4D Òptic: Emotional Science

Citing the influence of physicist Stephen Hawking and the author Jorge Luis Borges, and using Bernard Herrmann’s musical score from the Hitchcock film Vertigo for its scene changes, 4D Òptic by the Argentine playwright and director Javier Daulte marks an exciting trip into 2019. This “restoration, not revival,” of Daulte’s 2004 play is absolutely in… Read more »

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M. Linh and His Child: a Story of Solitude and Sanctuary

Lluis Homar stars in La néta del senyor Linh. Photo: David Ruano

Philippe Claudel’s best-selling short novel is brought to the Catalan stage in a theatrical collaboration between Belgian director Guy Cassiers and Catalan actor Lluís Homar. based on a Belgian production, La néta del senyor Linh is a poetic reflection on the fortitude and fragility of human relationships. Monsieur Linh is an elderly refugee who arrives on a ship… Read more »

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The Vibrator Play: Power to the Passions

L'habitació del costat (In the Next Room)

This pitch-perfect Catalan production captures the comedy and charm of Sarah Ruhl’s provocative play In the Next Room / L’habitació del costat. Set in America in the late 19th century, at the time of Thomas Edison’s invention of electrical lighting, the pioneering Dr. Givings receives female patients complaining of ‘hysteria’, to whom he applies a recent… Read more »

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Cronología de las Bestias: the Lies that Bind Us

Cronología de las Bestias. Photo: Javier Naval

In the entertaining thriller play Cronología de las Bestias, written and directed by the Argentine Lautaro Perotti, Spanish actress Carmen Machi is unforgettable as Olvido, a beer-swilling mother with a strange fixation on the washing machine, whose missing son Beltrán shows up behind the sofa after a 12 year absence. Instantly recognised by his antsy aunt… Read more »

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Kassandra: Fake prophecy lost in interpretation

Kassandra at Barcelona's Teatre Nacional de Catalunya

Elisabet Casanovas gives an impressive yet exhausting performance as Kassandra. This excessively didactic play by Sergio Blanco is based on the figure of Greek tragedy who was cursed with the power of prophecy yet further cursed to never be believed. This familiar part of the tale was dropped in near the end with a tarot card… Read more »

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Keep on Walking, Federico: An Ode to the Outsider

Mark Lockyer: Keep on Walking, Federico

Like his first piece, Living With the Lights On, Mark Lockyer’s “love letter to Spain” is an intense, sprawling monologue of inner and outer experiences, realisations of recent and distant past, delivered in an entertaining attack of sincerity. Unlike his first piece, Keep on Walking, Federico is set in an anonymous “authentically Spanish” village on the… Read more »

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Eurohouse/Palmyra: The Great Break-Up

Eurohouse / Palmyra Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas

Frenchman Bertrand Lesca and British-Greek Nasi Voutsas take on the EU and the Syrian crisis in the first two parts of a subversive ‘accidental trilogy’ bound by an austere tragicomic visual language. Accessible and entertaining, expect big themes, character-driven performances and the capacity to shift the mood very suddenly from light to dark. EUROHOUSE Developed… Read more »

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Tebas Land: Tragedy with a Twist

In this fabulously intense and manipulative Spanish-language drama by Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco, Martín, a young man who has murdered his father, becomes a material resource for S, an earnest if smug playwright-professor. The latter wants to make a play about parricide, a modern theatrical take on the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex; the former is… Read more »

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