When he was appointed he was disqualified for being "the director of the right", the one with whom "Lina Morgan and a rancid theater" arrived. Juan Carlos Pérez de la source, director of the Centro Dramático Nacional since 1996, addressed these accusations at the University of Navarra, in a lecture with the students of the School of Philosophy and Letters.

Then," he continued, "it was even said that he was an infiltrator of Izquierda Unida, and sometimes there are cities where we cannot act because of ideologies. I believe that theater must always be critical of power, whatever it may be.

For him, if the public theater had to do the same as the private one, it would lack logic: "We must always be conscience, not act out of convenience, become the light that encourages us to move forward and, above all, not forget Spanish authors, especially the young ones".

The dictatorship of the locker

"We also don't have to be overly dependent on the dictatorship of locker. We have to premiere against all odds. If we do not bet on Spanish authorship, we will not know who are people like Ignacio García May, Ignacio del Moral or Juan Mayorga, authors who in the first performances may not be a total success with the public or critics. That's why we have to support them, because the spectator is very conservative when it comes to watching theater".

Regarding the current status of the Centro Dramático Nacional, which has just joined the European Theatrical Convention, he commented that "as José Monleón says in 'Primer acto', we have just happily gone through a period full of risks and I think we have come out winners thanks to the honesty of our work".

"From 1989 to 1994, 14 plays by Spanish authors were premiered out of a total of 56, and many of them were performed only one night. In addition, many were performed only one night, and the justification was that, when the plays were by dead or foreign authors, 98% of the conference room was filled and, when the offer was for living Spanish authors, it dropped to 50%".

But, according to Pérez de la source, already in the 1996-97 season, "75% of the program was composed of Spanish authors, and we had increased by 25% the audience attendance , in relation to the previous year. In the following season, this figure increased by 105%, and 25,000 young people had attended our performances".

The current season of the Centro Dramático Nacional is being that of the Spanish word, because "we have to take care of the gold of our language. Thus, the words of Buero Vallejo, Arrabal, Boadella, Mayorga and García May have been reflected in six playwrights from Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia".

Pérez de la source also took the opportunity to make clear his role in the CDN: "I am not a director-manager, but an artistic director with the task of management. The Centro Dramático aims to be a space for building a democratic culture and reflecting on the conflicts of our time".