The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Come back from exile but avoid theatre, Spanish king is warned
Country’s top playwright tells disgraced monarch he would find play about him ‘extremely uncomfortable’
THE disgraced former king of Spain has been told to stay away from a new play about his life, with the country’s top playwright warning he would find it “extremely uncomfortable”.
The play, which opened to rave reviews in Madrid this week, depicts Juan Carlos as a pathetic figure trying to make a paella on board a yacht in the Persian Gulf and shows him groping women’s bottoms, shooting a dolphin and receiving a briefcase stuffed with cash from an unnamed Arab benefactor.
Albert Boadella, the writer of
– The King That Was, said: “Forget and his other great works. If Shakespeare were alive today, the first thing he’d do would be Juan Carlos I. Shakespeare would have filled his boots with this story.”
Juan Carlos brought democracy to Spain after the Franco dictatorship in 1975. He abdicated in 2014 and eventually left completely in 2020 after prosecutors placed him under investigation for multiple financial crimes, although he never had to face a trial as he paid off back taxes and some offences had expired.
“It is almost impossible to bring together so many things in the life of one character,” Mr Boadella said. “First, that he is born in exile and ends in exile. Well, we don’t know if he will end there, but now he is in exile and, in the middle, all kinds of things have happened to him.” The play portrays many of those things in the middle: accidentally killing his younger brother with a gun, siphoning off millions in kickbacks from Arab monarchs, having dozens of affairs and travelling with the aristocratic lover who he later accused of stealing 65 million euros from him and bringing about his disgrace.
Mr Boadella said he believed that Juan Carlos should return to Spain from his self-imposed exile in Abu Dhabi “to face the music”.
But he added that Juan Carlos should avoid the temptation to travel back to see his play, saying: “Watching yourself being dissected with 500 people around you would be extremely uncomfortable.”
Ramón Fontseré received a standing ovation at Thursday’s premiere for his uncanny impersonation of the old king tottering on his walking stick and speaking with his unique accent, somewhere between a French aristocrat and a boorish barfly.
The play is mostly high farce but there is also Shakespearian-tinged pathos when a storm blows up and Juan Carlos enters a delirium, confusing the sou’wester-covered crew members with all the ghosts of his past, like King Lear raging in the storm on the heath.
At one point Juan Carlos reflects on the general decline of monarchy, comparing his moments of glory when he inherited “absolute power” from Franco in 1975 to the merely symbolic nature of royal reigns in today’s Europe.
Asked if he is including the British royals, he shouts: “The British? They’re the worst, nothing more than charlatans playing up to the crowd.”