It is one of his favorite works, given his beauty, thickness and layers of meaning. This is stated by Marcos Guzmán, an academic at the Umayor Theater School and who is one of the directors of the works that this unit is developing after the Mincap financing for the project to support university theaters.
“Lear” by William Shakespeare is a tragedy around the horror and decline of our current world. A father who is king faces his daughters; On the other side of the mirror, a mother is deceived by an unrecognized child. Madness will spread through the kingdom as a fog that crosses everything. This is the story of two inexorably dragged families towards a spiral of violence, chaos and death.
The work will be presented for free in three points in the capital. In a first batch it will be mounted in the Umayor Theater Room (Santo Domingo 711) space that the 2025 also turned 20 in the national scene. The functions will be developed from the August 28 to 30 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets will be released by the TicketPlus.cl system
Then the cast moves to Lo Prado, to the Joan Jara Theater (Paseo de las Artes 880), space where there will be functions on the days September 9 and 10 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets will be delivered prior registration in the form available on the social networks of the Centro Cultural Foundation (@FCCloprado)
Finally, the cycle will conclude in Maipú, with a work of the work on Friday, October 3 at 7:00 p.m. In the municipal theater of the communeLocated in Av. Los Pajaritos 2045. For this function, tickets will be available on the Maipuencomun.cl portal, where the public can register.
Together with these, the cast will perform special functions for school audiences at Matiné, this adds to the meeting with the communities that the team experienced through the development of training clinics in the Prado, the forest and fifth normal.
All this after an audition process that gave way to the confirmation of an intergenerational element, with different experiences and trajectories, composed of Francisca Marquez, Claudia Di Girolamo, German Retamal, Rallen Montenegro, Vanessa Peric, Juan Galvez, Magdalena Urarte, Matías Cornejo, Josefina Larraín, Francisca Videla and Juan Pablo Montenegro; who will be on stage with the integral design of Catalina Devia; and the sound design of Daniel Marabolí.
Particularities
-What have been the peculiarities of this process, considering that it is a university theater project?
First the opening of the cast construction process, democratizing the access of students, graduates and graduates to the auditions, which allowed us to form a fundamentally young cast, consistent with the intention of this project to articulate a contemporary look on Shakespeare.
It has been for the entire work team a true luxury investigate scenically from the beauty of this dramaturgy, its multiple translations and versions, added to the different political readings and looks, philosophical and of different knowledge that circulate on the material, which somehow remembers the ability of classical materials, of being retouched, given their permanent emergency.
Our project articulates a young cast on the subject of a material that installs as one of its knots a brutal generational tension, a generational gap that is part of the conflict of the work and its characters. That is one of the places of reflection of the project, which also forces us from the acting point of view to address and try to overcome certain difficulties in the articulation and reading of its structure. Our intention as a work team is to raise certain questions around the material, not only from a lyrical dimension, typical of literature, but from the very specificity of the theater, which in our view has more to do with images, atmospheres, bodies and scenic space.
-Avation was defined that it was a cast of different generations.
From the artistic direction of Cristian Aravena and Paula Aros this was raised in the project itself: its nature is that it is basically a young cast. That implies a series of complexities and interesting challenges for the work. Our project is mostly made up of young actresses and actors, which exacerbates, I think, one of the knots of the work, which is the generational tension between the old and the young people, about one of Edmond’s texts, central character of the story, which says: “Young people go up when the old ones fall.”
-An of the elements of these projects is that they were classic. Here they chose a classic classic that is Shakespeare. How can this authorship question us today?
It has many entrance places. The emergence of the material, which has an obvious political dimension since the tensions around power are universal, are permanent in time and we see them in their fierce exercise of absolute brutality and misery every day. Tension and betrayal are an inalienable part of what surrounds and defines power itself.
Our project tries to tension the dramaturgy with a series of physical actions, images, supports, strategies and procedures that somehow allow us to approach from a spirit of contemporaneity to the story. Our Lear is looked at from the subjectivity of the same king, his condition, his loss. Lear’s madness reminds us of the idea of a mental condition, so in vogue in the contemporary, which causes a collapse in its emotional and family relationships. Blindness then appears as a fundamental sign. The jester constantly warns of his actions, challenging the king to be lucid around the actions he is exercising, but of course Lear is unable to see. In the work there is also that idea, to cause the fall of the old power, because there is no other way to access it. That is a bit the leitmotiv in tragedies in Shakespeare.
-Justly, your version is curious to read is played by a woman. Had it done before?
In our version there are two stories: that of Gloucester, which is stars in Claudia Di Girolamo, and that of Lear that Francisca Márquez does. The two stories operate as a mirror of the other and have to do with the complex link between mothers, fathers and children. King Lear with his daughters and the Duke of Gloucester, who in our version is a mother, with his two children are crossed by the ambitions of power, complex affections and ghosts, who take these families to blindness, causing them to be those who undermine their relationships to paroxysm and fall.
-You talked about work with certain previous materials on Lear. The first version that was made in Chile of the work was a translation by Nicanor Parra.
I remember that powerful version of Alfredo Castro, starring Héctor Noguera as Lear and Ramón Núñez as the jester. I also remember that Claudia Di Girolamo was in that version like Cordelia.
-How would you place this address work in your career, in everything you have done before?
I’m sorry as a great and terrible challenge (laughs). I think it allows us to account for certain research and scenic searches, in addition to certain issues that somehow cross previous projects.
-How was the work of the text, this adaptation?
Very collaborative. We understand that the text finally responds to the scenic games that we are raised in the trials, so it has been a job around the very mobile version.
Regarding what you asked about coherence with my previous work, I think for example in authors such as Pasolini, which despite being solid, bright and lucid as literature, always require a rewriting that occurs in the scenario itself, through the images, objects, actions and scenic space. In that sense for this project we have not been afraid to cut, letting it be the elements of the scene that speak. We could believe that everything is in literature itself. The theater is also something else.
-This work also has a free character and itinerance in territories. What seal printed this feature?
It’s a big question.: It’s finally moving …
-Confiar in the public …
That’s how it is.
-What is the invitation to the public?
Invite them to a scenic work from Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, with a cast of different generations. A story around the complexity of subsidiaries and the pride and blindness of power.
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