"Fear must not be paralyzing, it must mobilize us"

Barcelona"Politicians move around in a monoplaça / go with Avant / trip over branches / pay when they shit / and howl if they are flattered! / Who cares! / Haven't you voted for them? / Who else? The scabs from the park?", writes the German playwright Wolfram Lotz (Hamburg, 1981) in one of his most radical and most performed plays in Europe, The Politicians (2019). Lotz, who has a repertoire of fewer than ten plays, is one of the fundamental Germanic voices in the contemporary scene; he has been translated into about fifteen languages and his shows have been seen in countries like Germany, France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. And, despite this strong international projection, the playwright has never been performed or published here. Until now. Aware of this deficiency, the Centre de les Arts Lliures of the Fundació Joan Brossa welcomed the project by director Leo V. Granados and translator Marc Villanueva Mir to bring Lotz's The Politicians" to the stage and to bookstores at the same time. The show has just premiered and can be seen until April 26, and the book has already been published by Arola Editors.

"At first glance, it might seem like a political play, but it doesn't fit within any parameters of the Brechtian tradition or Heiner Müller's," explains Granados to introduce the piece. Lotz approaches the text from the perspective of an author who, during an obsessive night, begins to write about politicians. From there, the play embarks on increasingly absurd and wild paths and tributaries. "Lotz is self-critical because he feels that, like him, a large part of society constantly complains about politicians without doing anything to change the situation. He refers to this banal and everyday discourse of thousands of people who say that politicians are stealing from us, but without pointing fingers directly or proposing solutions," points out the director, who debuted with Fem l'última copa, by Harold Pinter (2019), and also led the new version of El principi d'Arquimedes" by Josep Maria Miró (2025).

One of the main characteristics of The Politicians is the formal game that, from the first line, the author sets up through language. The text is full of repetitions with the intention of reproducing the linguistic automatisms that society has inoculated and that it says almost without thinking. Thus, in the show "the politicians, the politicians, the politicians curse the storm and in the evening watch TV" but also "the politicians, the politicians, the politicians go by car because they want to be calm". As the play progresses, "the linguistic automatisms are being re-signified, because Lotz makes both crazy and realistic associations and you, as a spectator, can think of specific politicians", says Granados, who adds that the playwright "is a stutterer, and this connects deeply with his radical way of writing".

Generate images in the audience's mind

With such unconventional text, the staging was a real challenge for the company Els polítics. Granados gathered four performers –Guillem Albasanz, Francesc Marginet, Sandra Pujol and Ainoa Roca– and bet everything on surrealism and choral performance. "I shied away from the idea of trying to justify or make the audience understand the dramatic situation. We sought to make a radical commitment to the word, to the ability to generate images in the spectator's mind from a scenic device that creates impossible universes," highlights the director.

The show dives deeply into the absurd, and this brings a tone of humor to the piece, which the company not only has not renounced, but has strongly embraced. This element is multiplied above all thanks to Villanueva's translation, which maintains some German references – such as, for example, the bratkartoffeln, a type of fried potatoes – but others it transposes to Catalan reality, as when it says that "the politicians travel with Avant" or replaces Adolf Hitler with Francisco Franco and instead of saying he eats a pear [Hitler rhymes with birne, pear in German] it translates it as "eats a mango".

Els polítics functions, according to Granados, as "a portrait of society" that does not present clear solutions to the present, but does appeal to hope. "I don't believe that reality cannot be transformed. If things can be re-signified in theater, why can't it happen in the world? –reflects the director–. Fear is the great instrument of control in the 21st century, but it should not be paralyzing; fear should mobilize us".