The actor and director Manel Dueso dies, a free verse of Catalan theatre
Co-founder of the Sala Beckett, playwright and poet, he is the author of a poignant and incorruptible body of work
BarcelonaManel Dueso, actor, director, playwright, and poet with an extensive and prestigious theatrical curriculum, has died this Tuesday at the age of 73 as a result of cancer. He performed and directed more than a hundred plays by authors such as Shakespeare, Chekhov –his great predilection–, Molière, and Beckett, among many others, and wrote more than twenty plays, a production that validates him as a first-rate stage animal. As an actor, he was a well-known face thanks to such popular series as La Riera, Nit i dia, Cuéntame, Isabel, El cor de la ciutat, Secrets de família and Laberint d'ombres, and in cinema he worked under the direction of directors such as Jaume Balagueró (Mientras duermes) and Manuel Huerga (Salvador).
Creator of a committed and demanding theater, he did not always find the support and resonance he desired. "He was a very lucid and creative guy, who until the last moment has been writing poetry —explains to ARA the actor Francesc Orella, one of the performers who has recited his work in the poetic show Som cavalls d'escuma en camps de menta—. He had a very personal universe. He was not only unconventional, he really unsettled you, his texts move you from within. A great friend and a very talented artist has left us who did not have the recognition of the public and private theater companies of Barcelona. He made poignant and politically incorrect theater, he was against bourgeois and comfortable theater, and that still bothers people. When one is direct and raw, people get uncomfortable," laments Orella.
"Theater was his life, his way of being in the world. He understood it as a way to shake consciences and to discomfort those who sat in the stalls to make them understand the complexity of the human being. He did not write friendly theater, but poetic, flirting with the absurd, with surrealism, and always from love and the deepest respect for this art. That is why he was intolerant of mediocrity. His principles always came before everything else, even if that made him step outside the margins," states Montse Germán, another actress friend, who considers him a master. He had directed her in five productions.
Born in Sabadell in 1953, Dueso was a precocious actor and stepped onto the stage for the first time at the age of five at the Sant Vicenç Parish Center, in the Creu Alta neighborhood. His passion for the stage came from his grandmother, a great theater enthusiast, but at the age of 10 his parents forbade him from doing theater, although he continued to train in secret. After completing his military service in Lleida, at the age of 21 he bet everything on theater and entered the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona to study acting. Some of his teachers were Carlos Gandolfo, José Sanchis Sinisterra, and Pierre Chabert. As a director and author, however, he considered himself self-taught.
Dueso did street, guerrilla, and laboratory theater and co-founded several companies. He was also one of the founders of the Sala Beckett, where he debuted as a playwright in 1991 with Per a no res. He had premiered thirteen plays in theaters such as the Sala Beckett, La Villarroel, the Mercat de les Flors, and the Sala Muntaner. At the end of last year, he premiered at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya Jambo Bwana, inspired by a personal memory from the 80s, when he met a young Gambian man who had become a quadriplegic while working cutting down trees in Sant Hilari Sacalm.
As a theater director, he was interested in the densest and most complex authors: he directed works by Edward Bond, Connor McPherson, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and Jean Genet. In this capacity, he directed top-tier performers such as Julieta Serrano, Mercè Sampietro, Emma Vilarasau, Blanca Portillo, Montse Germán, Àurea Márquez, Daniel Brühl, Javier Cámara, Tristán Ulloa, Pablo Derqui, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Gonzalo de Castro, or Marc Martínez.
In recent years, the publisher Lapislàtzuli published his poetic theatrical work Mata'm (2023) and the poetry collection Som cavalls d’escuma en campsde menta (Lapislàtzuli, 2026). "His poetry contained a lot of magical realism, it was full of non-existent, invented, untamed creatures. He was an existentialist poet, who spoke a lot about death and life. His poetry is very raw, not at all intellectualized, lived-in. He had many things to say," recalled editor Jon López de Viñaspre this Wednesday.