The Teatre Nacional de Catalunya launched its new season in dramatic weather last Saturday which seemed generated for the occasion. The theatre’s pledge to open ‘a gateway to the world’ – written in bold deep-blue letters across the entrance – gave way into something more ambitious and self-aware: that vast spacey lobby that you feel… 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Lali Ayguadé, the acclaimed Barcelona-born dancer-turned-choreographer, brings her first full-length dance production Kokoro to Leicester’s Curve Theatre this Tuesday, January 26th. The piece offers a variation on a theme explored by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in Fractus: how, in a world divided into societies built for individuals, can we confront the pressing need to adapt, to… Read more »
