Maria Pau Pigem: "Being a woman is often still unfair"

BarcelonaThe actress Maria Pau Pigem (Barcelona, ​​​​1969) knows that King Kong theory It is not just any show. The staging of the rehearsal of Virginie Expenses, one of the most important feminist texts in the world, represents for the interpreter "an act of resistance, especially in the current moment, which is very turbulent," and has pushed her to make an inner journey from which she has emerged moved and grateful. Pigem had been thinking of turning King Kong theory in a monologue, but he did not find adventure partners until recently, when he came into contact with La Virgueria. The company of shows like Jellyfish (Quim Masó Award 2016) and The missionary (2022) quickly jumped on the bandwagon alongside M. Àngels Cabré, who was in charge of adapting the text. After premiering at the temporada alta festival, King Kong theory The play arrives on Wednesday at the Heartbreak Hotel theatre in Barcelona and will remain on view until 23 March.

"When I read the text, around 2010, it moved me. It provoked a feeling of rage, of thinking that, often, being a woman is still unfair. Why are there still differences? Why is it that if a woman and a man are equally intelligent, he is given much more space and visibility?" The essay is based on Despentes' first-person experiences to talk about sexuality, the repression of desire, machismo and prostitution from an approach that, at the time, was considered controversial. "The system is so perverse that, after being raped, she resorted to occasional prostitution to recover her body. She does not defend prostitution, as some have said, but rather portrays a sexist world that brutally took away her sexuality," explains the performer, who on stage is directed by Isis Martín.

King Kong theory The play crudely exposes the gang rape that Despentes suffered when she was young, a situation of violence that has led the actress to remember situations of abuse that she has suffered. "I have not been raped. When I was eight years old a man pulled down my pants fly and touched me in the elevator. At that moment I did not understand it and I did not know how to explain it. I could make a long list of all the abuses I have suffered. And I have friends who have all been raped." It is inevitable. In fact, while working on the play she needed to ask the author's permission to be able to carry out the monologue. "I felt that I was putting myself in a very intimate place of hers. I wrote to her and she responded with a beautiful message," says the actress.

A white butcher's table

For the staging, Paula Font and Paula González have built a space made of plasterboard and bricks that refers to the punk aesthetic of the book. "To write it, she had to revisit everything that had happened to her: rape, prostitution, violence. In the act of writing there is also an act of finding the wound and exposing it, like a butcher's table, which when it is clean is white despite all the crudeness that you know is going to happen there," P. points out. The set design refers to this image, "which also works like a blank page," and integrates projections by Mariana Echeverri throughout the production.

The theatrical adaptation preserves the essence of a text that "sadly remains current," says the actress, who did not want to construct the monologue "from rage" but as an act of love. "Despentes makes a great gesture of generosity by putting words to everything that happened to her, because when it happened she didn't find any books to accompany her," Pigem stresses. "She has taken the traumas and created literature so that there are references, and I can only give her a voice and thank her."