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 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 »
This Catalan adaptation of British playwright Hattie Naylor’s multilayered play Going Dark is an understated yet cosmically ambitious production that transforms the Espai Lliure into a planetarium; a claustrophobic yet mentally expansive dark space, where the wonders of the universe are projected onto a stage dressed up as moon’s surface. With significantly fewer resources than… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
This Catalan version of Arnold Wesker’s 1956 play, Chicken Soup with Barley, centred on a working class family living in London, is a finely staged and well-choreographed production, featuring a strong central performance by Màrcia Cisteró as the die-hard socialist Sarah Kahn. The play (Catalan title: Sopa de pollastre amb ordi) centres on the ideals… 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 »
Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, an exhibition currently at Barcelona’s CCCB, is the vibrant, visual manifestation of an extensive, on-going research project that brings together the work of 120 artists and designers from all over the continent. Curated by Amelie Klein of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the show was put together under… Read more »
