Barro

Europe facing its own ruins

With Barro, the first play in the Map of the Ruins of Europe tetralogy, La Joven Compañía begins a four-part reflection on what remains of the idea of Europe shaped during the twentieth century. To do so, the company brought together playwrights Guillem Clua and Nando López to explore what the First World War (1914–18) meant for the continent. Barro is Clua’s third play for the company, after Invasión and Proyecto Homero: Ilíada.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson said that the United States should never intervene in European affairs because our continent was trapped in an “eternal war between nations”. The following centuries proved him right, and the idea of a United States of Europe soon emerged as the only way out of our compulsion to destroy ourselves. The experiment was first called the EEC and later the EU, and for fifty years we believed we had succeeded. It was the longest period of peace Europe had ever known—until the Balkans erupted again.

In the twenty-first century, that continental Arcadia seems more fragile than ever. One of its founding members, the United Kingdom, has decided to leave the project, while the far right and nationalism slowly corrode the heart of a Union more interested in perpetuating old economic privileges and closing its borders to refugees who risk their lives trying to reach it. Faced with this, we cannot avoid asking: has the European project died? When did it begin to fade? Does it have a future? And if so, how can we rebuild the ruins beginning to surround us?

All these questions shaped the writing of Barro. With this play, La Joven Compañía begins a four-part reflection on what remains of the idea of Europe shaped during the twentieth century, starting as the centenary of the end of the First World War arrives. Choosing that event as the starting point is no accident: there are many connections between those young people who set off—between naivety and pre-war euphoria—for a conflict whose scale they could not imagine, and today’s young people, trapped by a society in recession and disappointed by a continent still unable to find itself, fighting their own personal war.

In Barro, written jointly by Nando López and Guillem Clua and directed by José Luis Arellano, we hear the voices of those who, at the beginning of the century, fought to build an idea of Europe that—through literature, philosophy or politics—always found its deepest meaning in culture. They held on to hope despite the violence of a conflict stretching on inexorably and tragically, believing in the possibility of coming together in the face of division. Others realised that the war was being fought along the wrong horizontal plane, decided their battle had to become vertical, and turned it into a genuine revolution.