The Jardiel Poncela Room of the Teatro Fernán Gómez. Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid (Plaza de Colón, 4) presents from tomorrow Friday until next December 8 the work El Monte de las Ánimas (The Mount of the Souls), by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, in version of José Ramón Fernández and co-directed by Ignacio García and Pepa Pedroche.
This project, interpreted by Alba Recondo, Javier Godino, Lucía Esteso and Pablo Béjar, is linked to the recovery of Don Juan Tenorio. El Monte de las Ánimas is considered the best short horror story in Castilian literature. In the face of the aggressive Halloween invasion around the All Saints’ Day, a public theatre cannot remain unmoved. It’s time to claim the figure of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and bring his most important legend to the scene, thinking especially about a young audience.
The legend tells the story of young Alonso trying to please his cousin on the night of the feast of All Saints. The work was published on November 7, 1861 with sixteen more legends in the newspaper El Contemporáneo.
Romantic literature wants to look beyond what reason draws. So look at the legendary. There will be some truth. Romantic literature had a short life in Spain and several names known to all. Among those names learned in school –Zorrilla, Cadalso, Espronceda… – the most famous is undoubtedly Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Today’s young people can find in these romantic legends a reflection of the stories that fascinate them; tales that, for the most part, are versions and variations on those legends that the Romanticism told. Using El Monte de las Ánimas as a container for other legends, we have brought to our present century those fears of the last century because they are the same fears, the same fear. What I dare not look at. What dwells in my nightmares.
The text by José Ramón Fernández allows us to dream of a tribute to the oral tradition of tales, legends, stories and stories that cross time and live in the memory of the listener, turning him into a narrator in future spaces of intimacy. It also proposes a close and recognizable scenic game to verify that the fear of the possible, the doubtful truth, the strangely intuited, the “beyond”, is a matter of always that we have not managed to overcome. The immense romantic authors are the starting point for this journey through the intangible and dark that inhabits everyone and that attracts with an inexplicable vertigo. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
