Blanca Portillo: "People are much less tense than they want us to believe"

Blanca Portillo, in a recent undated image. Javier Mantrana del Valle

Blanca Portillo says that, deep down, life rhymes.

That is why it is not by chance, she believes, that her role in

his thunderous success with

followed .

As the protagonist in Icíar Bollaín's film, she has won the first Goya of his career.

In the theatre, these days he is sweeping Spain with an unconventional play, based on the entrance speech at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) by its author, Juan Mayorga.

In this successful symbiosis between stage and screen, Portillo (Madrid, 58 years old) has grown.

“As an actress and as a citizen.

In that, life has been very generous to me.”

She says it as she is about to start her tour after having packed the Spanish Theater in Madrid for a month.

But that path of change began before her, when she entered the skin of a woman who precisely fought against the blackness of resentment through silence, convinced of the need to listen to understand, even the murderers of her husband.

Juan María Jáuregui was shot in the neck in Tolosa on July 29, 2000. That shot split his family in two and echoed through the streets of the Gipuzkoan town with the dry drumbeat of ignominy.

But his wife, Maixabel Lasa, over time, wanted to understand why him.

She decided to join the Nanclares road to listen to two of the perpetrators of the crime, already repentant.

They wanted to apologize.

But for her that word sounds a bit empty.

She preferred simply to understand.

“Maixabel believes that forgiveness, as a concept, has almost no value.

Yes, instead, he trusts in the ability to change and in that a person, when he is aware of the damage he has inflicted to the point of not wanting to repeat his actions, deserves a second chance”, comments Portillo on a terrace in his neighborhood, on the border between La Latina and Lavapiés.

Blanca Portillo, together with Luis Tosar in 'Maixabel'.

The journey into the regenerative power of her character in the film has transformed her.

is silence.

She talks about the one you choose and the tax”.

Just like in her play, when she alone is reeling off that word on stage as synonymous with a conversation and a condemnation, as an attitude that she shapes with a face of circumstances or manifests herself in the choking of tears.

“I have discovered things that I thought I knew and we don't know.

Sometimes we live with what comes to us in headlines and we have no capacity to assimilate.

I am completely in favor of that route that lasted so little time.

I, today, try to categorize less.

With information everything becomes relativized, we have settled in the poverty of black and white, in the good and the bad but, when you know, that makes you more tolerant with others and with yourself”.

He maintains that you understand with it where your fears and your comforts are, something that doubts when he sees the attitude of certain politicians locked in the anger.

“That they move the floor when it is more comfortable to know what is good and bad, we do not like anyone.

I wonder if certain politicians want to see us dumbed down as part of their puppet, when, in reality, most citizens are much more tolerant.

What do you think?

Do they really want us to become what they insist on moving us?

I wonder.

And the bad thing is that it is contagious.

It can be polluting, although I feel that people are much less tense than they want us to believe.

Sometimes we live with what comes to us in headlines and we do not have the capacity to assimilate

He prefers to think that we are not governed by comforting simplisms, that we question the circumstances and, far from evading ourselves, we seek reflection.

At least she has taken that path.

This has been influenced by her last two works.

Seeing how they have been endorsed by the public, she believes that she is not alone.

“Now I wonder more why things happen, why someone decides certain options.

That makes me understand the behaviors better, whether I defend them or not.

I find myself in a space of questioning rather than affirmation, despite the fact that there are circumstances that do not fit in my head”.

She refers to certain drifts, unequivocal and disconcerting steps towards the collective precipice of intolerance.

“Why are certain paths chosen?

What is good about these, what do they intend to achieve with it?

Far from affirming, allergic to the deaf forcefulness of unreasons and the absence of nuances, she prefers to ask.

“I do it much more, I am

, I feel far from those leaders who seek to set themselves up as stony symbols of something, who do not give in and who trust that the more inflexible they are, the more successful they will be”.

Faced with the verbiage, the slogan and the sensationalism of the rhetoric, Portillo recommends silence.

And in this he has allied himself with a deep accomplice, such as the playwright, philosopher, mathematician and academic Juan Mayorga.

They are two creatures of the scene.

Authentic priests of a rite that requires collective communion: the theater.

Their joint success has revealed several things to them these months.

“The pandemic, inevitably, has shaken us and that causes people to go to the theater more.

There, a collective, direct catharsis takes place, a pagan ceremony, a communion of shared emotions where you recognize yourself, where they talk about you, where everyone is concerned with what they see”.

Also what listens and what is silent.

That is precisely what

is about .

A somersault that turns something as solemn as a speech into an amazing and refreshing theatrical event.

Both express the word as if it were an exact science surrounded by uncertainty.

An aspiration, a manifesto and a poetic treatise.

They plot the show based on complicity with an audience that Portillo invites to participate: "In Madrid they have been brilliant, they have curdled some wonderful performances from the seat".

The noise trap

In

one finds mysticism, music, substance: a journey from ancient Greece to the Spanish Golden Age, from Dostoevsky to Lorca, from Shakespeare to Woyzeck, from Chaplin to John Cage and his piece

, that space of silent music that Portillo performs in its entirety, just as long as it lasts: four minutes and 33 seconds.

The text exudes wisdom and perpetual questioning.

It opens routes from mime to drama, from comedy and pantomime to tragedy.

“Mayorga is pure silence, the important thing is found in what the text sometimes doesn't say.

It is very cryptic, he practices it, in that we are very similar.

And also in how we conceive it.

For us it is reflection and rhythm;

it encloses and opens the moment of the hidden.

In these times of increasing noise that surrounds us and passes through us, it becomes something necessary, says the text.

There are people who flee it.

Some fear it and others need it, it is always situated beyond, in the precise place to listen to your own feelings”.

Blanca Portillo, in the general rehearsal of 'Silencio', directed by Juan Mayorga. Víctor Sainz

There one needs to go out in search of it, to get rid of the trap of the noise.

Facing oneself and looking at oneself from other spaces other than oneself.

With a sense of humor, too.

Mayorga and Portillo have discussed their joint creation a lot: “The weight of the dramaturgy is theirs, but we have opened a constant dialogue”.

For example, in matters that break established symbols, the case of Bernarda Alba Lorca.

Mayorga was betting on tyranny;

the interpreter, on the other hand, did it for her mother.

They did not agree.

Solution?

Show both versions.

“For me, she is one more victim.

It is not a monster with the words that Mayorga uses.

He speaks of her like this: 'The alienation of the tyrant who has learned nothing, whose intransigence does not yield even at the sight of her dead daughter'.

'It can't be, Juan!', I told him”.

For the author, Bernarda Alba represents intransigence, the yoke.

But Portillo makes amends.

“She is not the law, she is also subject.

I think that's too masculine a version, with all due respect."

Mother is and as the mother of five daughters with two marriages, Bernarda has known love and sex.

But she above all she has felt the instinct of care.

“We also see it in

in fact, I would not have approached the work in the same way without having made the film first”, he assures.

“A woman is a caregiver by nature, since the beginning of time.

You carry a being inside for nine months.

Protection, the attempt to seek well-being, corresponds more to us.

I do not see this as a condemnation, although it should not become something immovable or that we take for granted only for ourselves.

She must spread in men the same as in women.

Care humanizes, putting oneself in another's place, being in the other, cannot become a sentence.

It is a privilege and a gift on which the example must be extended”.

She has wanted to cross the gender line on stage.

That is why she in her day faced male characters that even raised her to other heights.

She was Segismundo in Calderón

, and also Hamlet.

“I have never had the intention of wanting to do everything, but to make it clear that I play human beings.

The same as I get into Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, with whom I have nothing to do, a man does not correspond to me in many things, but in others he does, it is about seeing him as a fellow man”.

Each one must be analyzed in their conditions: environmental, political, gender... “If Segismundo had been a girl, would he throw a man out the window, would that violent part dominate him?

I wonder.

I'm not saying that women don't have that vein, but I doubt that we show ourselves equal in that.

The good thing about him is that he manages to subvert it and becomes a great ruler.

By holding power he reveals himself as the best politician.

He puts the general interest before his own.

He undergoes a transformation, storming out of his confinement.

Although they deprive him of freedom and affection, that process makes him someone better, you laugh at Hamlet.

Calderón's greatness there is bestial.

Hamlet builds rather little.

that strange vision that

convinces that the world will never be better.

I never had the intention of wanting to do everything, but to make it clear that I play human beings

Breaking down the moulds, Portillo has found it natural to unfold for

within a feminine self and at the same time compose an academic.

The versatility and the rich forcefulness of his ambiguity allow him to achieve virguería in this case.

“That has been the challenge too, how to compose an academic who at the same time was an actress, without being me.

Do it with generosity, with the ability to laugh with respect.

Forging a relationship with the tailcoat of deep affection to achieve a passionate, vehement and older human being”.

She is now going up the stairs of the Portillo stage dressed in that tailcoat that is a costume that is as conventional as it is convenient.

With his hands behind his back, bent and bent at the same time, inside that illustrious androgynous that he has masterfully composed, with his hair glued to his forehead to decompose in the middle of the show and take us to the ray of silence, to the whisper of bifurcated thought , to the cave of silent meditation, to the stormy and revealing paradise of paradoxes.

Blanca Portillo continues her journey on this tour that began on Friday in Toledo and appears long as it is already the luminous shadow of this gifted actress with her well-deserved Goya now in the window.

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