José Luis Gómez and the Teatro de la Abadía

‘Gómez y La Abadía son una misma cosa, ya lo sé’ (Brouwer, 2005: 200) wrote Nuria Espert in a congratulatory letter to the theatre on its tenth anniversary. Even though by 2008 much of José Luis Gómez's day-to-day running of the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid had been delegated to other members of his team, it is undeniable that the genesis and impulse for the Teatro de la Abadía project were primarily Gómez's responsibility, and thus we must first look at his own professional trajectory for an overview of the theatre's emergence.

The link between Gómez and Albert Boadella is not merely artistic but personal. They coincided while they were both still young (around the time of El joc [1970]), under the unlikely circumstances of filming a language-teaching programme on German television entitled ‘Hablamos español’. Boadella explains: ‘Me había dejado convencer por mi amigo José Luis Gómez […] se trataba de enseñar el español a través de 39 capítulos, dramatizados con muy diversas situaciones […] Gómez estaba desesperado, pues quería tener un buen compañero durante el largo tiempo de grabación’ (Boadella, 2001: 195). Boadella relates how the production company suffered the ‘implacables críticas’ (Boadella, 2001: 197) of both men, but also how their ‘entrañable amistad’ (Boadella, 2001: 200) cooled off over the age-old stumbling block of money, probably a predictable clash given their uncompromising personalities. In spite of the rupture, the men have much in common, particularly in terms of their conception of theatre.