Interview
Juan Mayorga
“People might question my work in El Cartógrafo, but no one could question the work of Blanca and José Luis.…
“People might question my work in El Cartógrafo, but no one could question the work of Blanca and José Luis. They are so good that they render themselves transparent so that the characters can appear, to tell this extraordinarily complex story in a way that is simple and eloquent”
El cartógrafo “came to me through a personal experience; I wasn’t looking to write a play. The play jumped out and grabbed me”, says Juan Mayorga (author and director of the play). “I thought it was an old church, but it was a synagogue. I’d never been in one before, so I went in. There was an exhibition of photos of the Warsaw ghetto, but they were photos of life, not of repression. There were children smiling, people going about their lives as best they could”.
And the playwright began to mark places with an “x” on his tourist map. When he left the synagogue, instead of returning to the hotel, he set out in search of those places. “There was nothing left, no buildings, none of the people whose lives were so unfairly interrupted. Every single place I marked led me to that same absence”, he explains.
“There was only one spot where there was a black stone, a monument to those who rose up in the ghetto, marking where they fell, where the night fell”. That space of absences led him to write a play that deals with remembering and forgetting, the question that “any human being asks” about “what to do with our own past and the past of the people who were there. Our lands are populated by absences. Forgetting cannot be death”. This idea then came together with the legend of the ghetto cartographer, an old man who had tried to map out the place with the help of his granddaughter, who was able to move around and get to the places he could not.
And the figure of Blanca, the wife of a diplomat who is on a trip in Warsaw and feels the same need to look for the places and the people as the writer did. He takes the audience around the city in the Second World War and the subsequent years, the years of Communism, and up to the present day.
Other characters appear, up to a dozen, but there are only two actors to embody them (Blanca Portillo and José Luis García-Pérez). “I thought about staging a production with twelve actors. One of them was Blanca. The text was like a letter to Father Christmas because she’s capable of leading any project and playing Segismundo, Hamlet, and the Virgin Mary”, states the author, who had already written for the actress before but had never directed her.
“People might question my work in El Cartógrafo, but no one could question the work of Blanca and José Luis. They are so good that they render themselves transparent so that the characters can appear, to tell this extraordinarily complex story in a way that is simple and eloquent”. (Excerpt from an article by E. Sierra)