5. De profundis: Angélica Liddel

Contrary to Pascual, Liddell is not only a non-believer, but an avowed enemy of luminosity and hope. Her work emanates from, and is impregnated with her personal suffering, which she has been exhibiting on stage tirelessly since the mid-1990s.

Born in 1966 as Angélica González, she does not recall her childhood as particularly joyful:

My father was a military official and we made the whole route: I was born in Girona, we moved to Valencia, then Burgos, Madrid…[…] Growing up like this is terrible. I lived in military encampments, and when I managed to make myself at home, I had to leave. It was insane. I saw little but people with uniforms and guns. It was a soldierly environment, tough, more or less violent. What a place for a girl! (Ruiz Gálvanez, 2007).

Her adolescence was overshadowed by other harsh experiences, but none so impairing as the lack of maternal love (real or perceived), the consequences of which Liddell believes to be suffering till this day³⁶. As a result of her profoundly negative view on the family institution, she dedicated three of her earlier plays, The Palavarkis (El matrimonio Palavrakis, 2001), Once Upon a Time in West Asphixia (2002)and Hysterica Passio (2003), united under the common title Triptych of Affliction (Tríptico de la aflicción), to the destruction of the myth (or at least this is how she would call it) of the family as a safe haven. These plays, soaked with sadism and sexual violence, mostly of the incestual kind, may be considered as Liddell’s (rather peculiar) tribute to Freud, whose writing, judging by her already deleted blog, she had studied meticulously³⁷. The influence of psychoanalysis on Liddell’s artistic activity³⁸ is probably a legacy of her psychological studies – in addition to attending the Royal School of Performing Arts in Madrid, she earned a Master’s degree in psychology.

Just as Freud, Liddell does not believe that human beings, with all their animal instincts and drives, are able to find peace in culture³⁹. Even her artistic pseudonym testifies to the failure of this endeavour – it is an allusion to Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s muse, but also a possible object of his sexual appetites, as some very daring photos he took of her may suggest⁴⁰. Angélica Liddell’s pessimism concerning the factual possibility of finding a solution to the problem of human existence, which problem arises principally from pertaining at the same time to the biological and symbolic realms, from being an animal possessing self-consciousness, is also reflected in the name she and her long-time stage partner (as well as a life companion until 2008), Gumersindo Puche, chose for the two-person company they founded in 1993 – Atra Bilis, black bile. The ancient believed that this humour is responsible for the feelings of melancholy, sadness and dejection. Definitely, Liddell’s art is sufficiently imbued with darkness to meet the expectations aroused by the company’s name. Still, let us point out that in the recent ten years Liddell has promoted her image as a solo artist – while Puche is still present in the background, taking care of the administrative and logistical issues, his participation in Liddell’s projects from the purely artistic point of view has noticeably diminished.

Thus, during the past decade it has been all about Liddell, and literally so, as her performances have become more and more openly autobiographic and concentrated on her personal struggles, while showing less concern for the pain of others. While this solipsistic tendency has always been detectable in the artist’s work, it came completely to the surface in 2008, when she abandoned once and for all the use of the mask, the theatrical fiction, for the sake of first-hand confessions and performative actions. Approximately until that point her shows, although approaching closely the post-dramatic paradigm (as defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann), used to possess a diegetic framework⁴¹; later she dispenses with it altogether, in order to “live on the stage” (Perales, 2011)⁴².

However, before this change in direction, Liddell produced a series of outstanding texts and mises en scène containing a fictional level (although not a storyline in the traditional sense of the word). The Triptych of Affliction was followed by anothertriplet of shows gathered, when published (2007), under the common title Trilogy. Acts of Resistance against Death. Indeed, the three plays this trilogy consists of may be considered the most optimistic among Liddell’s repertoire – she worked out of resistance against the evils of the contemporary world, and such ideological commitment makes sense only if one believes, if only faintly, in the possibility of improvement, in the potential of the human being to progress. The first of the plays belonging to the relatively pro-social current in Liddell’s art, in which she tried to “turn information into horror”⁴³ is And the Fish Walked Out to Combat the Men (Y los peces salieron a combatir contra los hombres), whose premier took place in 2003 in Madrid. In this performance Liddell scrutinizes the egocentrism and the callous indifference of Spaniards (although it may be extrapolated to the whole developed world) towards the ordeal of thousands of inhabitants of the underdeveloped or war-ridden African regions who try to cross the Mediterranean Sea, an attempt ending oftentimes in death. This production was followed by And as She Did Not Rot… Snow White (Y como no se pudrió… Blancanieves, 2005), a macabre rewriting of the traditional fairly tale in which Snow White is a child victim of an armed conflict, and the dwarfs - soldiers who vent their own frustration and pain by violating and torturing her. The last part of the Trilogy was The Year of Richard (El año de Ricardo, 2005), Loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III and… George W. Bush, the main actor behind the 2003 Iraq War. A perspicacious analysis of the psychic structure of many a political leader, the play is also, for those well-informed, a sober diagnosis Liddell, a psychologist, gives to herself [fig. 8].

These texts were followed by Belgrade. Let the Tongue Sing the Mystery of the Glorious Body (Belgrado. Canta la lengua el misterio del cuerpo glorioso, published 2008), a brilliant play Liddell wrote to understand the Yugoslavian Wars (the topic re-emerged in the media in 2006, on the occasion of Milosevic’s death), and Dead Dog at Dry Cleaners: the Strong (Perro muerto en tintorería: los fuertes) [fig. 9] that

presents a dystopic European future, with the continent cleared of crime, but also of immigrants. It examines a coercive social contract that dominates and destroys personalities. The production […] is subtitled, «the Strong» because it speaks precisely about weakness: «The State demands obedience and discipline of individuals, and it exerts a force for which no human being is prepared» (Pearson, 2017).

A long and intellectually complex performance, it is the last one in which Liddell employs a fictitious framework. Ending this phase of her artistic production, the author commented: “Until now my work relied on ideas, on political or social commitment, rather anti-social, on resistance against injustice and human suffering. Now I’ve taken to talking about my feelings” (Perales, 2011).

Among the performances in which Liddell delves into the abyss of her own mind, one distinguishes itself by its overflowing emotional exuberance – it is The House of Force (La casa de la fuerza, premier 2009), which earned this playwright, director and performer the National Dramatic Literature Award. Through this show Liddell attempts to deal with the maddening pain resulting from the rejection she experienced on the hands of another artist, David Fernández, with whom she was passionately in love. In this case Liddell combines her own personal torment with the real-life stories of violence recounted by three Mexican women she invites to the stage, a strategy that breaks the vicious circle of revolving around her own axis, the viciousness of which becomes noticeable in her posterior production. After all, any one individual is interesting only for so long, even if she/he is a rara avis.

And any one individual is able to uphold a fit of all-absorbing (spectators included) rage only so long. After a period of sound and fury directed mainly at her ex-lover, comprehending, apart from the one above mentioned, such pieces as Anfaegtelse (2008) and I Will Make You Invincible with My Defeat (Te haré invencible con mi derrota, 2009), Liddell seems to enter a phase in which she tries to come to terms with the supposition that there is not, and won’t ever be, one person in the world worthy and capable of love, and so one must embrace loneliness and isolation as the only possible way of proceeding. Hence in Cursed Be the Man that Trusteth in Man: un projet d’alphabetisation (“Maldito sea el hombre que confía en el hombre”: un projet d’alphabetisation, 2011) she professes:

I’ve learnt to respect only money.
people don’t seem respectable to me.
you learn these things crying.
If in three years you accumulate enough disappointments
to erect an immense mountain of shit
you start to mistrust, perforce, the idea
of humanity
you separate yourself, perforce, from the idea of humanity,
you become disappointed, perforce, by the idea of humanity (Liddell, 2014, 15-16).

A similar message is to be found in All the Sky Above the Earth. Wendy’s Syndrome (Todo el cielo sobre la tierra. El síndrome de Wendy, 2013), a theatrical funeral to the artist’s youth and all the hopes it implies [fig. 10]. If earlier Liddell seemed, at least to some extent, concerned with the suffering of others, in this play she uses it shamelessly for her egocentric purposes, talking about the 2011 massacre of Utoya exclusively in the context of her own grief over the passage of time and her corporeal decay. Still, this approach is consistent with her contempt for the rest of human beings she proclaims from the stage.

If one cannot form satisfactory relationships with other mortals, one may try to substitute them with objects or abstract notions. And indeed, Liddell’s 2011 play Ping Pang Qiu is an expression of her impossible, unreciprocated love for China.

Another solution is to look for… God. Starting from 2014, Liddell’s art is filled with mysticism, as she voices her desire to “become the madness of God⁴⁴” (The First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, Liddell, 2015: 31), following in the footsteps of Juana Inés de la Cruz, Teresa of Ávila or Emily Dickinson (evoked in This Brief Tragedy of the Flesh/ Esta breve tragedia de la carne, premiere 2015). The paradox of this longing consists in the fact that for Liddell, contrary to her famous predecessors, God is a figurative notion, a conscious construct in whose actual presence she does not believe, a pretext to continue talking about love when no love is possible.

Precisely the lack of love is the most fundamental theme underlying Liddell’s art and the desperate cries this calamitous deficiency provokes resound throughout the totality of her production. At the end of the day Liddell is convinced, just like the famous psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, that love is “the only thing that gives meaning to existence”⁴⁵ (Liddell & Zangarini, 2015: 123). And those who are excluded from amorous passion, tenderness and attachment, like Frankenstein⁴⁶, like Richard III, and like Liddell herself, will burn with hate and its natural fruit, the desire to destroy. That is why in one of her latest pieces, What Will I Do with This Sword? Approaching the Law and the Problem of Beauty (¿Qué haré yo con esta espada? Aproximación a la Ley y al problema de la Belleza, premier 2016), the playwright seeks beauty only in order to annihilate it, making eight young girls of angelic appearance copulate with octopuses, as if proclaiming

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days (Shakespeare, 2000: 148-149).