The first drama by Sílvia Abril: "I go out to play"

Barcelona"What are we doing today to leave a better world for the women who will live in 2061, when Halley's Comet reappears?", asks theater director Gara Roda to introduce El firmament, a play by Lucy Kirkwood that will be performed from May 6 to June 14 in the Sala Petita of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. The production is set in 1759 —when the comet appeared— and begins with a woman's murder conviction. To be exempt from the penalty, the woman argues that she is pregnant, and the town convenes an exclusively female jury, made up of townspeople, who must decide whether she is telling the truth or not. "I saw the play in New York and it captivated me. Often, only one story is told. Here, we have the opportunity to hear the voices of the fourteen women who will be on stage," says Gara Roda.

Actress Sílvia Abril steps into the shoes of Elisabet Vidal, the village midwife and a great defender of the condemned woman, Sança, played by Anna Castells. "My character has a lot of information about all the women on the jury, because the vast majority have given birth and she has assisted them. She leads a campaign to save Sança, she is convinced she is pregnant," says Abril. Accustomed to playing comedy characters, the actress is now facing a drama for the first time. "I've had imposter syndrome, many fears and insecurities, but I am very well accompanied and I am enjoying it a lot. I go out to play, and I hope this drama is the first of many," states Abril.

The original text stems from the popular women's juries that, during that era, were convened in the United Kingdom when the accused claimed to be pregnant. "This didn't happen in Catalonia. Since we wanted to set the play in les Guilleries, we propose this jury as a possibility. What would have happened if the women of that time had had this opportunity? How would they have faced it?", the director wonders. Taking advantage of the hypothesis, Roda has chosen to wrap the play in a fable-like atmosphere that plays with magical realism and orbits between the past and the present. "The era has served to create the foundations of the play, but from there we have tried to forget about it," explains Roda, who cites the use of sirens on stage and the voice of Donald Trump as an example of connection with contemporaneity.

Finding liberation

One of the challenges of the play has been to individualize the voices of all the characters so that they were not "a mass of women," but that each could reflect her personality. Thus, among the jury there is a mother of a family with six children, a foreigner, an old woman who knows everything, and a stubborn and very narrow-minded woman. Besides Sílvia Abril, the cast includes Cristina Arenas, Anna Castells, Ester Cort, Montse Esteve, Elena Fortuny, Maria Garrido, María Hernández Giralt, Júlia Jové, Cristina López Vallès, Tafita Miró, Mont Plans and Teresa Vallicrosa, along with two child actresses, Mila Borràs and Lola Sendrós. The only man on stage is Norbert Martínez, who plays the bailiff with the task of keeping the women locked in a room while they deliberate.

For the staging, Roda places the audience on three sides and slightly elevated with respect to the performers. "I wanted to sink the characters so that the women would feel trapped and observed from above," says the director. This occlusion, which at first may seem oppressive, becomes liberating. Through the conversations in the room, the women leave behind the physical exhaustion derived from tasks in the field and at home and begin to talk. "The play is, above all, a journey of listening to each other," concludes Castells.