A House, Once
Una vez, una casa
by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez (Spain), 2019
Three female.
Longlisted for the 2022 Max Award for Best Playwright.
A nearby country in a not-too-distant future. Crisis and upheaval has left a nation floundering. But a promise to build back better has been made. Regeneration has begun, borne out of anti-metropolitan nostalgia at the hands of men. In the rural heartland of this all-powerful movement, two women meet at a luxurious country pile, far from the nearest village and hidden by woodlands. Once fellow students in a more liberal time, the old friends’ paths have since diverged. The decision to look up an old pal and drive for miles to this isolated spot to see her is one made far from lightly, and fraught with danger. But sometimes there is nowhere else to turn. Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez’s follow-up to La Floridaand Cuzcoasks: what price survival?
This all used to be an open plain. There was just the house and the dull-coloured earth. Kilometres of land all the way to those mountains over there, the ones you’ll have seen as you drove up. If, for example, someone had escaped the house and run away, however fast they ran, it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to shoot them in the kneecap, not in the leg in general, I mean, literally in the kneecap, if you’re a good shot, of course, and prevent the person from getting away. Not now. There’s too many trees. And the house, it’s true, it is a bit tucked away. That was how they wanted it.
A House, Once was translated with the support of the 2020 fund for the translation of theatre texts from the Fundación SGAE, the foundation of the Society of Authors of Spain.
Other works by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez: La Florida, Cuzco.
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