Violencia

About the show

Beatriz doesn’t know if she’s ready for the meeting she’ll have in ten minutes. Her husband, Martin, is by her side. But the pain is immense. It’s been years since she last saw the parents of her son’s murderer, Ricardo and Amelia, face to face. Still, Beatriz needs to understand—or at least try one last time—how such an atrocity could have happened. In order to move on. To regain the will to live. And she’s willing to go all the way, no matter the cost.

Six years later, both couples have agreed to meet again. And what begins as an attempt to understand the past becomes a painful but necessary process. They talk about their sons’ childhoods, bullying, loneliness, regret and grief. Ricardo and Amelia carry the weight of not having seen the signs. Martín and Beatriz, the rage of having lost everything. Yet, in the depths of that shared abyss, a possibility of forgiveness emerges. A small, silent gesture changes everything: they hold hands. And for a moment, there is light. There is life. There is a future.

This is a story of overcoming trauma through dialogue. In a world where rage, violence and revenge flood our streets, forgiveness and dialogue may become the most powerful and transformative weapons for profound social change.

Note from the adaptor and director

No, it’s not just happening in the United States.

Violence is spilling out onto the streets of our cities. And it takes many forms: a shooting, an assault, a suicide… But the root is the same: our mental health is being severely affected because social bonds are breaking down. The loss of a sense of belonging lies at the heart of the collapse. We are social animals.

And this collapse affects young people most acutely: suicide is now the leading cause of death among those under thirty in Spain. There is a deep, silenced, structural malaise. This play seeks to shed some light on this vast issue.

Who is responsible? What role do the internet and social media play in our mental health? Are politicians truly assuming their responsibility? How can we articulate pain through language—untangle it so that it doesn’t fester but, at last, can flow? How can we construct a collective narrative that moves us beyond the simplistic framing of heroes and villains? How can we forgive what we cannot understand and what, nonetheless, pierces us?

In Violencia, the great dilemmas of our time sit around a table. If institutional responses fail, if parliaments become void of meaning, then it falls to us—”artists”—to take responsibility. To speak of contemporary tragedy is the work of theatre. No metaphors. No filters. No make-up. Just the subject of inquiry and the bodies that inhabit it. In all their rawness. To provoke catharsis. And perhaps—just perhaps—to illuminate a possible path forward.

Diego Garrido Sanz