He never ceased to surprise you when you saw him with that confident and powerful look, the face and beard of a corsair and the emphatic, provocative, and even defiant statements, a Kropotkin or a Bakunin of the theater, and then he turned out to be a sweetheart, a kind, sentimental, and friendly man, a conversationalist and bon vivant. He died on Friday at the age of 84, and knowing this will bring deep sadness to many: the director, author, theater manager, and audiovisual producer Ángel Alonso, the endearing anarchist and agitator, a key figure in the Catalan scene, one of the founders of the Sala Villarroel in Barcelona and its longtime head.
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From the Villarroel, since 1972, when it was born as a theater “close to the working class,” until 2005, with Adolf Bras, José Antonio Ortega, and Alfons Guirao as the initial team, Alonso (Barcelona, 1942) offered a varied and healthily panoramic theater, always with a touch of leftism, anarchism, and rebelliousness in the programming, gave opportunities to many of the country’s historic companies, and brought people from all over Spain, turning the venue on the Barcelona street of the same name into a first-rate artistic platform and an icon of theater of an entire era.
He steered the Villarroel from the anti-Franco struggle to democratic stabilization, navigating the complex and turbulent waters of the transition. It should be remembered that the committed venue was bombed in February 1977, in the lobby. The explosion occurred during the performance of the play Blood and Ashes, Dialogues with Miguel Servet, written by Alfonso Sastre and performed by the independent theater collective El Búho.
A man of progressive convictions, libertarian in mind and gesture, Alonso was often very funny and frequently ended his thoughtful opinions about theater, society, and politics — for him a totum revolutum— with hearty laughter that largely put everything into perspective. Listening to him converse with one of his good friends, Pepe Rubianes, seeing who could say the most outrageous thing, was quite an experience.
Life gave him the surprise that one of his productions, when he claimed to be an activist and alternative creator, became a sovereign success in commercial theater and one of the most viewed shows in the history of the country’s theater: the comedy The Odd Couple, starring Paco Morán and Joan Pera. Produced by Focus and premiered in 1994, it surpassed two thousand performances and one million spectators during the five years it remained on the bill, according to the producer’s recollection. For Alonso, it was a source of pride but also perplexity and even a bit of embarrassment to have succeeded with that production, given his career and personality. Focus and Alonso, now that is an odd couple, was said in the theatrical circles back then.
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He felt much more ideologically identified with Stories from the Damn Army, the 1990 theatrical adaptation of Ivà’s antimilitarist comic strips in El jueves, with Ramon Teixidor as Sergeant Arensivia, which also achieved record figures and contributed to the debate that led to the abolition of compulsory military service.
Alonso was much more, of course. He premiered nearly 80 shows, including versions of Madame Bovary and The Stranger, about twenty based on his own texts. He was at the heart of the discussions that led to the creation of the Catalan theater ecosystem, fought tooth and nail for the Villarroel as for everything he believed in. He even directed drama series for RTVE in Catalonia and was responsible for the creation, direction, and production of a landmark children’s television program, Planeta imaginari.
Those of us lucky enough to know him as a friend will remember him as good-natured and emphatic, passionate and funny, larger than life as the Anglo-Saxons say. When in 2007, 35 years after the hall opened, the inaugural programming of the renovated Villarroel was presented in its new stage under Focus and directed by Javier Daulte, Àngel Alonso broke down in tears of emotion, recalling, the old and skeptical big man, the old comrades. Today, dear Ángel, it’s our turn.
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