Can there be dignity in defeat? This question, asked since Antiquity, is the one to which we answer Cervantes in his dramatic version of the siege and destruction of Numancia by the Roman legions of Scipio. Poor Cervantes, so defeated in … life, so ignored in the literary world of his time, the man who, on his return from Algiers, displayed, to the ridicule of others, the fact that he had lost an arm in the battle of Lepanto, wrote this work which places him not only as a good playwright but also as a renovator of the theatrical forms of the time and which is a good example of the continuation of classical tragedy.
This work has been carried out several times, but Alonso de Santos He succeeded in making it something close to our theatrical sensibility, something extraordinary. With a faithful and free adaptation which highlights the importance of the text, with a solidly supported plot, with characters who have depth and deviate from the psychological mechanism of the other versions, Alonso de Santos mounts this tragedy in a very effective, very clear and even exciting way. Faced with the statism of Cervantes’ work, allegorical and cultural, Alonso de Santos opts for a dynamism that the viewer appreciates, to introduce vigor into the development, to clearly establish that action must take precedence to highlight the beauty of language, to transmit moral and even political values. “Numancia” tells us that dignity resides in the people and must be defended by them, that this dignity is a product of freedom to such an extent that people can choose their own demise before falling into new tyrannies. “Numancia” is therefore already a political symbol to which Alonso de Santos knows how to give an entity: the human being as the subject of history, even if history overwhelms and terminates him.
Alonso de Santos knows how to teach us that ‘The Siege of Numancia‘ of Miguel de Cervantes It is not a minor work, nor is its central theme something very distant from us. Quite the contrary. In the Green Room of the Teatros del Canal, the words of 1585 become our contemporaries. Numancia can be as many cities that resist in a war that wants to completely defeat them, as many human beings who do not want to be canceled. With very accomplished performances, a very successful scenography,
Alonso de Santos delights, teaches and entertains in a personal and magnificent version of this tragedy and achieves what few others do, that Numancia shines, moves and speaks to us with the best weapons of theater.
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