Las cartas boca abajo

Sergio Pereda directs this version of Las cartas boca abajo, Antonio Buero Vallejo's play about two sisters trapped in a house and in the renunciations of their everyday lives. Contemporary theatre at the Teatro Español in Madrid.

The production takes as its starting point the text by Antonio Buero Vallejo and follows two sisters who live in a house that has become a reflection of their renunciations, within a time that seems not to move forward. Amid recriminations, secrets and frustrated expectations, they pretend that everything is going smoothly while each character hides a fragment of what happened. The staging, directed by Sergio Pereda, builds a portrait of ambition, failure and the difficulty of recognising what one truly longs for.

Buero Vallejo premiered the play in 1957, in the midst of the Franco dictatorship, and portrays the friction of a society with economic constraints, rigid social conventions and few prospects for a large part of the population. These were the years before the developmentalism of the following decade, when many families had to keep up appearances without being able to achieve what they longed for.

The show invites audiences to look beyond the façades of homes and to discover what lies behind closed doors, with wounds that remain hidden for years. The Teatro Español, in Madrid, is hosting the performance, and its programming focuses above all on contemporary theatre.