"In Catalonia you are lucky because it has a strong pride in its language"

BarcelonaActress María Adánez (Madrid, 1976) arrives at the Romea Theatre in Barcelona full of enthusiasm. It is the first time she has set foot in a Catalan theatre with a professional project under her arm. "I don't understand why, until now, you had never acted in Barcelona," says the director of the Romea, Josep Maria Pou. Adánez owes much of her popularity to the series There is no one living here, where she played the character of Lucía between 2003 and 2006. She has since continued combining television, film and theatre, the discipline in which she made her debut when she was only seven years old with Dollhouse Ibsen and which has a considerable weight in his professional career. Precisely for this reason, Adánez takes Grammar by Ernesto Caballero with special enthusiasm. The show will be at the Romea until February 23.

Grammar It is a theatrical game and, at the same time, a cultural claim. It stars a cleaning woman who one day, while working at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), drops the grammar volumes on her head and falls into a coma. When she wakes up she has become an educated woman, but this curious episode of infused science, instead of making her life easier, isolates her from the world. "She spends the day correcting the people around her until everyone gets tired and she is left alone," explains the actress. Desperation leads her to a therapist (José Troncoso) who promises that he can resolve the situation, and that is where the engine of the drama begins to turn strongly. The man will try to make the protagonist forget everything she has learned in relation to the Spanish language.

"It is one Pygmalion On the contrary, because she experiences a destructuring of language. This process serves to throw many darts at the public. Are we what we speak? Does language delimit us or open us to society? Adánez reflects. The show, in fact, arose from the need to denounce the perversion of language. "Expressions are being lost, we speak worse and worse. There should be a campaign to recover the precision of language, which is in decline," Caballero stresses.

"You have to make an effort not to seem cultured"

The playwright explains that at school his daughter was criticised by classmates "because she tried hard to speak correctly" and that when he brought it up with the teaching staff, not everyone saw it as a problem. "We live in a society where speaking badly is a big deal, now you have to try hard not to seem cultured. We are putting our heritage into motion," laments Caballero, who is sceptical about politically correct language: "I am not in favour of telling the academy to assume certain words or meanings.

On stage, José Troncoso's character represents the opposite of that spirit, that is, the value of ignorance. "When I was a child, the presenters elevated the language. Now I watch television and it's just the opposite. We are more valuable the more ignorant we are," says the actor. The production satires those who impoverish the language and uses the audience as an active element of the work, posing questions to the audience. The final objective is to generate debate and activate the individual switch so that everyone looks after a more polished and rich language. "In Catalonia you are lucky; apart from a magnificent theatre it also has a strong pride in its language," concludes Caballero. "In Castilian, on the other hand, we suffer from a strong complex when it comes to putting forward the richness and variety and plasticity of the language."