Adolfo Fernández and César Sarachu

…Adolfo Fernández and César Sarachu …embarked on the challenge of adapting for the stage the novel by Rafael Chirbes ‘En la orilla’, a startling story not so much for its bitterness but more for the fact that it is «terribly realistic».

By the time the play started to notch up prizes –the National Narrative and Critics’ awards, among others – Fernández had already acquired the rights to stage it. He declares he is a «huge fan» of the work of the Valencian author (who passed away in 2015), on account of the sharpness of his critical gaze, which makes no concessions. ‘En la orilla’ is the chronicle of a collective failure, a gallery of «moral miseries» which is set «the day after the real estate bubble bursts», when a body appears in the lake in Olba.

The actor and director who was born in Seville but brought up in Bilbao has never forgotten the five days he spent with Chirbes at a workshop held in a farmhouse in Minorca. When asked about his method, Chirbes replied that he wrote «like a runaway horse». It has not been easy staging this «baroque» novel, which is almost 500 pages long, and which draws on «the realism of Delibes, the shock tactics of Cela, and the costumbrist style» of Galdós, whom Chirbes recognised as his maestro.

It has taken three years and nine adaptations. The plot revolves around three moments on the same day: the hunt, lunch, and an evening out drinking «when the characters finally erupt and start to say things to each other». The stage is a runway along which a series of highly recognisable «wretched» figures parade, from a time when «everyone talked about Cartier and the latest wine magazine. We look so pathetic that we can laugh at ourselves, at all of us».

César Sarachu takes on the role of the lead character, Esteban, a carpenter who loses his great love and ends up «living life from the shoreline». He is tricked by a real estate developer – played by Fernández, who also directs the play – and greed leads him to deceive his sick father, his siblings, and even himself. He ends up financially and morally bankrupt. «It is a story in which there is not even the smallest crack to let the light in», he describes.

Sarachu performs plays in Spanish, Swedish, English, and French, and has acted in London, Paris, Tokyo, New York… At Lecoq’s Parisian school, he learned to work with his body and his gestures over and above words, «because, ultimately, emotions are physical, and that is a universal language». There he met his wife, who is Swedish, and he has lived in that country for over two decades.

– Following your appearance in the hit TV show ‘Camera café’, do you now detest vending machine coffee?

– No. It was a little overwhelming. It was like you came from nowhere and you’d only just got there, but I still have a lot of affection for Bernardo [the character he played], and for his mother too. It was such a hugely popular show that for a while I turned down a few projects so I wouldn’t get typecast (Excerpt from T. Abajo’s text)