One of Spain’s very first road deaths took place on a hairpin bend in 1927 Ourense, a province of the northwestern region of Galicia. The deceased, one José Fernández España y Vigil, was a civil engineer employed to study the layout of the southern bypass of the railroad – a proposed new section of the… Read more »
Be it ‘musical theatre’ or ‘theatre with music’, big or small format, in Spanish or Catalan, for children or adults, with live music or without… the all-singing, all-dancing Barcelona musical is woven into the fabric of the flamboyant Catalan capital. This 22/23 season expect cinematic successes such as Grease (in its 50th anniversary) plus Catalan… Read more »
In March 2016 propagandists, located (according to Google Analytics) in Saint Petersburg, infiltrated my blog lookingfordrama.com. ‘Vote Trump!’ They urged on a number of posts about Catalan theatre productions. Of course it’s nice to receive any comments, but it was disconcerting that having perused my online persona (courtesy of Facebook) my unwanted guests would have… Read more »
In a two-hour block separated into segments, the Swiss production 120 Days of Sodom carefully dismantles Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious ‘art horror’ film, released in 1975. Based on the writings of the Marques de Sade (interest in whose work never seems to fade) it tells the story of a group of fascists who kidnap 18… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The proposition to exhume the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco after nearly half a decade resting in peace in a state-funded mausoleum, puts a grave twist on Martin McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara that makes a return to Barcelona’s La Villarroel in an energetic Catalan version directed by Iván Morales. Set in the district… Read more »
In this entertaining homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a team of Catalan multidisciplinary creators have adjusted the plot of the 1818 original to present an atmospheric if ‘diet’ version of the tale. A Wagneresque soundtrack and enigmatic images of the natural world provide the scenery for the story of mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, who, in… Read more »
Place yourself in Belfast in 2009. Two middle-aged Nordies meet in a pub in the jittery presence of a Polish barman. Their lives are linked by a bomb that one threw there, in 1974, at the height of The Troubles. It blew 6 men up, some literally to bits – one of them was the… Read more »
