Joaquín Furriel: "In theater you can afford to love someone you would hate outside"

BarcelonaAlthough Barcelona broke its heat record this Wednesday and the Teatre Grec stage is outdoors, Argentine actor Joaquín Furriel (Lomas de Zamora, 1974) is not afraid of the city's high temperatures. "I premiered my first play when I was 13, on December 20th in Buenos Aires, which is like performing here in July. I'm always happy when I perform in the heat, it's a caress for my soul," the performer highlights. He is the protagonist of The True Story of Richard III, a show directed by Calixto Bieito that will be performed this Friday and Saturday as part of the Grec festival. The play arrives in Barcelona after being staged in Madrid and Bilbao and having a season and national tour in Argentina with a very enviable reception: for two and a half months, the show could be seen from Wednesday to Sunday at the Teatro San Martín, which has a capacity of 950 people. They sold out all tickets.

After working together on Life is a Dream (2010), Furriel and Bieito reconnected last year at the performer's suggestion. With an extremely intense audiovisual schedule – for many years Furriel was part of several Argentine telenovelas that made him very well-known, especially in his country – the actor was looking for a project juicy enough to take a break from filming and enjoy theater again. "I read Shakespeare's Richard III and I found it to be a farce about cruelty. Through humor, I could turn it into a cathartic work about a whole series of things that distress me and that I don't know where to place. For example: violence, the idea of an enemy, authoritarianism, the denial of the past, the underestimation of human rights, the association of the welfare society with a ridiculous utopia," Furriel enumerates.

The director immediately jumped on board and they got to work on a version of Richard III that anchors itself in contemporaneity and includes the BBC documentary about the appearance of the king's body in 2012. "That discovery dismantles the idea that Richard III was a physically monstrous character. He carries the hump within him. He has a wickedness that no one would endorse," the actor emphasizes. Precisely, the great challenge of each performance is to get the audience to connect with this protagonist, even though his behaviors are abject. "That's what fascinates me most about theater, the capacity for openness and for taking the spectator to frightening places. Here you can allow yourself to love someone you would hate outside. It's an oasis without moralities or corsets, it exists to talk about primary emotions and all the subtleties that accompany them," Furriel defends.

Politicians in a senile state

The show avoids establishing direct links between specific political leaders and Shakespeare's protagonist, but it does weave a reflection on the figures who currently govern the world. "In current politics, with leaders over 75 years old, sometimes when I hear them speak, I have the feeling that some of them are senile. We have conceived a younger Richard III, who wishes to kill everyone and rule the world because he believes he can compete on equal terms with those who are reigning," says the interpreter. In this sense, the play raises "how we are increasingly endogamous and live in times of tension," in societies "where you are either in favor of a cause or you are the enemy."

The vehicle for achieving this is a text loaded with humor and strong physical demands, especially for Furriel, who understands interpretative preparation as a sporting event and follows a series of guidelines to take care of his body, but above all his voice. "Calixto has a way of working with impulses and physical emotionality that makes what happens on stage only able to happen there – points out the actor–. If I did some of the things I do in the show here, the people around us would very likely call a psychiatrist, convinced that I am suffering a psychotic episode".