The theatrical resurrection of Domingo Villar

Domingo Villar (Vigo, 1971–2022) was unable to see his only play premiered. A stroke took the life of the Galician writer when he had completed ‘Sibaris’, a fun and acidic reflection on success and creative paralysis sprinkled with a crime and an investigation. The piece, which premiered in Galicia after Villar’s abrupt death and for which the writer had reserved a role, is “an old-fashioned bourgeois comedy,” says its director Lois Blanco. He arrives at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid and hopes to continue touring Spain.

It was at the end of 2019, on a long transoceanic flight returning from the Guadalajara book fair, when Villar surprised his editor, Ofelia Grande, and read her the play that he had kept a secret until then. It is the one that now returns to the stage, resurrecting its creator, who died at the age of 51. “Dreams come true even for those who cannot see them, and releasing this work was Domingo Villar’s most important dream,” says his editor, certain that “he could not write what would have been the best of his work.” ».

“He was a playwright of enormous virtues and I wanted to act in this play, so my commitment was to put it on its feet and fill the theaters, first in Galicia, as it happened, and now in the rest of Spain,” says actor Carlos Blanco, popular for series such as ‘Fariña’ or ‘El Caso Asunta’, and chosen by Villar, who reserved a small role as a literary agent in the piece.

Villar started from his own experience. He was blocked between his two most successful novels, ‘The Beach of the Drowned’ – made into a film by Gerardo Herrero and with Carmelo Gómez as the star -, and ‘The Last Boat’, both starring his inspector Leo Caldas, whom he created. in ‘Ojos de agua’ with his tempered and fluent assistant, agent Rafael Estévez. Between Villar’s second and third novels there was a silence of almost ten years, which his editor explains. “Every night Domingo read to his father what he had written during the day and when he lost it he went into a kind of drought.”

The piece revolves around Víctor Morel, an artist who is stuck and obsessed with perfection. “Something that happened to Villar,” Lois Blanco reiterates. “In ‘Sibaris’ you see more of Domingo Villar than in his character Leo Caldas, who had a lot of him,” confirms the editor.

In a hurry

Villar imagined that his protagonist receives an invitation from the Sorbonne University, willing to pay generously for a master class to the famous author in financial trouble. But the writer’s first public appearance in years ends in a panic attack and flight. When the lives of Morel and his wife seem to be sinking, she finds a way out.

“Despite being a new playwright, his dialogues are full of humor and Galician reticences, because Villar was aiming for a high-class playwright,” says Carlos Blanco, who heads a cast that includes Belén Constenla, Oswaldo Digón and Pablo Novoa. For Toni Garrido, Villar’s producer and friend, the piece is “a strange trip that we have taken without Villar.” “His children told us a few days after his death that the work had to be done. “It was the most entertainingly sad thing I have ever done in my life,” confesses Garrido.

Villar barely started what would have been his fourth novel, a story about the world of surfing whose provisional title is ‘Winter Waves’. “There is no more material to publish, but in the fall we will put on sale a collector’s box with his detective novels,” Ofelia Grande anticipates.

“Success takes you to a place that is difficult to leave, but for Domingo success was feeling loved and it did not affect him negatively,” notes the editor. Beatriz Lozano, the writer’s widow, confirms the enormous satisfaction that the theater gave Villar and assures that he was “a good actor.”

With a degree in Business from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Villar worked as a film and television scriptwriter, while also writing food reviews and collaborating as a journalist in various media. A confessed admirer of Camilleri and Vázquez Montalbán, he ended up being one of the undisputed kings of Iberian ‘noir’.

«There are those who think that literature is a revelation or a burst of inspiration, but for me literature is a craft like lutherie or ceramics. It is about having good raw material and dedicating all the love and time it requires. “I think about every sentence, I am enormously insecure and I like to read out loud everything I write,” Villar said of his profession.

From the rainy Galician settings and with characters rooted in their land and culture, their three police intrigues are successfully republished and now reach almost 30 editions per title. Leo Caldas’ series has been translated into more than fifteen languages ​​and has won a handful of international and national awards, such as the Book of the Year from the Madrid Booksellers’ Guild, the Crime Thriller Awards and Dagger International in the United Kingdom, the Le Point du Polar Européen in France and the Martin Beck awarded by the Swedish Academy of Black Novels.