Focs/Vatre

A powerful rereading of the classics based Yourcenar

“I hope this book is never read,” writes Marguerite Yourcenar at the start of the text.

Halfway between direct confession and neurosis, Fires reveals an inner crisis arising from Yourcenar's great failed love affairwith her editor, André Fraigneau, and transforms it into one of the most beautiful and bravest books of her life.

Focs features a series of tales written in lyrical prose, almost poems, inspired by Greek mythology and a certain idea of love.

Focs/Vatre, based on the book 'Feux' by Marguerite Yourcenar (© Gallimard), is directed by Carme Portaceli, with a Catalan artistic team and Serbian cast. It comes to the TNC after previews in Belgrade and being seen at the Finisterra Festival in Porto.

A coproduction between the TNC and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade (Serbia) that consolidates the international project of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya as an entrance and exit for talent.
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Sometimes myths speak to us in confused words about the future. The writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) read the classics to find sisters of flesh and blood in Clytemnestra, Antigone, Sappho, Mary Magdalene... and thus interpret the upheavals of her time. She reviewed the concept of love through these characters we think we know but actually do not know at all.

History or rather those who have told us History, those who have told us the myths, have made a reading of it that perpetuates its values and premises. But Yourcenar, a woman of enormous culture, of exceptional depth, explored some of these myths to tell us "another History" that today, without so much fear, we see as far more real than the one we were told. Her journey through the concept of love with reference to these characters is revealing for everyone and, above all, for we women. Yourcenar is a groundbreaker.

And María Velasco brings these myths into the 21st century and gives us a lucid and vital vision both of myth itself and of its dependencies, its level of consciousness, what they have had to experience and what they have had to suffer. And all with a sense of humour and a contemporary perspective that, as she says, "calls together an assembly of victims of yesterday and today to, in their own words, illuminate the future."

This play allows us to see the clear signs of our behaviour in these classic myths, in all the tradition that makes us the pillar of our ideas, of our feelings. The emotional journey is still ours. Only awareness and these mirrors will help us understand and overcome sufferin

Carme Portaceli