I confess that the first time I saw Núria Espert, in February 1978, I went with the prejudice of grandiloquence, that stigma that I projected against an actress who seemed to me exaggerated in all her movements, with a deep and ancient intonation. The staging of ‘Una altra Fedra, sisplau’, directed by Lluís Pascual, and with I don’t know how many tons of sand on stage, also helped to make the tone ornate, and perhaps because Espriu’s work (a commission explicit of Espert) was short, words and sentences stretched out to infinity. It was not the beginning of a great theatrical friendship, I confess.
I kept that distance with Espert, with that concept of great lady of the theater that was incorporated into his personality, for several years. In fact, I did not recover from the egregious error, from the scenic myopia that I dragged for so long, until 2015, when she, also directed by Lluís Pascual, played ‘King Lear’ at the Teatre Lliure. I could apply what Espert herself said about Shakespeare’s monarch, abandoned in the storm of old age: “It is very difficult to shudder with this character, but when you feel him close, that difficulty vanishes.”
I had her close, that January night, and I understood that it was I who, for so many years, had navigated my unfair assessment of who was, without a doubt, in all her magnitude, a great lady of the theater. Not only because her Lear was a colossal old man disappointed and sad, but still impetuous and dignified, but because in that version it was Espert herself who taught all her wisdom, who brought tons of experience and intellectual and stage knowledge. All the dregs of a career that is now about to turn 75 years old led to the figure of the decrepit and blind king. We thought then that it was the last time we could see Espert on stage. We were wrong. In 2019, on a Sunday without too many people in the theater, I was able to attend one of the most impressive performances I can remember. Espert, also with Pascual, returned to Lorca (I count, at least, more than half a dozen Lorca shows, as an actress and as a director) and did so with a reading of the ‘Gypsy Ballads’. She alone, dressed in black, with the only scenographic help of some red and gray armchairs where she sat from time to time to recover her intimate memory. “It is not a show & rdquor ;, she said, “it is not a recital, it is not memories, while it is everything, there is my life and love for Lorca & rdquor ;.
play a cat
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He did not read the poet’s verses, but did something else: “Speak them, act them” or “inhabit them”, as one critic wrote. And at the same time, in Catalan, she explained his life. When she was barely 13 years old, she Núria Espert he recited ‘Romance de la luna, luna’, without knowing who García Lorca was. He did it in a cafe that his parents frequented. A person in charge of the Teatre Romea listened to her and suggested that she go for a test to play a cat. The girl Espert, At the age of 13, he recited ‘La pubilleta’, by Pitarra, one of the most melodramatic poems, emotional to the point of exhaustion, of Catalan literature. He got the part. Shortly after, he was already performing at the theater on Calle Hospital in a play by Sagarra, ‘L’amor viu a dispesa’. It was at that moment when Sagarra said a not very delicate phrase that has become historical: “This girl has the balls of a bull & rdquor ;.
That brave spirit was confirmed very soon. In 1954, at the age of 19, took part in the chorus of the ‘Medea’ by Euripides who was about to go to the Grec, at that time the Greek Theatre. The protagonist, Elvira Noriega, the most renowned actress of the moment, fell ill 12 days before the premiere. Espert had to pass a stress test to replace it. She was locked in the room of an abandoned hospital to verify that she would be able to place her voice and keep it until the end of the tragedy. She’s ever since she’s done it. With five other ‘medeas’, with multiple performances, with long tours, with memorable shows, with the best directors, with that excessive eagerness to shout “crazy with fire, crazy with snow”, as Lorca wrote. Now he leaves it. ‘La isla del aire’, directed by Mario Gas, will be his final farewell. In the Romea, where else? They are still on time. They can act like the ushers at a Kabuki theater in Tokyo when, seeing the mythical actor Bando Tamasaburo enter the room, they knelt, reverent.