The filming of Whity, melodrama directed by RW Fassbinder, was one of the most chaotic in the history of European cinema. The romantic entanglements between the members of the team, the loud arguments, the drunkenness and the early morning fights in their accommodation in Almeria lit the fuse for the dissolution of the Antiteater, a company with which the director of The bitter tears of Petra von Kant He filmed eleven films and staged 16 plays between August 1967 and September 1969. Fassbinder at that time was as prolific as Lope de Vega could have been in his day: he took advantage of everything. So much so that the conflictive filming of Whity in the Cortijo Romero, now converted into the Almería Cinema House, served as the subject of a new film, Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Attention to that dear prostitute), where he tells in detail what happened a few months ago in that property where John Lennon stayed three years before during the filming of How I won the war.
In Attention to that prostitute… The actors from the Munich Antitheater each played the role of one of their companions, while Lou Castel played an angry alter ego of Fassbinder. This sarcastic, self-critical and funny film marked the closure of the Antiteater and the beginning of a new era in the risky career of its director.
To Dan Jemmett, who in 2013 staged The coffee, Fassbinder’s version of Goldoni’s work of the same name, it seemed to him that all this adventure could be the subject of a new play, Cats die like people, which he himself has written in two acts (with the collaboration of Brenda Escobedo). In the first of them, the British director reproduces roughly the situation that the German filmmaker develops during the first half of Attention to that prostitute…, where a group of actors awaits the arrival of the director of a film titled Country or Death. In the recently released production in Madrid, the company awaits the director of the play within the theater that it is going to perform. (Quartet, by Heiner Müller). And in the second part, when filming begins in the film Country or Death, In the play, what begins is the representation of the drama composed in 1981 by Müller based on dangerous friendshipsa novel by Choderlos de Laclos written on the eve of the French Revolution.
What in the original film version is funny due to the authenticity that Fassbinder, Eddie Constantine and the Antiteater actors all parody themselves, in the theater performance is nothing more than a conceptual game that could perhaps be of interest to those know sufficiently the two models from which the British director starts. Jemmett has made a choice very much to his liking. Everything happens in a bar that could be in a hotel, in a theater or in the Cortijo Romero. Also his version of The mocker of Seville It happened in a bar (and The coffee, of course): in one of them there was a jukebox, as in Cats die like people, where five songs are played during as many downtimes, to which must be added eight minutes of inaction in which images are projected.
The costumes with which Vanessa Actif parodies the characters of Chorderlos de Laclos in the second part do not lack imagination, as they fuse the 18th century with the punk. Adán Torres’ corporeal set design has an entity that is not often seen in Spanish productions. All of this does not seem to be interesting enough for the majority of the audience, which barely occupied a third of the capacity of the Valle-Inclán Theater in a daily performance (despite the fact that the stands have been removed) and who received the finale with applause. lukewarm
The cast of seven actors gives themselves with faith to the mannerist, hieratic interpretation of exaggerated gestures that the direction entrusts to them. Julia Piera’s recreation of Jeff, the director of Quartet, Fassbinder’s alter ego. David Luque’s performance is also distinguished, perhaps because his character is the only one who in the first part has signs of humanity and therefore leaves the stereotyped box in which his companions must operate. Clemente García plays Heiner Müller, who takes notes of what the actors say and repeatedly blows text into their ears.
Coincidentally or not, last week at the Casa del Cine in Almería the Panorama Fassbinder, to bring the public closer to the filmmaker who, through Sergio Leone, took the filming of Whity, an oblique western, with horror film aesthetics and with an ending that is a nod to the last scene of Morocco, by Josef von Sternberg.
‘Cats die like people.’ Dramaturgy and direction: Dan Jemmet. Madrid. Teatro Valle-Inclán, until June 23.
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