Iñaki Rikarte, the theatre director who turns everything into gold | Culture

The name of Iñaki Rikarte is on everyone’s lips in the Spanish theatre world. Everything he directs turns to gold, his works are loved by both audiences and critics and he is taking home the main awards in the sector this season. At the recent Talía Awards, awarded by the Academy of Performing Arts, he was crowned best director for his work. forever, a moving wordless mask show by the Kulunka company. At the Godot Awards, Madrid critics’ prizes organised by the magazine of the same name, he received the same distinction for The monster of the gardens, by Calderón de la Barca, which premiered three months ago with the National Classical Theater Company (CNTC). But next Monday he could also receive two Max awards, benchmark awards on the national scene, which will be awarded in Tenerife: best direction and best theatrical co-authorship for Forever. They would join the one who won in 2023 for Supernormals, A surprising production by the National Drama Centre (CDN) on the sexual life of people with disabilities.

All this has exploded in the last two years, but Rikarte has been on the stage for more than two decades. Born in Vitoria 43 years ago, he began working as an actor in plays by the CDN, the CNTC or the Basque company Tanttaka. But in parallel he launched himself as a director in different groups in Euskadi, mainly Kulunka. In 2020 he was a finalist for the Max for best direction for Disdain with disdain, by Lope de Vega, in another CNTC production. Since then he hasn’t stopped: four totally different and successful productions in four years. Has he found the secret formula for success? The aforementioned smiles: “There is no recipe. Each show requires a different process and I can’t guarantee that the next one will work. But perhaps there is something common that I propose with everyone: that the public understands and enjoys it.”

We are at the Comedy Theatre in Madrid, headquarters of the CNTC, where he has dazzled with his staging of The monster of the gardens. The performances have already ended, but it will be revived at the Almagro Festival from July 19 to 28. It is a mythological comedy by Calderón de la Barca, sparsely represented due to its anachronism and difficulty: gods, nymphs, oracles, the hero Achilles and the Trojan War in the background. All of this in verse from the Golden Age. How do you hook the 21st century audience with those ingredients? “Realism doesn’t work with the classics, especially because the characters don’t speak normally. So you can’t try to make something everyday something that is not everyday, you have to find a code so that those words are credible in the performance. That’s what I mean when I say that I want the viewer to understand it,” Rikarte responds.

The code was found after much thought on the question: what is this work really about? “It is the story of a forced recruitment. Achilles is in love and does not want to go to war, but the forces of the State act in such a way that he cannot avoid it. They manipulate him. He could be a young Russian who lives in a village where the army bus passes and takes him away. Or a Ukrainian, an Israeli, a Palestinian. The destiny is the State,” reflects the director.

In his staging, Rikarte does not allude to any of the current wars, but rather plays with the Spanish imagination to turn the stage into a metaphorical space with easily identifiable signs: legionaries, civil guards, processions and virgins who are like contemporary oracles. A party in which nothing is gratuitous because from the first minute all the conventions of reality are blown up. “If Calderón made a cloak out of his myth, why shouldn’t we do the same? That’s what myths are for: for us to reconstruct them and use them to explain what we are today,” Rikarte sums up. The history of Western theatre is the history of an eternal rewriting.

With the same question he faced Supernormal, the show for which he won the Max last year. Written by Esther F. Carrodeguas, the play is a succession of stories intertwined by a character who offers sexual assistance to people with functional diversity, with a mixed cast of actors with and without disabilities. “I was lost, it was a totally unknown world for me and the text is brutal, without taboos. Until one day I found the key while watching with my son how some gardeners worked in a roundabout in Madrid. Among them were people with disabilities and it seemed like the idyllic image of integration: blue sky, those people planting flowers, all in uniform. But suddenly I thought: is it really idyllic? What is there beneath that image?” Rikarte recalls. The scenic translation of that question was: a perfectly trimmed French garden rises, disappears and below is a disabled boy masturbating on a bed.

Perhaps that is Rikarte’s secret formula: his ability to condense the essence of a scene into an image that connects directly with contemporary sensibility. Or perhaps he has developed that skill in his many years of work with the Kulunka company, which specializes in wordless mask theatre. There is no other option than to rely on visual language. “For example, you see a mother showing her son photographs that she takes out of a tin box and you understand that she is telling him something about her story. Even if the characters do not speak or you do not understand what Calderón’s verses say. The situation is the heart of the theatre,” he proclaims.

With Kulunka, founded in 2010 by Garbiñe Insausti and José Dault, he premiered that same year directing André and Dorine, an elderly couple who falls into apathy and then into Alzheimer’s. The show was cathartic and was so popular that it is still being performed around the world: it has already been performed in 30 countries. Later came Quitamiedos, Solitudes, Edith Piaf, Hegoak and Forever.

There is still one question, the most difficult one yet: How do you manage to please the public and critics at the same time? Rikarte shrugs his shoulders and responds with another question: “Isn’t criticism also the public?” But she does not avoid the issue: “I do not consider myself an avant-garde director, in the sense that my objective is not experimentation or surprising with innovations. But I do use contemporary stage languages ​​and everything that can help me in each show. Maybe it’s just a matter of using them sensibly.”