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In Ostende, one New Year’s Eve, in the hall of an old Hotel, appears Minetti, an actor called by the Director of the city’s Theatre to play King Lear. He, as well, was a Director in a small village on the border with Denmark. But the Director does not turn up and Minetti speaks non-stop evaluating himself, his life, Life. He talks about how he was relieved of his duties because he had disowned classic literature. He brings his own Lear’s mask, made specially for him by Ensor himself in this same city. The night wears on, the day goes by. The director does not turn up and he will never play Lear. Finally, alone, taking the mask Ensor made for him out of the suitcase, he puts it over his head and, getting over his obsessions in front of the sea of Ostende, he takes a pill and waits for the death. Meanwhile, the Hotel guests celebrate the coming of the New Year.
ABOUT THE PLAY
This play is based on a real and historical German actor, Bernhard Minetti (1905-1998), who, in 1976, inspired playwright Bernhard this nearly monologue of diabolical musicality. This actor performed plays by Shakespeare, Genet, Shiller, Pinter y Beckett, and was never away from the stage in his 70 years of career.
The playwright utilizes the actor in his essence and does not care at all about his biography. His greatest vocation is showing his ambiguities and despicable acts, showing him at the same time as a great despiser of Nazism, whose undesirable resurgence he never stopped denouncing.
Bernhard composes for Minetti this bleak and pathetic concert, in which the orchestra, conducted by a sometimes furious, sometimes fragile and feeble soloist, fades little by little into a mortal silence, while happiness is all around. The actor, vampirized by his own art, dies in the street, where the dramatic artist has his kingdom.
ABOUT THE STAGING
Both actor Juan Carlos Moretti and I, with the aim of getting as close to this text as possible, started the work on our own, developing the habits of our routine and our method, studying the text, reading it aloud, looking for the rhythms and sonorities, trying to decipher the little enigmas or the great conflicts each playwright has, and which are more usual in Bernhard than in others.
Working on a Bernhard text is always putting up a building on another which has already been built. The figure of the main character was getting bigger as the other characters and the scenography were disappearing. They were falling within the work, blending in the reading the Actor and Director usually have in the first rehearsals, and the characters became the ghosts who were wandering around Minetti’s mind. Illness, lost of memory, death, tiredness, dementia, old age, youth, love, Nazism, intolerance, ….; these all were the ghosts of his life. The structure of the play took shape. It was unnecessary to have actors to interpret characters, or scenography to illustrate impossible dreams. There only exist Actor and Director, who are the Protagonist and the Antagonist, the essential elements in Theatre.
