Thanks to his tenacity, talent, discipline and the indefatigable search that he usually undertakes to expand his artistic horizons, Joaquín Furriel The privilege of being considered the heir of Alfredo Alcón in the Argentine theatrical activity is being won in their own right.
Furriel revalidates the title with the premiere of “The true story of Ricardo III”a free version of the Shakespeare classic directed by the Catalan Calixto Bieito. The work premiered in the Martín Coronado Room of the San Martín Theater, an emblematic space in which Furriel knew how to provide an unforgettable characterization of Hamlet, a tremendous challenge of which he left Airoso by taking over each of the ghosts of the Nordic Prince.
Under his leadership, that “Hamlet” setting summoned more than eighty thousand people in 2019.
Now another out of time. In an era marked by comedies and musicals, Furriel makes a countercultural commitment, against the countercurrent. The occasion leads to a meeting with news and a talk about it.
News: Ricardo III has obsessed many actors, A Pacino has dedicated a film, for example. What is the attractiveness of this character?
Joaquín Furriel: He is the only character of Shakespeare who starts saying what he is going to do and does not stop until the end, he lacks conflicts, he is a guy who has no pruritus to use all the histrionic means he possesses to achieve power and with that goal appeals to levels of evil that are surprising. I think that its history is still a filial drama, it is the displaced of a family and decides to load them all to get to power. He also perceives that they are half numb at a time where you have to be awake, so he does not consider that his brother, who is governing the kingdom, is doing it in the best way.
News: He is heard to speak and it is impossible not to make a parallel with reality, not only Argentina but worldwide. The guy says what he is going to do and does, society is half numb, there is a kingdom of cruelty. Does the work have more validity than ever?
Furriel: Look, what seemed attractive to me and for which I wanted to carry out the project was to see what a director as magnificent as Calixto Bieito, who for me is one of the best in Europe. Approach to its version, see how evil works, how it dissects the relationships between the characters, follow the primary drives that are unleashed and see the dimension that Ricardo III found running from the moral imperatives. Because he puts in question the common places, including the ugliness and deformity of the character as justification of his actions. This version puts all that aside and says: “Let’s not justify evil, but, on the other hand, if evil exists in all of us, what happens?” History has shown that as a species we are varying according to sociocultural contexts, but in many cases we continue to react the same.
News: The work is called “The true story of Ricardo III.” What is this search for veracity?
Furriel: Well, because I think that Shakespeare ends up writing a work quite far from historical truth even if it is taken as such. It destroys the York, a family that had ruled until the death of Ricardo III, who in fact is the last king who dies on a battlefield, to look good with Queen Elizabeth who was a Tudor and criticize some officials of that time without referring directly to them because he was very dangerous. The true story also refers to the fact that in 2012 they found Ricardo III’s body in the parking lot of a supermarket in Leicester and discovered that he was not hunchback, he only had a scoliosis as a lot of people. The work Our Dialogue with the original of Shakespeare and a BBC documentary where the body begins to be analyzed. In the title there is something that manifests, we are playing with the concept of truthfulness, we consider what is true and what is false, this work exposes the fragility of truth.
News: The players are used to playing every Sunday, but when there is a World Cup they train in a special way. To make “Hamlet” he turned to yoga and swimming, how did he prepare for Ricardo III?
Furriel: On the one hand I have been reading books for a long time that have to do with what the work invokes, which is evil. And on the other, I am doing a lot of aerobic and anaerobic work to get with the air because it is a physical setting that requires a lot of training.
News: At least it lasts a hundred minutes, compared to the three hours of Hamlet, did business.
Furriel: Oh no, the three hours! (laughs) but it’s a hundred minutes where we are on stage all the time. In the fourth act of “Hamlet” I practically did not appear, I could go to the dressing room, here we are on stage since it starts until the work ends. We are going early, at 20, except on Sundays that we function at 19, which is good because at 21 you are going to morph.
News: Chat about the work while one eats or takes something complete the experience?
Furriel: That is the interesting thing that theater has, it is a live experience, one of the few places that we have left where the phone does not have to be and it is an activity to share. You go with someone, you see the work, then you sit down to chat about that or about life. I want that if you come to see us you feel that the work impacts you. That you are emotionally connected, that the public is crossed by what happens on stage. That is why we have that extraordinary cast, where there are performers such as Belén Blanco, Luis Ziembrowski, and Ingrid Pelicori, for example. Calixto did not want twenty actors, I preferred ten who are soloist, all theatrical very powerful, and he succeeded. They will meet a work that has humor, sarcasm, violence and beauty.
News: In Martín Coronado, he had already made “life is a dream”, directed by Bieito, and the “Hamlet” of Szuchmacher. Can we say that he plays at home and knows all the ghosts of the room?
Furriel: (Laughs) and, a little yes. It is a room that I like a lot, although it is big, something very crazy happens to me, for some reason in Martín Coronado to the public I feel close, I find intimacy beyond the 950 seats.
News: One of the central characteristics of his character is ambition. Without reaching those extremes, did the ambition ever put it out of axis?
Furriel: I believe that more than ambition we have to talk about a cousin sister who is the anxiety to accelerate the times, that has happened to me. Ambition is a very general word, it has positive and negative connotations. One can ambition grow, the problem arises when what you want to do makes you run from your identity, that never happened to me. But it happened to me as a boy that I wanted to access some projects and if for some reason they did not give me, that generated an anxiety that did not enjoy the present that I was living. Now looking back I realize how important it was to pass by to continue touring the way.
News: At this time we are all to some extent by Cristina Kirchner’s theme. Can we also read it as a tragedy of power?
Furriel: Look, when Calixto directs the play, he says that he does not do political theater, but of course on stage there are many issues that one sees in the political situation. I think who feels in the plate will be able to analyze many things and cross them with reality according to their subjectivity. Look that as a society we have been coming with opposite and exclusive looks for a long time, everything must be seen in one way or the other, within that cultural polarization in which we are immersed for a while it is a great exercise to observe which file falls to each one.
News: In 2022 was the fury for “Argentina, 1985” and the desire to win the World Cup. This year the Pope died, the Cristina happened and the trial for Maradona’s death is a disaster. Is Argentinity in crisis?
Furriel: That saying that was installed: “We are Argentines, I can not explain it to you” I never liked it because in some way it is to endorse a lot of things and in the background we know why we are as we are. It seems to me that nobody has the power to say: “Being Argentine is this”, something very valuable of our idiosyncrasy is just diversity, there is culturally our potential. Wanting homogenizing, falling into the monotony of saying that we can only be in a certain way, I do not believe it. We should think more complementaryly and not so uniquely, we have self -love for our country that I like and value it. I know all of Argentina because I traveled a lot from kid as a backpack and continued doing it over the years, both as a tourist and for work, it is a barbaric country. Sometimes we talk from a porteñocentrismo we need to run a little because it was said a thousand times, but it is true, the country is much more than Buenos Aires. Wealth is precisely in the diversity of landscapes, being and thinking, hopefully at some point we can bring positions since we are all living in the same sun.
