Filmmaker David Trueba’s theatre debut: “Los guapos/The Handsome Ones”

David Trueba’s films have often had a theatrical dimension. La silla de Fernando/ Fernando’s Chair, co-directed with Luis Alegre (2006), revolved a conversation with the legendary actor-writer-director Fernando Fernán-Gómez; Madrid 1987 (2011), a veritable chamber piece, took place within the confines of a swimming pool where its two protagonists are trapped. El hombre bueno/The Good Man (2024) places its trio of unhappy characters in a remote location where revelations tumble, and secrets are revealed. Now in his stage debut, Trueba turns to Vito Sanz, seen in The Good Man as well as his earlier Casi 40/Almost 40 (2018), and a regular in his nephew Jonás Trueba’s Madrid-set features, including most recently Volveréis/The Other Way Around (2024), in an odd-couple dramedy where characters are not quite as honest as they purport to be.

Los guapos is a two-hander set in a bar in the working class Madrid neighbourhood where Pablo (Sanz) and Nuria (Anna Alarcón) grew up twenty years earlier. Nuria gets back in touch with Pablo when she sees him on television one day — coverage of a case he has won as a lawyer in Strasbourg. She is hoping he can help her to get compensation from the makers of a folding walking stick with seat that she holds responsible for her mother’s death. A faulty screw appeared to cause the contraption to fold in, throwing her mother back and knocking her unconscious. Nuria wants the manufacturer to pay and hopes that Pablo can help her by talking on the case.

Pablo and Nuria may have been teenage sweethearts, but times have changed. The former recognises what she once meant to him, but it is a sense of duty and guilt that leads him to help her rather than any sense of lingering attraction. He left the neighbourhood, went to university, studied law and built up what appears to be a successful legal career. She has had a more checkered history, refusing to divulge too much information about her past employment but enough for the audience to realise that the addictions that led to her brother’s imprisonment for theft and his later AIDS related death have also afflicted her. Her jittery moves, her inability to read Pablo’s body language — she offers him sex to thank him for taking on the case — and her sexualised language point to a difference between them that feels ever wider as the piece progresses.

Beatriz San Juan’s set has a pile of illuminated coloured crates stage left, a dated counter with stools stage right and a pinball machine centre left. The bar may once have been a lively neighbourhood haunt, but it is now a ghost of its former self. Alarcón’s Anna is whippet thin, with a cropped white top and a salmon pink jacket; nervy and edgy, she is rarely still or without a cigarette in her hand. She watches Pablo but is also always looking out of the corner of her eye to see who else is around. It is as if she fears being watched and monitored. The conversations between the pair show that Nuria, for all her chutzpah and verve, was never able to leave the neighbourhood either physically or emotionally.

The play takes place over a series of episodic encounters. At times, both Nuria and Pablo address the audience in asides that seem to be addressed to a confidante. The opening sets up a metatheatrical device — “Lately. I don’t like anything I see in the theatre,” Pablo states as his first line. But it appears that Sanz the actor rather than Pablo the character is speaking, as a way of framing the narrative that the two actors will spin before the audience. Even before the automated announcement is played asking for mobile phones to be switched off, the actors have framed the action as theatre rather than life. Sanz continues, berating films that revolve around drama schools, which point to the students in such establishments as “special”. Why instead, don’t they have films about schools for plumbers or fishermen, he observes. Perhaps what Trueba hopes to achieve with Los guapos is a sense that he is dealing in “ordinary” lives. In many ways, however, what Trueba sets up is a play that asks questions about opportunities and agency. Nuria thinks she was dealt a tough deck of cards: her father abandoned the family when she and her brother were children; her mother worked all hours stitching jeans at home to make ends meet; her brother was imprisoned for theft and hooked on heroin by the time he left prison. She talks of class struggles but her understanding of class shows no compassion to the migrants in the neighbourhood. Class is for Nuria about territory and survival.

Vito Sanz as Pablo and Anna Alarcón as Nuria in David Trueba’s Los guapos. Photo Luz Soria, Centro Dramático Nacional, Madrid

The play’s final section has a twist that shifts it into the terrain of a thriller. Did Nuria have a role in her mother’s death? What was she not telling Pablo? Tales all have a teller bringing their own agenda and priorities into the narrative process. Pablo may have seen his father lose his job in telecommunications at 53, leaving Madrid to go back to the family’s village, but Nuria idealises the village as a home she never had. Ultimately, in Los guapos, it is all about perspective.  Nuria and her brother were known as the handsome ones in the neighbourhood because of their striking looks. Nuria sees this label as a curse, something that signalled a distance from the rest of the neighbourhood, something that led to the community’s resentment. For Pablo, the name represents that which Nuria once represented: the unattainable. Once they had begun dating — and she remembers it as a longer period of months, he sees it as merely weeks — and the obsession wears off, he distances himself from her: she recalls that he promised to ring on her birthday but never did. He observes that he wanted to be Felipe González (Spain’s former prime minister), a famous writer or lawyer; Nuria lived life at an accelerated pace, and he just pulled away.

The direction is languid — the couple drink beers, peruse the paperwork relating to the case and evoke the past. She approaches; he pulls away. Nuria imposes herself, Pablo listens, waits and evaluates. Pablo is cautious; Nuria is impulsive. Trueba’s play shows that the past is part of the present she can’t escape. Both are arguably unreliable narrators. He has power and history on his side; she isn’t easy to like or believe and perhaps that is why both Pablo and the audience judge her harshly. There is no such thing as a neutral stage.

Los guapos isn’t Trueba’s finest work – the writing doesn’t always have dramatic tension and familiar tropes come to the fore too often: Pablo is the one that got away; Nuria the one that got left behind, embodying a white working class that feels forgotten by the major political parties. It may explain the far right’s support among the working classes in Spain.

That said, the performances are highly watchable: Sanz is excellent as the uneasy lawyer who suspects that Nuria may not be as well intentioned as she claims. Alarcón imbues Nuria with a desperation that is painful to watch and the lines from the opening of The Great Gatsby which Pablo recites are a reminder to himself and the audience to think before judging: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Los guapos may be a slight piece but sold-out performances and a warm reception at the Sala Beckett in Barcelona’s Poble Nou — an area that itself has undergone significant gentrification over the past thirty years — signal the broad resonance of its themes.

Los guapos, a production by the Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN) and Bitò played at the CDN’s Teatro María Guerrero Madrid from 24 April to 9 June and runs at the Sala Beckett Barcelona from 13 December 2024 to 12 January 2025.