INCERTA GLORIA

Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Barcelona

2015

Joan Sales dedicated most of his creative endeavours to make what would become the great Catalan novel about the Civil War. It is a portrait with admirable rigour of detail and a firm stance against the excesses of all parties, which, without losing strength in the ideological convictions of its author, avoids falling into the Manichean positions that have so often facilitated the elaboration of reductionist discourses on this conflict of painful resolution.

Sales' masterpiece follows life on the battlefront and in the rearguard from the different points of view of three young friends who fought together on the Aragon front, and who are both united and separated by their love for two female figures who live the reality of the opposing rearguard from that "uncertain glory of an April day" - to paraphrase the Shakespearean verse of The Two Gentlemen of Verona— in which the rise of the military forces triggered the war.

Àlex Rigola approaches the pages of one of the greatest Catalan novels to offer his personal stage reading, in keeping with his earlier works, such as his celebrated 2666 on the novel by Roberto Bolaño.

And all youth is nothing more than the uncertain glory of an April morning, a dark tempest traversed by flashes of glory, but what glory? What glory, O God? One must awaken, and awakenings are sad after nights of fever and delirium. Perhaps the worst thing about war is that it’s followed by peace… One awakens from one’s youth as from a delirious fever, but one clings to the memory of that fever and that delirium, that dark tempest, as though nothing else on earth were worth the trouble. I’m nothing more than a survivor, a ghost. I live only in my memories.

(Joan Sales, Incerta glòria)

Stage design: Max Glaenzel

Costumes: Sílvia Delagneau

Light design: Agustí Viladomat

Soundtrack: Nao Albet

Sound: Albert Mosoll

Video:
Francesc Isern
Max Glaenzel

Assistant direction: Alba Pujol

Assistant stage design:
Martín Eluchans
Josep Iglesias

Documentacion: Eleonora Herder

Body illustration: Alejo Levis

Technical and management team of Heartbreak Hotel:
Jordi Puig “Kai” (Producción ejecutiva)
Punt de Fuga SL (Coordinación técnica)
Titus Andrònic SL (Producción)
Trànsit Projectes (Producción)

Production: Teatre Nacional de Catalunya y Heartbreak Hotel