La última noche con mi hermano

Writer and director’s note

In December last year, a friend’s brother passed away. Speaking with her, she told me that she had spent his final night by his side, and that the experience had completely changed the way she saw life, how she understood death, and how she thought about the meaning she wanted to give to the act of living.

As I listened to her, this title lit up inside me: La última noche con mi hermano (the last night with my brother), and I think I said it aloud as we were talking, without giving it much thought. She liked the idea of me creating a play with that title and continued sharing details about the horror of the loss and the flood of emotions that had overcome her — including the strangest ones: those that were oddly comical.

Grief over the loss of a sister or brother is often the least acknowledged or supported socially. It’s true that there are many ways of experiencing siblinghood, and it’s also true that it can sometimes be marked by distance and detachment. But just as often, the sibling bond is a vital part of a person’s life — and losing the other half can feel like a genuine amputation of the self.

This is the story of Nagore, a woman diagnosed with cancer, and her brother Alberto, a man who struggles to accept his sister’s illness and must come to terms with her death. Alberto and Ainhoa have two children, Nahia and Oier, and Ainhoa has a brother, Claudio. This is a family made up of three sibling pairs, each with very different experiences of what it means to be a brother or sister. A family in which Nagore—the woman who lives alone—is a vital centre.

Fraternity is one of the core republican principles, alongside equality and liberty. In our constitution, it already appears in its evolved form, closely tied to the notion of solidarity or social responsibility. In any case, it refers to the idea that “the other” is not “a stranger” — and above all, that the fragility of others belongs to us all. Fraternity, or the belief that all humanity forms part of the same family, is an ancient concept, one that has been used in the pursuit of peace and unity, with both admirable and disastrous outcomes. I wonder how our private experience of siblinghood shapes our public lives, and how, in turn, public forms of fraternity influence our private relationships.

La última noche con mi hermano is a project born from the desire to work once again with Nuria Mencía, and from the need to explore the griefs that leave lasting marks on our lives.

Alfredo Sanzol