? The answer is in money, money, money. At that, I vomit.
P. “The truth is a thunderous toy.” It is another of the phrases that is heard in the function. Is it getting harder to find the truth?
R. I don’t think so. The truth is very multifaceted. Today there are some guidelines. Science, truthfulness, researching well, knowing which reliable sources you turn to is important, but the siren songs are very powerful. We have become lazy when it comes to thinking. Having your own criteria is difficult and for this you need the breeding ground of culture and education. That is why there is so much interest on the part of evil, so to speak, in eliminating culture and subjugating education, diluting healthcare. Today, one of the trenches of the class struggle is to fight for the public over the private. Unfortunately, we are seeing that no matter how much we elect our political representatives democratically, it is increasingly relative. Those who set the standards today are the large multinationals and the great fortunes.
P. He ran on Ada Colau’s list for the 2023 municipal elections. How do you experience politics in Spain?
R. With pain and perplexity. We are witnessing an assault on reason and truth. It is an unbearable and complicated cockiness to manage. Economic management in our country is going well, the economic indicators are positive, but society is feeling increasingly stifled. The housing problem is pressing and belongs to this assault on reason and humanism. I hope that society itself reacts and that there is regulation of the media because the hoaxes that many of these media spread are infamous. We cannot let certain characters who are causing great structural damage get away with it.