Peals of laughter greet ETA's demise

Jordi Galcerán, one of Spain's most successful and renowned playwrights, talks about his latest work, Burundanga , as though it were an innocent little love story. But the truth is that the play, which premiered a week ago at Madrid's Teatro Maravillas, is anything but.

In the play, the Barcelona dramatist has ventured to imagine the end of the Basque terrorist group ETA - an event that has yet to happen in real life, despite an ongoing ceasefire. And while it is true that he is not the first author to explore this open wound in Spanish society, nobody until now had used something so painful to provoke fits of laughter.

"I just wanted to make a romantic comedy to entertain people, which is no small task," says Galcerán, quoting Woody Allen's famous equation: "Comedy = Tragedy + Time."

"I just wanted to make a romantic comedy to entertain -no small task"

"We're not really aware of the risk we are running with this show"

But this being Galcerán, one knows that there is much more to his new play than just intrigue, irony and humor. His apparently naïve projects almost always contain a second reading - which is not to say that Burundanga is not a thigh-slapping comedy about a couple of young lovebirds who just want to be happy.

Galcerán likes to throw his audience; he did so in The Grönholm Method (staged in over 50 countries), in Carnaval and in Fuga . This time around, he has put together an enticing cocktail featuring a girl who becomes pregnant but does not wish to tell her boyfriend about it until she is certain that he loves her for real. She hears about "burundanga," the popular name for scopolamine, a "truth serum" of sorts that leaves the user without a will of his own or any memory of what he did under its effects.

Legend has it that the CIA used it in interrogations and that it is used to perpetrate other crimes. And yes, her boyfriend loves her, but he also happens to be a member of ETA.

"I've been turning the text around in my head for three years," says Galcerán. "I'm discussing a terrible, tragic matter that affects people who are suffering right now, but I didn't want to offend anybody. That is why I had a hard time finding the right characters."

Essentially, he wanted to talk about ETA without losing the humorous tone, much like Ernst Lubitsch did with the Nazis in To be or not to be , which was filmed during World War II.

"I was aiming to write the best play possible - that's as far as I go; that's all I want," says Galcerán. The really hard part was finding the happy ending. "I did it; I show the last two members of ETA, a couple of real bunglers, which allowed me to keep that comic perspective, but we're not really aware of the risk we are running with this show."

There is perhaps one inevitable question: did someone commission this play? "I don't embark on this kind of madness on commission. It was really hard to write, each reply put me on the edge of the abyss; I had to create two believable ETA members, but without offending a single spectator, and that was really complicated," says Galcerán, who does not conceal the fact that he talked to sympathizers of the terrorist group in order to build believable characters.