The world moves without mercy. One day you find yourself at coordinates that mark the gravitational center of what is interesting, revolutionary, advanced, artistically attractive, and suggestive, and another day you occupy, not without some committed distance, consistent with principles and perhaps disenchanted, a more remote place, on the margins of attention and debate.
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Perhaps for Manel Dueso, the actor, director, playwright, and poet who passed away at 73 last Tuesday after a long illness, as announced by his publisher Lapislázuli in a statement, that moment close to the energy generated by the pivot of history occurred in the 1980s.
At the Sitges Festival
Dueso and Luis Miguel Climent premiered ‘Ñaque o de perros y actores’, the tribute by Teatro Fronterizo and José Sanchis Sinisterra to picaresque and Golden Age theater
It was the early hours of October 30, when Dueso and Luis Miguel Climent sat dressed as traveling comedians on their trunk on the stage of the Retiro theater and won days later the Arturo Martorell award for best show at the 1980 Sitges Theater Festival with Ñaque o de perros y actores, the tribute by Teatro Fronterizo and José Sanchis Sinisterra to picaresque and Golden Age theater, with deliberate Beckettian touches. It would be the first of the 700 performances with which it toured the world for years.
But more than the success of Ñaque, the most notable aspect of this title is how Dueso actively participated in the dramaturgical ideology of one of the most stimulating laboratory companies of the time, which led years later, in 1989, to the creation of Sala Beckett on Alegre de Dalt street in Gràcia, one of the city’s major theatrical references to this day.
Although Dueso always cultivated a very personal poetics in his theatrical texts, just as his poetry was charged with a certain theatricality, being part of Sinisterra’s school also gave him a certain taste for sharp, ironic writing, close to the absurd, with complex interpersonal relationships, more mystery than certainties, seeking beauty on the margins of life, in illness, death, loneliness, or sadness. A universe he cultivated until the end. His last poetry collection, Som cavalls d’escuma en camps de menta, was nothing less than a lucid confrontation with his own proximity to death.
And these are also the atmospheres of the two texts that in 1996 won the Critics’ Award: Sara y Simón and Platón ha muerto (revived by Temporada Alta in 2015). If the latter almost materialized an Edward Hopper painting, with a long conversation between a waiter and his only customer; with Sara y Simón he delved, with characters forced by their sexual condition, gender, or addictions, into the underworld of lumpen Barcelona, already heavily affected by AIDS (a disease as deadly as elusive in the work). A piece that stands out for its poetic strength, as Carles Battle highlights in a 1995 issue of the magazine Pausa, and which in some way could connect with the dramatic flight of Jordi Prat i Coll in Fàtima. Although the distance between a text written in the 1990s and one from the second decade of the 21st century is evident. Perhaps the same as that between Angels in America and The Inheritance.
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But after that peak moment, Manel Dueso’s dramaturgy did not find its place among the new Catalan dramatic writing, at least not with the same degree of analysis and projection, although in December 2025 he premiered Jambo Bwana at the Sala Petita of the Teatre Nacional. It was a text he had been trying to produce for some time, like many other projects born from his tireless eagerness to write and create stories.
On television
He participated in series such as ‘La Riera’, ‘El cor de la ciutat’, ‘Cuéntame cómo pasó’ or ‘Isabel’
Perhaps for that reason Dueso became much more familiar to the general public as a theater, film, and especially television actor, both in Catalan and Spanish. That closeness that comes from embodying a recognizable character from La Riera, El cor de la ciutat, Cuéntame cómo pasó or Isabel.
An experience he later also applied as a coach for actors in other television series. A facet of teacher he also exercised, as a teacher of acting, dramaturgy, and directing actors, at the Institut del Teatre, Eòlia, the Col·legi del Teatre, and the Escac.
In fact, he only graduated in acting from the Institut del Teatre, working under the direction of renowned directors such as Lluís Pasqual, Calixto Bieito, Carme Portaceli, or Oriol Broggi. Otherwise, an enthusiastic self-taught author and director.
An instinctive comedian since his childhood in Sabadell, a poet since his adolescence, and a playwright and director since his early maturity, following in the footsteps of references like Sinisterra himself, unafraid to face classics from all centuries, although he always kept a declared preference for working with his own work.
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