The Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico directed by Helena Pimenta returns with one of the texts from the Spanish Golden Age that best explains the abuse of power. Calderón is always contemporary.

A drama of honour, El alcalde de Zalamea [The Mayor of Zalamea] deals with the excesses committed by soldiers with impunity on citizens, and the obligation for the villages and towns in the path of the army to billet soldiers in their homes. The Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico has staged it three times: in 1988, directed by José Luis Alonso, in 2000 in a production by Sergi Belbel, and in 2010, directed by Eduardo Vasco. Twenty-four performers, including actors and musicians, will present one of the most frequently performed and best known pieces from the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age.
As a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age and of universal drama, El alcalde de Zalamea defies simplification. Each era, each circumstance, each landscape discovers what it needs in the play. After three previous productions of the play, the CNTC is using a new approach this time - different in terms of strength, in order to continue revealing what lies behind the words of Calderón to the audience.
It is difficult to find a dramatic text that contains scenes that are so exciting and so perfect. The transition from comedy to tragedy and vice versa seems like an impossible pirouette. We are left breathless when one becomes the other, when one conflict becomes its opposite, when day becomes night, and we seek encouragement at times that are not so logical which give us this extraordinary conception of space and time.
It is a play about love because the author emphasizes heartbreak. It is a play about justice because injustice predominates. It is also about honour as being synonymous with fame, opinion or the essential virtue of the soldier, of the army of a state, or with conscience and personal dignity - what all human beings are entitled to. And dishonour, abuse and hypocrisy appear too often and too early.
And what of the exceptional construction of the characters - those from Zalamea and those who arrive there? They are contradictory, as always in Calderón's work, and great, overcoming a tempest that begins with the first verses of the play, and attempt to hold out until the end of their theatrical life, while despite everything, conveying to the viewer the idea that life goes on.
This is the story of a failure, the abuse of human beings by others, of a battle lost, as is human life itself. Calderón appears to want to throw this idea at us, as Cervantes did. And in this project that I am about to start, word after word, verse after verse, just as they did, I am committed to life, to the fiction that explains to us why, like them, I believe in the dream of the impossible that has lived inside us since the beginning of time.
Helena Pimenta