Los años maravillosos: Archive, Image and Collapse opens Thursday 13th August at the Etcetera Theatre, moving through the illusion of storytelling to discuss image, memory and fracture. Learn more about what to expect:
1: What does the phrase “the future as longing” mean to you?
For me, it describes the distance between who we once imagined we would become and who we eventually became. I think we all live alongside that imagined version of ourselves, and Los años maravillosos takes place precisely in that space between the promise of who we thought we would be and the reality of the lives we have lived.
2: The show suggests collapse is inevitable. Is this the message audiences will take away?
Rather than suggesting that everything is doomed to collapse, the play explores the tension between what we dream of, what ultimately happens, and everything we are willing to do to hold on to what we once believed in. I never make theatre thinking about the message an audience should take away. I’m far more interested in theatre opening up questions than providing answers.
3: The title suggests nostalgia. Is the work critical on nostalgia or does it embrace it?
People who know me would probably say I’m deeply nostalgic, so I’d have to say it embraces it —but it’s a contradiction. I always find myself returning to the same places, the same bars, the same songs. There’s something in me that needs to go back. I always come back to London, and I’ve still never been to Paris.
When my father died, that need became much stronger. I felt an urgency to return to the archive, to return to Los años maravillosos. And that led me to a question: were those years really that wonderful?
I think there’s something very particular about childhood. As time passes, we tend to remember the happy moments while forgetting the fears, the contradictions and the pain. At the same time, as children, we imagine who we’ll become. In a way, we spend our lives moving between those two narratives: the past we idealise and the life we imagined for ourselves.
That’s why I don’t think Los años maravillosos either embraces nostalgia or rejects it. I think it observes it. It holds it in tension. Because, in the end, nostalgia tells us just as much about the present from which we remember as it does about what actually happened.
4: What makes storytelling an illusion in this work?
For me, theatre is always a fiction, even when it works with real archives or autobiographical material. I’ve never been interested in reconstructing reality on stage. I’m interested in creating a theatrical experience.
In this piece, I begin with a real newspaper interview, family photographs and my own personal history. But none of those elements are there to prove a truth. They are placed in tension with the body, the image, the music and the theatrical device itself. The archive stops being a document and becomes theatrical material.
The illusion isn’t about convincing the audience that everything happened exactly as it’s presented. The illusion lies in believing that a life can be arranged into a coherent narrative. In Los años maravillosos, that narrative breaks apart again and again, because a life can never fit inside a single story.
5: What has been the most challenging aspect of creating this production?
The hardest part was finding a way for the piece to stop being about my mother and begin speaking about all of us. From the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want to make a biography. I’ve always been quite sceptical of works that rely on family history as if, on its own, it were enough to sustain a theatrical experience.
At first, I kept asking myself a very simple question: who would actually care about Lilian Beares’ life? Probably very few people. But eventually I realised I was asking the wrong question. What mattered wasn’t her life itself, but what it could reveal about an experience we all share.
That’s when the real subject of the piece emerged: the lives we imagined for ourselves but never got to live. The distance between who we thought we would become and who we eventually are doesn’t belong only to my mother. It belongs to all of us.
For me, that’s where theatre begins: when a story stops being purely personal and becomes something the audience can recognise as their own.
6: What has been the most enjoyable part about creating Los Años Maravillosos: Archive, Image and Collapse?
I began writing Los años maravillosos in January, while I was grieving the loss of my father. At that time, I felt a strong need to return to the archive, to the photographs, to my mother’s interview and, in a way, to my own childhood.
As the process unfolded, I realised the piece wasn’t only about the past. It was also about desire, about what was still waiting to happen. And, quite unexpectedly, the journey of the piece itself began to unfold.
That’s why the play is set in London. For many years, this city represented the future I imagined for my work. Today, that future is no longer a fantasy but a reality. We’re an independent Latin American theatre company premiering in London’s Off West End, before going on to the Edinburgh Fringe.
I think that was the most rewarding part of the whole process: realising that the distance between what we dream of and the lives we actually live isn’t always a defeat. Sometimes, without even noticing it, life finds another way of fulfilling those very same desires.
Los años maravillosos: Archive, Image and Collapse opens Thursday 13th August at the Etcetera Theatre. Many thanks to Diego Beares for answering our questions. Book your tickets here!
Leave a Reply