(Corrects the last name of the actress in the seventh paragraph, which is Sanchez, not Gonzalez)
RABAT, Dec. 8 (EFE) – Director Manuel Gutierrez Aragon has adapted the novel “La vida perra de Juanita Narboni” for the stage, an international portrait of Tangier at the end of Spanish colonialism through the eyes of a single woman.
The work, which is having its world premiere today in that city in northern Morocco, presents on stage the homonymous novel by Ángel Vazquez, considered the Planeta Prize-winning writer’s masterpiece.
This means, as Gutiérrez Aragon explained to EFE, to approach Morocco and, above all, Tangier, “through a novel that has gradually become classic in Spain and is easy to transfer to the stage, because it is a solitary monologue of a woman in the last years of the colony.”
The novel and the play deal with Tangiers from 1945 to 1957, when the city that was home to a mixture of Arabs, Jews, and Europeans—particularly Spanish—was under international protection.
“It is Tangiers International, which is always somewhat idealized by all, and Angel Vazquez demystifies on the other hand,” explains the Spanish director of a play sponsored by the Cervantes Institute that will be staged in many of these centers around the world.
The work opens today in Riad Sultan Square, the cultural and artistic Kasbah in the ancient city of Tangier, which will host a second performance tomorrow, Thursday.
It stars Tangerine actress Romina Sánchez, whose return to Tangiers, she tells EFE, is always special. “It is the city where I grew up, it is the place where I connect with the senses, the poetic, the city where dreams are forged… La vida perra de Juanita Narboni represents here a dream come true,” he sums up.
Sanchez has acted in several TV series, winning the award for Best Experimental Short Film, and was also a Goya Awards nominee for Best Leading Actress in 2014.
The novel on which the work is based was published in 1976 and is woven as a continuous monologue, in which the author travels through time with “flashbacks”, placing the action in the mind of the protagonist, who mixes reality, memories and premonitions.
Moroccan director Farida Ben Liazid took her to the cinema in 2005 in a Spanish-Moroccan co-production starring Mariola Fuentes.
Gutiérrez Aragón (1942), winner of the National Film Award in 2005, directed his last film in 2008, We Are All Invited, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Malaga Festival.
Also a novelist, he won a Herald Award for Life Before March (2009), followed by When the Cold Comes to the Heart (2014) and To the Actors (2015). Last year he was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. EFE
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