La gramática

After an unforeseen accident, one of the cleaning ladies who work at the Royal Spanish Academy, who has very little education, becomes an erudite stickler for language and grammar. A renowned neurosurgeon offers to carry out a unique process of linguistic deprogramming on the woman, that is, a “reset” which will solve the many problems this zeal for proper speech is causing in her life. Will it be possible to unlearn something that was never taught?

La gramática is a satire which pays tribute to our relationship to a legacy which, according to Lázaro Carreter, is our most basic heritage: language. Can linguistic competence lead to marginalisation? Can the use of impeccably proper syntax actually offend some people? Ernesto Caballero wrote and directs this comedy with overtones of a dystopian parable about the boundaries of language and, by extension, our world. It’s a biting portrait of today’s Spain, a country addicted to TV reality shows, which highlights the impoverishment of our language and takes unerring aim at those responsible. In the tradition of George Bernard Shaw, Caballero returns to playwriting with this “anti-Pygmalion” about a “nobody” forced to follow grammatical rules as if she were under a centuries-old curse spanning from the era of Antonio de Nebrija to the present.