The average worker – aka the Spanish middle classes – is the focal point of a satirical stage production by the Madrid-based cooperative Teatro del Barrio. Masacre (Massacre) is an informative and incredulity-inducing theatre piece that covers some 100 years of Spanish economic history in just 80 minutes. The production features prominent Spanish actors Alberto San Juan… Read more »
Hanging on the branches of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s brilliant tragicomedy, this humourless Catalan adaptation of The Wild Duck (L’ànec salvatge) turned complex character-archetypes into filmic clichés. This 1884 play was an excellent choice by director Julio Manrique. Its predominant theme of blinded idealism and addiction to abstracts over human relationships, exemplified in the missionary… Read more »
Featuring a breathtaking performance by Ariadna Gil, this Catalan theatre adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre distances itself from the wild Yorkshire moors, and reimagines the north as an anonymous lobby, with a grand piano and four identical doors, reflected ad infinitum in big mirrors at each end. Gil plays the lead in a permanent state of… Read more »
In a 2015 British production of La Mère, a contemporary French play by Florian Zeller, actress Gina McKee appeared ‘ghost-like’ in the lead (The Guardian). In the Catalan-language production La Mare, a local version of the play directed by Andrés Lima, Emma Vilarasau (pictured above) takes on the complex role of Anne, a mother in her 50s who suffers a… Read more »
The shocks and infidelities of history and memory are explored in Història, a small format theatre production brought to Barcelona’s Espai Lliure after a successful run at Sala Beckett. This narratively and visually engaging piece is the work of Catalan playwright Jan Vilanova Claudín in collaboration with director and actor Pau Roca, and features strong… Read more »
Precisely timed to chime with World Press Photo, La Treva (Time Stands Still) is a Catalan-language version of Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Donald Margulies‘ stage drama, in which two veteran journalists try to make peace with their homebody selves when trauma forces them to return to Brooklyn from the war in Iraq. Sarah (Clara Segura)… Read more »
Sci-fi thriller The Nether (L’inframón), by American playwright Jennifer Haley, is back at Teatre Lliure in Gràcia this autumn after a spell at the Grec Festival in July. The contemporary play, brought to the Catalan stage under the direction of Juan Carlos Martel Bayod, deals with portentous, worrying themes; questioning the sanctity of the virtual realm as a ‘safe… Read more »
No indignity is spared in this NTGent production of Platonov, directed by the Belgian theatre and film director Luk Perceval. Platonov (its English-given title) is a 105-minute adaptation of an unwieldy early play by Anton Chekhov, written by the Russian between the ages of 18 and 21. Completed in 1878 and with a playtime of around… Read more »
Four women gather in a luxurious residence in an unknown state in civil war. It’s the home of Micheleine and her absent husband, ‘an important man’, whom Katheryn, a foreign photojournalist, has come to shoot. They wait with Katheryn’s young guide and translator Gilma, a hungry woman with greasy fingers, deep pockets and shoes that mud… Read more »
Faithful to the alluring yet foreboding atmosphere of the original novel by Louis Couperus, the Ivo van Hove / Toneelgroep Amsterdam stage production of De stille kracht (The Hidden Force) conjures up the colonial world of the Dutch East Indies as an opulent but decaying paradise, battered by the odd monsoon. The year is 1900, and 100 years… Read more »
