La casa de enfrente

An adaptation of the only completed novel by Ernestina de Champourcin, directed by Elisabet Altube, following a young woman who invents the life of a man she watches every afternoon from her window.

Elisabet Altube directs this contemporary theatre piece, which starts from a question: what stories lie hidden behind a neighbouring house? On stage, Carmen del Rosal brings to life a protagonist who watches a man who visits a dwelling about which nothing is known every day. That void stirs her imagination, which leads her to invent an entire life for him and, with it, the desire to tell what will never belong to her.

The show deals with everything that unfolds alongside our existence: what we watch from a distance, what barely brushes against our lives, and what arouses curiosity without ever revealing itself fully. The piece is conceived as a coming-of-age novel: it traces the childhood, adolescence and first emotional awakening of its protagonist in fragments that reveal the doubts of young women in the 1930s.

The piece adapts the only completed novel by Ernestina de Champourcin, a writer better known as a poet within the Generación del 27. The book was published shortly before the Civil War and was soon forgotten; the writer herself described it as a youthful misjudgement. Its literary value has since been reclaimed, having until then been overshadowed by historical circumstances. The show is staged at the Teatro Español, on Calle del Príncipe in Madrid, a venue that programmes mainly contemporary theatre.