'The Wolf Queen' or the audacity to emulate Shakespeare

The French princess Margaret of Anjou is a fairly important figure in English history. Married by proxy at the age of 16 to Henry VI, she became a powerful queen renowned for her intelligence and political acumen, but also for her unwavering courage, which, as Edward Hall said, made her "more like a man than a woman." In the theater, she is a minor character in four of William Shakespeare's plays (the three parts ofHenry VI and, above all, Richard III), all of them documented from The Holinshed Chronicles (Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland), written between 1528 and 1580. "She-wolf of France, if not worse than the wolves of France," says the Duke of Suffolk in one of them.

Pau Carrió, a daring director and playwright—let us recall, among others, his Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky in the Free—, decided that Margarida deserved her own play and that she could rectify the Bard's neglect, an objective with precedents in other contemporary works in England. If Shakespeare draws inspiration from historical chronicles, Carrió does so by piecing together fragments of the famous playwright's works and then adding everything she needed—and there was a lot—to tell the story of this peculiar queen. It was a matter of tracing her life from age 16 to 55, when she died. The challenge was to assemble her own creation with the poet's words. And it is as true that the text flows quite continuously as it is that it is difficult to feel Shakespeare's poetic breath.

Articulated like a flashback Lasting over two hours, from the queen's final moments in an empty space, the production suffers from the problems inherent in this literary connection of the material, becoming a succession of events and confrontations that fails to explore the characters' conflicts and motivations beyond their dialogue. This is even true for the protagonist, and Maria Rodríguez Soto, poorly directed, attempts to fill the gaps with exaggerated gestures and melodramatic vocal inflections. However, the sobriety and symbolism of the staging—with some very effective ideas, such as the forest of armor used to depict the battle—and the commitment of the performers lend a certain strength to a production that, it must be said, achieves its goal of elevating the supporting character to a leading role.