Terra baixa Àngel Guimerà / Pablo Ley

Terra baixa is the most universal play of Àngel Guimerà about the good and the evil. And, above all, is a play of thrilling emotion that slips from rural drama to romantic tragedy to explode in a final liberating call, when Manelic cries out, after killing the master: "I killed the wolf! I killed the wolf! I killed the wolf!”. Three times, to make it clear. Good triumphs over evil, virtue over vice, the purity of the mountains (close to the sky) over the pettiness of the lowlands (and, down below everything, the late 19th century industrial Barcelona and its miseries).

Behind Manelic's crime of passion clearly beats a social drama that, read from the 21st century, anticipates the history of the 20th century in many ways. The worker (Manelic) who confronts his master (Sebastià) to liberate his future (Marta) is a transcript of the class struggle, and one does not need much imagination to see in it an origin that is not far removed from the Civil War (with as many prelude as you like: the Tragic Week, the Bolshevik Triennium, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera...). Guimerà certainly considered, in his own way, social justice, but he could hardly imagine a world in which the Russian Revolution or the rise of fascism would take place and even less so that the confrontation between these two forces would end in a devastating world war.

By Pablo Ley Fancelli / Carme Portaceli (dramaturgy)