Theater — «THE LAST NIGHT WITH MY BROTHER»
Theatre — THE LAST NIGHT WITH MY BROTHER, by Alfredo Sanzol at Teatro Cuyás, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Text and direction: Alfredo Sanzol
With Elisabet Gelabert, Ariadna Llobet, Nuria Mencía, Biel Montoro, Jesús Noguero and Cristóbal Suárez.
National Drama Centre and National Theatre of Catalonia
Note from the author and director
Last December, a friend's brother died. Talking with her, she told me that she had spent the last night accompanying her brother and told me that this experience had totally changed her way of seeing life, of understanding death, and of thinking about the meaning she wanted to give to the act of living.
As I listened to her, this title lit up inside me: The last night with my brother, and I think I said it to her at the same time we were talking, without thinking too much about it. She liked the idea of me creating a play with this title and continued telling me details about the terrible nature of the loss and about the sensations that had assailed her, including the strangest ones: those that had to do with the comical.
The grief for the loss of a sister or a brother is the one that is socially least accompanied. It is true that there are many ways to experience siblinghood, and it is also true that on many occasions these are experiences where coldness and distance settle in, but it is also true that, on many occasions, siblinghood constitutes an essential fact in people's lives, and the loss of the other part is a real amputation of the self.
This is the story of Nagore, a woman diagnosed with cancer, and her brother Alberto, a man who does not accept his sister's illness and who will have to learn to accept her death. Alberto and Ainhoa have two children, Nahia and Oier, and Ainhoa has a brother, Claudio. This is a family of three sibling pairs with very different experiences of siblinghood. A family in which Nagore, the woman who lives alone, is an essential axis.
Fraternity is one of the republican principles alongside equality and liberty. In our constitution, it already appears with the derivation it has had towards the concept of solidarity or social. In any case, it refers to the idea that “the other” is not “foreign,” especially that the fragility of the other belongs to everyone. Fraternity, or the idea that all humanity is part of the same family, is an ancient concept and has been used to seek peace and unity with very good and very bad results. I wonder how the experience of private siblinghood affects public life, and in what way fraternal relationships in the public sphere influence the private.
The last night with my brother is a project born from the desire to work again with Nuria Mencía and from the need to address griefs that mark our biographies.
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