Women on the verge of song and dance: why Almodóvar’s world is pure theatre

‘“Perhaps it’s the wrong time of day,” says Monica, the tourist office guide who’s taking me on the Pedro Almodóvar tour of Madrid. We’re in the La Latina quarter, looking at a 14th-century square. In the film-maker’s 1988 sex comedy Matador, we see this part of town in early evening: it’s the prelude to a mad seduction, and the scenes are shadowy, sultry and sweaty, full of lust and menace. But it’s not looking anything like that today. Everything is wrong: the light, the chill, the fact it’s deserted. The only other person here is draped over a bench holding a beer can. It’s hard to imagine him menacing anything, except possibly a bin.
Maybe a walking tour first thing on a Monday morning wasn’t the brightest of ideas. For the full Almodóvar experience, I say to Monica, perhaps we should have gone on a pill-fuelled bender through Chueca, the gay district, before leaping off the Viaducto de Segovia naked. She looks alarmed. We compromise on a cafe that features in Live Flesh.

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As a musical version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown starring Tamsin Greig prepares to open in London’s West End, I’m in Madrid to explore the reality behind Almodóvar’s films: the city is so prominent in them that it sometimes feels like a genuine character. But as Monica and I trawl around the sober-suited, business-hour streets, it occurs to me that Almodóvar’s Madrid is, in fact, a strikingly unreal place, elusive and fragmentary, half-tangible and half-imagined, a chimera of shadows and reflections rather than picture-postcard snapshots.
It is, I am beginning to realise, more like the world of theatre itself, all of which makes a live-action, singing-and-dancing Women on the Verge seem a little less surprising. After all, from the Cocteau-influenced Law of Desire to the Lorca-tinged Dark Habits, his films feel steeped in the stage. He is probably the only film-maker in history who has placed scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and Lorca’s Blood Wedding in the same movie, namely All About My Mother. Streetcar in particular infiltrates the film – the heroine sees the play at a life-changing moment and becomes so obsessed that she takes a job as assistant to the woman playing Blanche, even going on stage as Stella at the last minute.
Then there’s Talk to Her, the 2002 film in which a male nurse becomes fascinated with a woman he can see dancing from his apartment window. The great German choreographer Pina Bausch doesn’t just make a cameo – the whole film is infused with the spirit of her Tanztheater, leaping from one visual extravaganza to the next. We think of Almodóvar as a cinéaste, fond of filming love letters to Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk, but perhaps he’s actually more like a theatre-maker who happens to work in the movies.
Women on the Verge is not the first attempt to put Almodóvar on stage. In 2007, Diana Rigg and Mark Gatiss appeared in All About My Mother at the Old Vic in London. But it’s Verge, says director Bartlett Sher, that poses unique challenges. With the help of lyricist David Yazbek and composer Jeffrey Lane, Sher has performed major surgery on the musical since 2010, when it opened on Broadway and was called “a sad casualty of its own wandering mind” by the New York Times. “In Women on the Verge,” says Sher, “reality gets torn apart. It’s just so crazy, nothing is as you think it is. Everything is down the rabbithole.”
In fact, you could almost say Almodóvar’s picaresque tale of Pepa – who is spurned by her lover, chased through Madrid by his gun-toting wife, then drawn into an Islamist terrorist cell – is a fast-paced farce yelling to be put on stage. Theatre is more indulgent of disbelief than cinema: it’s easy to see how Almodóvar’s fondness for dream sequences and surreal plot leaps might translate. Music, too, is such a part of his universe that the most implausible ingredient of any musical – that someone might burst into song while waiting for a bus – hardly feels crazier than anything else, including the bit in Verge where two cops are drugged with gazpacho spiked with sedatives. “There’s a heightened sense of conflict and drama,” says Bartlett. “It’s the kind of material that sings.”
In Madrid, I have another appointment, with Agustín Almodóvar. Not only is he Pedro’s younger brother, he has also produced every one of his films since 1987’s Law of Desire, in addition to making fleeting cameos. A jowlier and more earnest version of his sibling, with a bald crown instead of the wild grey quiff, he sits with me in their airy production studio, explaining that theatre goes to the root of their work – right from their earliest days in the city.
Unable to enroll at Spain’s national film school because of the Franco dictatorship, Pedro fell in with an avant-garde drama troupe called Los Goliardos (a medieval word meaning, roughly, “vagabonds”), performing outrageous versions of Lorca and Sartre to a bohemian audience. “They were doing The House of Bernarda Alba,” says Agustín with a grin, “and the police came and shut it down because they thought it was subversive. We used that in our advertising for next time.”
While with Los Goliardos, Pedro met an actor who would change everything:Carmen Maura. She encouraged him to stop fiddling around making bawdy super-8 films and do features instead. Maura ended up starring in his first – 1980’s gleefully camp Pepi, Luci, Bom – and went on to play numerous redoubtable heroines, from the transsexual Tina in Law of Desire to Irene in Volver. Maura is not the only actor Almodóvar has collaborated with repeatedly: Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas have become familiar faces, alongside a reliable character cast. “It’s almost like he has a repertory company,” says Agustín. “Pedro calls it his family and he means it. You create blood ties with people you work with.”
If Almodovár seems reluctant to be trapped by the conventions of cinema, this may have something to do with the Movida Madrileña. A carnivalesque movement that burst on to the Madrid scene after Franco’s death in 1975, it comprised writers, musicians, designers, photographers, actors and artists, all joyously tearing down the restrictions imposed by Spain’s authoritarian government. Performance blended into porn, comic-books appeared and influenced fashion, while drugs and partygoing became practically compulsory.
“It was the big bang, when everything bubbled over,” says Agustín.” He seems the sensible type. Was Agustín out partying with the best? He smiles shyly. “I was lucky enough to be a witness. Pedro protected me, he was my older brother. Now, in a way, the roles are reversed.”
In the topsy-turvy, constantly evolving world of Almodóvar, it’s hard to pick out consistent themes, but one might be the nature of identity: how we project ourselves to the world, who we appear to be versus who we really are. Even films that stray nowhere near a theatre – Bad Education, The Skin I Live In – pose questions about illusion and artifice, about gender roles, about roles of all kinds.
Talk to Her was born out of Pedro’s friendship with Bausch, whose fascination with the relationship between the sexes nourished all her work. The brothers visited Wuppertal, her company’s home, and shot fragments of two Bausch works, Café Müller and Masurca Fogo, for the film’s opening and closing sequences. Café Müller’s ambiguous, disturbing images of entrapment and control – female dancers drifting distractedly through a thicket of chairs manoeuvred by men – mirror the movie’s own, says Agustín. “Pedro saw Pina as an artist who was totally original. There were no words in those scenes. Inner emotions were dramatised through movement.”
Given his enduring fascination with the stage and stagecraft, has his brother ever been tempted to return to theatre? “There have been times,” says Agustín, “but at the last minute he’s always gone back to film. He likes the control.”
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