Carmen

The actress Beatriz Argüello (Madrid, 1975) answers the call of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA from Colonia del Sacramento, a city in Uruguay that is currently hosting a theatre festival in which the actress is participating with “Protocolo”, a show by Abel González Melo that premiered at the corral de comedias in Alcalá de Henares. But it is not the time to talk about now. This Friday (8:00 p.m.) she returns to the Niemeyer Centre –almost ten years ago she was there with the particular version of “Don Juan Tenorio” by Blanca Portillo– with the tragedy “Carmen, nada de nadie”, a production focused on the life of Carmen Díez de Rivera, a politician halfway between Greek tragedy and Shakespearean dramas about power.

–We are an Atlantic away.

–We’ll be back tomorrow. Today [por ayer] We’re doing the second screening of “Protocolo”, but we’re back tomorrow. As soon as I get back from Barajas I’m heading straight to Chamartín to catch the train to Avilés.

–Let’s get down to business. How do you bring to life in the theatre a woman as real as Carmen Díez de Rivera?

–When you play a person who has lived, or is doing so at the time of the work, you have an added responsibility because, of course, you have to really get close to that person, know their story, research it too, see images, read if there is a biography of them… well, have that historical rather than imaginative fieldwork. When you play Lady Macbeth or Ophelia, that’s where Shakespeare’s text and your imagination come into play, but when it’s a real character, what you have to do is something different: you have to work with respect and humility so that, when you already know the whole truth, you can let go of ballast and take a certain freedom in the work and in the rehearsals to make all that yours and be able to offer that person, Díez de Rivera, your body, your voice, your way of seeing her because it’s not about doing an imitation either.

–She was blonde.

–Yes, yes… and I’m not. I’m going to lighten my hair. For the Avilés performance we’ll find a way… yes, of course, we have to make a certain transformation, but Fernando Soto, the director, hasn’t based the interpretation work on us being exactly the same physically, because Adolfo Suárez, the prince, Juan Carlos, also appear.

–Carmen Díaz de Rivera was very important and, before being so, she was like a character in “Oedipus Rex.”

–The dramaturgy of the play is very well constructed because it tells a bit about her public life, what is known… well, everything is known about her. Or almost everything: she wrote her memoirs. It tells the political side, the work side and also the personal side: at 17 years old she discovers that the boy she was going to marry, Ramón Serrano-Suñer Polo, was her stepbrother: brother on her father’s side. She discovers this when they go to get the birth certificate so that the two boys can get married.

–A high-class scandal.

–From the aristocracy. Let us not forget that Carmen was the illegitimate daughter of the Marquis of Llanzol because her real father was Franco’s brother-in-law, the minister Serrano Suñer.

–She was the only female chief of staff to a Prime Minister.

–Yes, yes. That was a revolution for the time. Carmen was a beautiful and extremely intelligent woman, an extraordinary woman on all levels: she had studied Political Science, she spoke several languages… She was very important in those months of the Transition, she worked hand in hand with Adolfo Suárez, she was a close friend of Juan Carlos.

–Come on, a protagonist from any Shakespeare.

–Her life has many very attractive novelistic elements that can be brought to the cinema or the theatre. She is a woman who lived very fast, just think that she died at the age of 57… and everything she did throughout her life. When she felt the great pain of not being able to marry the boy she loved, she became a cloistered nun. She was very Catholic. She was a missionary in Africa, came back, studied at the Complutense, then went to England, to France. She took life in deep breaths.

–And how do you digest all this adventure?

–It is a blessing to be able to play a woman like Carmen Díaz de Rivera: such a fascinating woman. And the truth is that you never really get to know her, in fact, I am just getting to know her. But don’t think that she is so well known, especially by the younger ones.

–And, on top of that, it is rare for women like this to be the protagonists of stories.

–Our show is a way of honouring those women who have helped history change course: from a dictatorship to a democracy. Women who have been ignored or hidden. I think it is wonderful that it is being staged.

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