Ana Duato returns to the theatre 20 years later for one reason: a text by Marguerite Duras

What can they do to ensure that so many memories do not end only in pain? What is happening to them now? Is it a beginning or the end? The love and brutal passion that has united this woman and this man for years is over. But they want to see each other again and the signing of the divorce papers takes longer than necessary. It is a night in the hall from the hotel where they met, where heartbreaking feelings emerge, harsh reproaches, accusatory silences, memories of the hell they lived in, but also the hook of sex that is still there. Ana Duato returns to the theatre after more than 20 years of absence with the Argentine actor Darío Grandinetti , who is taking to the stage in Spain for the first time, to give life to this love tragedy in La música , a text written by the French author Marguerite Duras in 1965, directed by Magüi Mira. The play opens on February 26 at the Infanta Isabel theatre in Madrid, with no end date.

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) herself said it: “ Music is a constant rewriting of the impossible score of love.” The name of Duras, a prolific writer and author of great texts such as The Lover or the script for Hiroshima, mon amour , is not very common in the theatre in Spain, unlike on European stages. Magüi Mira, actress and director , had been interested in her for a long time. “She is an author who has fascinated me: I have always wanted to adapt one of her texts and I never had the opportunity. It is not easy at all, she writes with a very special literary flight, and that brutal and wild reality that she describes in Music must be brought to the stage without filters. This text interests me especially because it delves into that drug that is sex, sex as a language of communication that does not necessarily have to be added to love. This couple finds each other without knowing that they have not overcome that drug,” explains Magüi Mira, in an interview with the two actors.

Only one table in that longed-for hotel in a French town is witness to this reunion, which begins and ends on stage with Schubert ’s Andante Opus 100 , the only change from Duras’ text, which chose music by Beethoven . He, a successful architect, a controlling and distrustful man, somewhat melancholic, and she, an independent and determined painter, have rebuilt their lives, but they arrive with an urgent need to look to the past. “What interests me above all in this work is that Duras poses the conflict from a position of fantastic equality. Here there is no hindrance of sexist customs, there are no matriarchies, nor patriarchies, nor feminisms. It is a relationship of equals. The pride that one or both of the two characters may feel has to do with their personality, not with their condition as a woman or a man. I am interested in making a work in which the female character is, she does not need anyone to be. "As a male actor, I find it fascinating because it is more complicated to face a well-established woman who is herself and does not need anyone," says Darío Grandinetti (Rosario, Argentina, 65 years old), an actor who has lived between Madrid and Argentina for years.

Ana Duato (Valencia, 56 years old) believes that Marguerite Duras tried to make a better world for women, more equal, and she brought all that to this play. “It is a complicated and very intelligent text, which we have been discovering in the rehearsals. Duras does not do anything without a thread. Everything she says, every question she poses is loaded with memories or projections towards the future. It is a play with two versions of the same past, as is usually the case. There is an evident change of roles from the first moment and that is very interesting. She has overcome a relationship that has left her with great emotional damage, but that has made her a stronger woman,” says the actress, who confesses that she has not had time to miss the theatre, immersed in her long work in the series Cuéntame.

It is a night in which they come to end a relationship and find themselves devastated and dragged by that love that united them, but which they know is impossible. It is a night of meeting, disagreement, of memories of the “atrocious hell” they lived, of thousands of reproaches, his jealousy, her independence and, also, the discoveries and secrets that they ignored about each other. “What they came to do is no longer, more important things happen. They think they are coming to end the relationship, but they realize that they are still united by a red thread. In addition, there are other things that have happened and that they have both kept quiet and now appear. It is a night of rediscovering the relationship, of rediscovering the other and also themselves, of rediscovering that desire that still beats,” explains Grandinetti, for whom the couple has arrived at that night without doing the necessary mourning.

“Maybe she does,” says Ana Duato about her character, a woman with a lot of strength, but at the same time, a lot of vulnerability. “She is a woman full of contradictions. She lives the nostalgia of having a house, a man by her side, along with the need to be independent. She moves in both waters. She is a very modern character who talks about many things that are part of today's woman. I like the contradiction to play her. The truth is that you don't get bored with her, she goes up and down. What is clear is that she has learned a lot about herself, she has rediscovered and rebuilt herself, she knows who she wants to be and how she wants to live. She reaffirms her decision not to live that hell again, to get away from that toxic love, even if she yearns for something from those years,” adds Ana Duato.

It is a sleepless night, in which two characters remain trapped in the love that united them. Is it the beginning or the end of a relationship? The day arrives. Everything is over, but everything can begin.