La Jornada: At 77 years old, Luis de Tavira keeps his date with Shakespeare by playing King Lear

Life always has appointments or pending debts for us. For Luis de Tavira, one of the main ones was with William Shakespeare. During more than half a century of career, to his credit there was not a single production or a single interpretation of the English bard. And, of course, it has its reasons.

That void ends now by starring in the setting of Rey Learin the version adapted and directed by Angélica Rogel that will be presented from May 7 to June 7 at the Hellenic Theater.

The playwright, stage director, actor, theater pedagogue and creator of institutions accepts the challenge at 77 years old, with a certain “fear and trembling”, guided by one of his central convictions: “the theater is always the one who chooses, not one; he called me to do this now.”

In personal terms, who is considered one of the greatest figures on the Mexican scene faces this adventure with enormous inner complexity. “First, with the enthusiasm and grace that comes with doing theater and staying in the construction of life at these years that I have,” he tells The Day.

“Accepting the challenge, the invitation of life and theater to continue on stage gives me deep joy and hope. But this is daring: I would not have done it if they did not invite me. I have enormous faith in those who came to me.”

It was also decisive to “know and admire” Angélica Rogel very well, as well as the members of the “wonderful cast”: Mayra Batalla, David Calderón, Mariana Gajá, Mauricio García Lozano, Mariana Giménez, Alejandro Morales, Diana Sedano and Raúl Villegas.

“Theatre is a community art. Here there is an admirable team, enormously lovable and capable. I feel very privileged,” adds the teacher, who confesses his surprise because now he is required more as an actor when much of his career has been as a director.

“I started as an actor. Héctor Mendoza, my decisive teacher, told me that if I did not enter into the enigma of acting I would never understand theater. From there I became an acting pedagogue and, later, in the development of an aesthetic vision, to direction. That has been the continuous line of my work. I have also created institutions so that theater fulfills its reason for being,” he explains.

“It is curious that in recent years they have called me to act. I have not proposed it, I do not consider myself an actor. But José Caballero invited me after almost 30 years of not doing so. I dared and the theater welcomed me.”

Since then, he says, they have continued to call him. “I have always thought that the theater chooses us and puts us in our place. When I say that the theater chooses, what one has left is to say ‘yes or no’, and, in which case, obey.”

Acting is for De Tavira (Mexico City, 1948) a way to acquire skills: “I learn constantly. There is a passion for knowledge about the enigma of the human that is only found in the experience of theater and is shared. The spectator is also a teacher. The play, the fiction and the character himself are understood in the ears and in the hearts of the spectators of each performance. That is an immense grace.”

hell in the heart

In his opinion, Rey Lear represents acting and stage work on a “larger scale.” It is one of the greatest fictions and the character has a complexity before which “one feels fear and trembling.”

The important thing, he assumes, “is to put yourself there, obey and let it happen. It is a terrible work, a character capable of reaching passionate and tragic extremes. He maintains a relationship from the intimacy of feelings to cosmic laws. The great interlocutor of that character is the cosmos and chaos.”

In that sense, the stage creator finds an echo in the English poet John Milton, a contemporary of Shakespeare: “In The lost paradise It says that we are capable of creating a hell in the heart of paradise or a paradise at the end of hell. It is the ability of the spirit to interact with the forces that surpass us: nature, the cosmos, the celestial bodies, the sun.

“Something that in the era of positivism we have lost. The violence with which ecological consciousness or the risk of atomic destruction awakens today confirms a vision that we previously believed to be primitive. There is the dialogue between our time and Shakespaere’s.”

Regarding the tragic force of Lear, De Tavira considers that it lies in the extreme enigma of passion taken to that maximum point known as fury. “It is not just anger or anger, but the ability to go to the extreme. He is a man who faces fury. It becomes a hurricane, a tempest, a storm, winds that are the masters of the character. When he stands in front of them he will understand his serious mistake: that of a powerful man, but also that of a father who is going to face ingratitude.”

In his opinion, ingratitude is one of the great human problems. “We are ungrateful. We do not recognize what we have received as grace. Shakespeare goes to extremes: there can be no greater ingratitude than that between parents and children. Lear lives that experience and begins to understand the blindness in which he lived. Then, madness becomes wisdom.”

For the stage creator, the work also speaks of the structure of power: a king who decides to let go of public responsibility, but retain authority. “He wants to eternalize himself in power, the great temptation of every powerful man. Then he puts his children to compete for love and succumbs to adulation. He makes a mistake and tragedy opens his eyes until he reaches the storm.”

Loyalty to ours

One of the main reasons why De Tavira had never done Shakespeare has to do with a loyalty to the great playwrights in the Spanish language.

“Now, in this final moment of life, I have to accept the invitation. Shakespeare is the size of Aeschylus, Calderón, Molière. He is the most universal author. Without him there is no England, just as there is no France without Molière or Germany without Schiller,” he says.

“We have Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Calderón, and we don’t stage them. I almost made it a point not to stage Shakespeare if I hadn’t staged ours before. I felt that the dialogue with him is vast, but we haven’t exercised that of our great creators of identity. However, the theater chooses and now it called me to do this.”

Regarding how he prepares for a work that constantly goes from cruelty to tenderness, he responds: “I don’t know; it’s trying to put myself there, let it happen and happen, trying not to resist and trust.

“You have to guess. Acting is mantic. We learned to speak because we trust and because we guess. I don’t feel endowed with great technical resources. I put myself in the dimension of simplicity, humility, obedience. I let the fiction itself take me.”