WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 23, Number 2 Spring 2011

Editor
Marvin Carlson
Contributing Editors



Christopher Balme
Miriam D'Aponte
Marion P. Holt
Glenn Loney
Daniele Vianello
Harry Carlson
Maria M. Delgado
Barry Daniels
Yvonne Shafer
Phyllis Zatlin
Editorial Staff
Sascha Just, Managing Editor Pamela Thielman, Editorial Assistant
Barrie Gelles, Circulation Manager
Benet i Jornet
Photo: Courtesy of Benet i Jornet
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2011
ISSN # 1050-1991
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
To the Reader
In this issue we have an unusually rich selection of material from Spain, with three major articles covering
recent work not only in Madrid and Barcelona, but in a number of less familiar cities. The rest of Western Europe
is also well represented with reports from a wide range of theatre centers, among them Paris, London, Berlin,
Dublin, Oslo, and Helsinki. For the upcoming fall issue we will foreground, as usual, spring and summer theatre
festivals in Europe. We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in
Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western
European Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, or mcarlson@
gc.cuny.edu.
Western European Stages is supported by a generous grant from the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Journals are available online from ProQuest Information and
Learning as abstracts via the ProQuest information service and the International Index to the
Performing Arts. www.il.proquest.com.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council
of Editors of Learned Journals.
3
Table of Contents
Spring 2011
5
13
31
39
43
45
47
51
53
59
63
67
Phyllis Zatlin
Maria M. Delgado
Phyllis Zatlin
Marvin Carlson
Joan Templeton
Joan Templeton
Kevin Byrne
Marvin Carlson
Yvonne Shafer
Andrew Friedman
Pirkko Koski
Volume 23, Number 2
Theatre in Madrid and Barcelona: March 2011
Relocations, Reworkings, Reopenings: Catalans in Madrid, Argentines
in Barcelona
Theatre in Spain: Not Limited to the Biggest Cities
Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir
Solness le Constructeur Thtre Hbertot
Lulu
Dance First and Think Afterwards: The Thrill of It All by Forced
Entertainment
Arrah-na-Pogue at the Abbey Theatre
Berlin Opera and Ballet
Black Box Teater of Oslo's "Marstrand III" Festival: Namik Mackic's
Salting the Tail and Gisle Vienne's I Apologize
Auster and Smeds
Contributors

4
Pedra de tartera (Stone in a Landslide), based on a novel by Maria Barbal, directed by Lurdes Barba.
Photo: National Theatre of Catalunya.
5
During my two-week trip to Spain this
March, in Madrid I could have seen a play by
Tennessee Williams (Streetcar Named Desire)
at the main stage of the Teatro Espaol or one by
Georg Bchner (Woyzeck) at the Mara Guerrero
National Theatre, but instead I chose to track down
living Spanish playwrights. That led me to the
small auditorium at the Teatro Espaol for Santo,
a collection of short plays of related theme by
Ignacio del Moral, Ignacio Garca May, and Ernesto
Caballero, and to the Naves del Teatro Espaol at
the Matadero (a renovated slaughter house) for
Penumbra, by Juan Cavestany and Juan Mayorga. In
Barcelona I could have seen Anton Chekhov's The
Three Sisters at the Lliure's new theatre at Montjuich
or Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country on the
main stage of the National Theatre of Catalunya.
Instead, I chose to track down Catalan works: Josep
Benet i Jornet's Dues dones que ballen at the smaller
Lluire-Grcia theatre and a theatrical adaptation of
Maria Barbal's novel Pedra de tartera in the small
auditorium of the National Theatre.
The municipal Teatro Espaol, under the
direction of Mario Gas [WES 18.3, Fall 2006] now
schedules question and answer sessions for interested
spectators in conjunction with its plays. I chose to
see Santo on 18 March when there would be such
a session with the cast, playwright-director Ernesto
Caballero [WES 15.2, Spring 2003; 18.3, Fall 2006;
20.2, Spring 2008], and the other two playwrights
after the performance. In the panel discussion, actor
Aitana Snchez-Gijn took the lead as she did in the
cast of four in the short plays of this triptych. Her
insights on connections between the three texts were
illuminating.
Publicity for Santo (Saintly) indeed
featured only a head shot of Snchez-Gijn, no
doubt on the correct assumption that her picture
would be sufcient to sell tickets. Born in 1968, she
made her debut in television at the age of sixteen and
has since had an illustrious lm career. From 1998
to 2000 she served as president of the Spanish lm
academy. Although her lists of television and theatre
credits are shorter than the one for movies, she has
won major acting awards in all three categories.
The rst play in performance was del
Moral's Mientras Dios duerme (While God Sleeps).
Snchez-Gijn is Teresa, a nun who has killed a
man in order to protect a girl from sexual assault.
Jos Luis Esteban, who also turned in a stellar
performance in all three plays, in this case is a priest
who visits Teresa in her bedbug-infested jail cell.
The bishop he represents wants to avoid scandal for
the Catholic Church, even if Teresa and other nuns
must lie about the killing to do so. He attempts to
have Teresa agree to take the easy path, out of prison
and back to her convent. The text, which I liked best
of the three, raises signicant questions about good
and evil, truth and lies. Teresa is a social activist. She
had joined the townspeople in protesting the dam
that will destroy their land and then wished to save
children from construction workers who see girls as
sex objects. She wants to be put on trial so that her
truth may be revealed.
For the second play, Snchez-Gijn
changes from her drab gray garb to a red dress. In
plain view of the audience, she xes her hair and
puts on lipstick. In her role as Rais in Garca May's
Los coleccionistas (The Collectors), she steals a
mysterious red book but is caught by the librarian,
to whom she subsequently promises a "miracle" if
he will let her keep it. She tyrannizes the "saintly"
man, even coercing him into removing an articial
eye from a dead man. Esteban dons glasses for
this second play, but he transforms his character
so convincingly, from overbearing priest to timid,
subservient librarian, that any costume change is
irrelevant.
Caballero's Oratorio para Edith Stein
(Oratory for Edith Stein) returns Snchez-Gijn to
the gray garb of a nun. In this case she becomes
a Jewish philosopher who, upon discovering
the writings of St. Teresa of vila, is inspired to
convert to Catholicism. For a Jew, conversion was
no protection from the Holocaust. Esteban in this
play is a Nazi interrogator who wants to know what
motivated Edith.
The supporting members of the cast, Esther
Acevedo and Borja Luna, do not need speaking roles
to establish their high level of acting skills. Luna is
particularly impressive in the second play, when he
becomes a barking dog. Acevedo in the third play
conveys the image of a frightened, nude woman
even though she is partially clad.
The adaptable small auditorium was
arranged with rows of spectators on two sides.
At one end of the central acting area was an open
doorway; at the other, a bigger-than-life sacricial
Theatre in Madrid and Barcelona: March 2011
Phyllis Zatlin
6
lamb. I heard no references in the texts to such a
lamb, but unquestionably the production deals with
issues of sainthood and martyrdom. The minimalist
set, designed by Jos Luis Raymond, functioned
well. A long bench in front of the lamb was used at
times for actors to sit down but also contained boxes
with props. A large, separate box served as a desk,
among other capacities.
About half the spectators remained for
the discussion that followed the performance. The
playwrights revealed that they are long-time friends
who casually came up with the idea for the sainthood
triptych. They expressed surprise that the project
had actually materialized. It was Snchez-Gijn,
however, who provided connections among the
plays. She found the rst to be realistic, the second
surrealistic, and the third symbolic. All three revolve
around the theme of temptation; in plays 1 and 3, it
is a man tempting the woman while in play 2, the
roles are reversed. The two nuns prove stronger in
character than the male librarian. Snchez-Gijn
further linked the book and setting in play 2 with
the works of Jorge Luis Borges, who was in fact a
librarian.
Audience members, myself included, found
Garca May's play puzzling. What was the miracle,
they asked. And one wondered if perhaps the play
was simply meant to be a bad dream. Plays 1 and 3
are closer to each other in theme; by placing them at
the beginning and the end, the production acquires a
circular structure.
The Cavestany-Mayorga production is the
rst I have seen at the Matadero, a large cultural
center still under development in Madrid. While
maintaining the exterior of the old slaughterhouse, the
interior is being remodeled for a variety of activities
related to the arts. The theatre area, which opened
its doors in June 2007, resulted from collaboration
with Mario Gas, director of the Teatro Espaol, set
designer and set technician Jean Guy Lecat and
Francisco Fontanals, and municipal architect Emilio
Esteras; the cost was four million euros.
Penumbra (Shadows) is a production of
Animalario, a company directed by Andrs Lima
with which Mayorga has been associated for a
number of years [WES 17.3, Fall 2005. For other
Penumbra, directed by Mayorga. Photo: Courtesy of Naves del Teatro Espaol.
7
references to Mayorga, see WES 14.1, Winter 2000;
19.2, Spring 2007; 20.2, Spring 2008]. Mayorga
and Cavestany previously co-authored for the
group a hilarious, satirical text that revealed what
was really going on at the wedding dinner of the
president's daughter: Alejandro y Ana: todo lo que
Espaa no pudo ver del banquete de boda de la
hija del presidente. Albeit with comic moments, the
surreal Penumbra is far removed from that farcical
commentary on Spanish politics. Actor Alberto San
Juan, who plays the father in Penumbra, once again
demonstrates his versatility. This latest production
was scheduled for a run of almost two months,
from 27 January to 20 March. A preview was staged
outside Madrid in a large playhouse at Fuenlabrada;
based on that experience, the text was modied
somewhat. The friend who accompanied me to the
Matadero had seen the production in Fuenlabrada
and thought it worked better in Madrid not just
because of the changes but because of being staged
in a smaller space.
Garca May's Los coleccionistas was
interpreted as a bad dream by at least one spectator.
Penumbra, according to the director and authors,
specically used dreams as a starting point. For
improvisational workshops, the actors were asked
to relate their dreams in response to the question of
what has hurt them the most, whether physical or
emotional pain. As the title suggests, much of the
action takes place at night, in shadows or half-light;
a frightened child is rst seen bearing a candle.
Certain scenes are repeated, as they might
be in recurring dreams; these include the mother
(Nathalie Poza) serving soup to her husband and
son as well as having sexual encounters with
Penumbra (Guillermo Toledo), who takes on
a physical existence. The character Penumbra
whispers that if we live to be eighty, we will have
spent six years dreaming, and most of those dreams
will be nightmares. The action of Penumbra gives
expression to the various characters' greatest fears
and desires. Nightmares in this play dominate, with
storms, a shipwreck and the child's death. There are
only glimpses of good dreams when the sun comes
out with the possibility that the family may at last go
down to the beach.
The set, designed by Beatriz San Juan,
consists of a summer cabin at the shore, suggested
only by a framework; and an opaque, tent-like
structure next to it where the child's grandparents
are staying. That structure has no door so it is
not surprising that there is no response when the
concerned child knocks there. With backlighting the
audience does see a gure inside, more likely a doll
than a real human being. Large sheets of plastic form
a backdrop, through which characters occasionally
enter the stage. At times plastic also envelops the
framed house and, with wind and sound effects,
helps to represent storms.
The text asks how one can explain the world
to a child. A curious element of this staging is the
portrayal of the child in the form of a life-like puppet
that is controlled by a human actor (Luis Bermejo).
The puppet, manipulated by a rod attached to his
head, has hinged legs, and Bermejo easily moves
about the stage with him and at times speaks for
him. It would not be too exaggerated to say that the
puppet steals the show. Moreover, the human parents
in this dysfunctional family intermittently take
on the mechanical movements of puppets. These
staging strategies are reminiscent of Tadeusz Kantor
although the text in other ways is more related to
French surrealism than to that Polish playwright.
I saw two other performances in Madrid:
a script-in-hand reading of Paloma Pedrero's En la
otra habitacin (In the Other Room) to celebrate
International Women's Day at a neighborhood
cultural center in the Salamanca district of Madrid,
and a production of Jordi Galcern's Fuga (Escape)
at a large, commercial playhouse, the Teatro Alczar.
Both were well received by their audiences.
As producer Robert Muro explained prior
to the reading of Pedrero's play, Spanish script-in-
hand performances are relatively new, dating back
no more than fteen years. Muro, who has organized
cycles of such readings for Spain's counterpart to a
dramatists guild) the Sociedad General de Autores y
Editores (SGAE) should know. A spectator I chatted
with before the performance apparently attends most
SGAE readings; assuming that I lived in Madrid, she
wondered why she had not seen me at them.
Pedrero is one of contemporary Spain's
best known playwrights, both nationally and
internationally [WES 9.1, Winter 1997; 14.2, Spring
2002; 14.3, Fall 2002; 15.2, Spring 2003; 21.2,
Spring 2009]. She attended this performance and
graciously joined her co- director Raquel Mesa and
the actors Arantxa F. De Sarabia (Paula) and Natalia
Huarte (Amanda) to respond to questions from the
audience afterwards. There was no indication from
her or from spectators, who might have read her
most recent weekly column in La Razn, that she
would be entering the hospital the next day for a
colon cancer operation.
The two characters in this previously-
unstaged but published drama are a mother and
8
daughter who have a conictive relationship. The
mother, a professor who is unhappily married to an
older man, has temporarily taken over her daughter's
loft apartment while she mistakenly thinks Amanda
is away in hopes of setting up a tryst with Mario,
a younger man who has been her student. The
eighteen-year old daughter is a brilliant student of
cinematography but insecure because she considers
herself unattractive, certainly less beautiful than her
mother Paula. Moreover Amanda, too, is attracted
to Mario. Those familiar with Pedrero's El color de
agosto (The Color of August) will not be surprised
by the kind of cat and mouse rivalry that ensues.
While in the earlier play two women artists angrily
paint each others' bodies, in this case the women
have a food ght. The stage at the cultural center had
adequate props to establish the daughter's apartment.
The acting, considering limited rehearsals, was
excellent. It is anticipated that the play will receive
a full production before long, most likely with the
same cast.
Jordi Galcern (born in Barcelona in
1964) is a Catalan playwright who has achieved
international acclaim for his satirical comedy El
mtodo Grnholm (The Grnholm Method) [WES
17.3, Fall 2005; 19.2, Spring 2007]. That play, rst
staged in 2003, has been made into a movie and
performed or scheduled for performance in thirty
different countries; as difcult as it is for theatre
from Spain to be produced on the American stage,
soon it may even reach New York audiences. In
Madrid in March 2011, there were two Galcern
productions running: the comedy Fuga (written
1994, rst staged 1998) and a drama, Palabras
encadenadas (Word Play, 1998). I chose the former,
directed by Tamzin Townsend, who also directed
the performance I saw of El mtodo Grnholm [See
WES 19.2, Spring 2007]. Townsend, who is British,
is actively involved in Madrid theatre; her staging
of Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam was running
simultaneously with the Galcern comedy.
The playwright says that Fuga is one of his
early works and he is not interested in promoting
it, but the Wednesday night I went, it played to an
almost full house at the large, centrally-located
Alczar (over 800 seats). The audience loved it,
and the ratings in the entertainment guide, Gua
del ocio, placed it as number three on a list of eight
recommended productions.
Fuga is a fast-paced comedy made even
faster by Amparo Larraaga's lightening speed of
delivery in her role as a door-to-door salesperson.
Larraaga as Carmen (alias Marta) enters the home
of an ex-government minister, Isidre Gal (Jos Luis
Gil), who has been forced to resign because of his
allegedly fraudulent activities. He had contemplated
suicide but nds a renewed desire to live because
of Carmen. He readily accepts as true not only her
stories but also her family that includes an abusive
husband and a paralytic father. Unfortunately for
him, Carmen and her cohorts are even more corrupt
and adept at fraud than he was.
Townsend's direction of this thriller-farce is
impeccable, and the cast of ve excels at their roles,
or multiple roles for the gang engaged in deception)
and gunplay. The title, too, yields more than one
meaning: the danger that gas may escape (basis of
Carmen's sales spiel) and the escape that the ex-
minister plans to nd happiness with her.
The single set, designed by Ricardo
Snchez, might be considered typical of a bourgeois
comedy except for a surprisingly narrow, horizontal
window that runs the width of the exterior wall of the
house. In response to negative comments about the
window, Isidre says several times that he designed
the house himself and he is Catalan. In Madrid the
line gets laughs. A few days later, when I toured the
relatively new Institut del Teatre in Barcelona and
saw its exceedingly tall narrow windows, I realized
why Spanish audiences would get a joke about
Catalan architectural design.
A decade ago, when the new Lliure was
under construction, I understood that the old
playhouse was being abandoned by this famous
theatre company (WES 12.3, Fall 2000). But the
news of its demise was premature. The old Lliure-
Grcia facility, renovated at a cost of 2.5 million
euros, reopened for the 201011 season. It is now
regularly scheduled as a second, smaller auditorium,
with seating that can range up to 350. That is where
I saw Benet i Jornet's Dues dones que ballen (Two
Dancing Women). Although Benet i Jornet is for
many an admired playwright in Catalunya and
certainly a successful creator of television series, in
all likelihood this play attracted full houses during
its six-week run because Anna Lizaran and Alcia
Prez played the two roles. Lizaran has had a long
and distinguished career, much of it associated with
the Lliure, where Prez has also performed in recent
years. Their names attracted enthusiastic spectators
despite some negative reviews.
The reviewer in La Vanguardia, a major
Barcelona newspaper, praised the acting, directing,
set, and costumes while panning the play, which
he said was a rehash of Night Mother. He also
said that Benet i Jornet must have tacked on the
9
scene of the women dancing to justify his title.
From my perspective, the reviewer's comparison
between the Catalan work and Marsha Norman's
play is inaccurate, and an experienced author would
more likely let the play suggest the title rather than
invent the title rst. Given the careful preparation
throughout the play, in retrospect the ending should
not have come to the reviewer as a surprise.
The episodic action of Dues dones que
ballen is presented in ve scenes, starting when a
younger woman rst comes to clean an elderly
woman's apartment. The author was kind enough to
send me the play script, written in 2008 and revised
in 2009. Although it suggests that there should
be pauses, it provides no stage directions, thus
giving the director and actors free rein. Likewise
the characters do not have names. To facilitate my
discussion of the play, I shall use the actors' names
to indicate the roles.
Prez, who has been hired by Lizaran's
daughter, initially has a conictive relationship with
the elderly woman. Prez wonders aloud if Lizaran
is showing signs of Alzheimer's and hints that she
would be better off in a nursing home. Lizaran
suspects, probably correctly, that Prez has picked
up these ideas from her daughter and makes it clear
that she would rather be dead than end up in an old-
age home. The leitmotif of suicide is introduced with
her saying she'll turn on the gas; Prez tells her that
gas is no longer lethal unless it causes an explosion.
A related theme throughout the play is pills: Lizaran
gradually accumulates a large stockpile.
Lizaran speaks more kindly of her son
than her daughter but is forced to admit that she
hardly ever sees him. And she never sees son and
daughter together. When she happily announces at
the close of the fourth scene that both of her children
are planning to visit her and that maybe they will
surprise her with plans to renovate her apartment,
the audience should be on alert.
Dues dones que ballen, written and directed by Benet i Jornet. Photo: Ros Ribas.
10
Typical of a two-hand play, the relationship
between the characters has ups and downs. Lizaran
and Prez squabble. The older woman at one point
tells her helper to get out and not come back. Indeed
Prez stays away for an extended period. But
Lizaran has a sense of humor, delivering comic lines
with air, and the two women also share laughs.
Gradually they become friends and conde in one
another.
The younger woman used to be a school
teacher and, at play's beginning, still teaches part-
time, but has been depressed since her six-year-old
son died "accidentally." Blows he received from
her companion proved fatal; Prez expresses a
hatred of men. Lizaran encourages her to pursue a
new romantic involvement, with an older teacher;
when it doesn't work out, Prez stops going to the
school entirely. Her life, like Lizaran's, no longer
has meaning. We discover ssures in both women's
personalities.
Visible cracks in the upstage walls of
Lloren Corbella's set show that the apartment, too,
is falling apart. Curtained windows, beyond which
one can see other buildings, face an inner patio.
Doors to the right and left of the windowed area
lead to other rooms in the apartment, most notably
the kitchen where Prez nds the supplies she needs
to sweep, dust and iron. Her realistic housekeeping
activities provide movement and keep the play from
being static.
A key prop in the dining/living room area
is a china closet with shelves that hold Lizaran's
radio and her collection of tebeos (comic books).
Prez suggests at scene endings that they turn on the
radio to listen to music. Benet i Jornet, who began
collecting and making comic books in his childhood,
says that the Lizaran character was inspired by an
elderly woman he saw buying some.
Lizaran and Prez have generational
differences about music. The former is a Frank Sinatra
fan while the latter prefers a recent arrangement of
a Sinatra song as performed by Robbie Williams. I
anticipated that the music, specically "Something
Stupid," would be played between episodes but what
Dues dones que ballen. Photo: Ros Ribas.
11
I heard was, for me, an unidentiable background
noise. Perhaps the La Vanguardia reviewer would
have been better prepared for the later dance scene
had the music been more than a topic of conversation.
After Prez gets to know and feel affection
for Lizaran, she searches for a missing comic book
to complete the elderly woman's beloved collection.
Lizaran in turn surprises Prez with a plane ticket
and a hotel reservation so that the younger woman
can have a dream vacation to Paris. All Prez wants,
however, is to be reunited with her son.
In scene ve, the collection of comic books
has disappeared. The elderly woman, whose children
plan to conne her to a nursing home, has destroyed
what she most loves.
The nal trip the two women take together
is fueled by an overdose of Lizaran's pills. They are
genuinely happy as they gleefully break open the pill
packages. Then, to the sound of "Something Stupid,"
they dance while waiting for the pills to take effect.
Over time Dues dones que ballen will
probably not be considered one of Benet i Jornet's
major plays. Its episodic structure may reect his
immersion in television series. But this is a carefully-
developed, psychologically realistic portrayal of
two women whose lives are crumbling. As such it
provides Lizaran and Prez with a strong vehicle for
demonstrating their exceptional acting skills.
By far the most impressive production I
saw this March was Pedra de tartera (Stone in a
Landslide), based on a 1985 novel by Maria Barbal,
at the National Theatre of Catalunya. The original
work is a rst-person narration that tells in episodic
fashion a woman's life experiences, starting at age
thirteen and including the Spanish Civil War. It
has quickly become a modern classic of Catalan
literature. The theatrical adaptation by Marc Rosich,
directed by Lurdes Barba, does a stunning job of
recreating that narrative for the stage. At least some
of the dialogue is in rural dialect, but the performance
is so compelling that spectators can follow the action
whether or not they capture the words. Heading a
uniformly excellent cast is urea Nrquez in the role
of Conxa. Given the demand for tickets some people
reportedly waited three hours in line for theirs) it is
fortunate that the sala petita at the National Theatre
is not as small as its name suggests. Seating can
range from 266 to 450, and a larger conguration
appeared to be in place for Pedra de tartera. At a
six p.m. performance on a Sunday, the theatre was
packed.
The set, designed by Max Glaenzel with the
collaboration of Estel Cristi, throughout most of the
action represents the inside of a farmhouse: stairs
and a door are located upstage center; a kitchen
counter is upstage left. Stage right is a door leading
to the outside, with a table downstage of the steps.
Downstage of the counter in the kitchen, at oor
level, is a wood-burning pit where a big soup kettle
is always in use. Along the far left wall is a large
pile of stones, extending upwards, with a window
near the top. From reading the novel, I know that the
young Conxa often goes up to a loft to look out over
the elds and that in a moment of great sorrow she
is tempted to throw herself from the window. The
stones suggest the kind of eldstone construction
common years ago in rural Catalunya, but they
also serve as a location in the concentration camp
where Conxa and her daughters are sent near the
end of the civil war when Franco's forces triumph. A
projected image of barbed wire establishes that they
are imprisoned.
This single set is supplemented with
enough large projections on the upstage and left
walls that the stage play at times borders on being a
motion picture. Conxa's parents are seen only as lm
images. Historical background is provided through
actual or simulated newsreels, in sepia. The former
show a triumphant Francisco Franco while the latter
include the execution of Conxa's husband Jaume
and others. As an elderly woman, Conxa reluctantly
moves to Barcelona where her son works; we see her
looking through curtains out on the city, from which
she feels alienated.
The young girl, the fth of six children, is
given to her childless aunt and uncle both because
they need help on their farm and because her parents
have too many mouths to feed. Her long walk across
elds with her uncle to her new home, carrying a
bundle with her clothes and wearing shoes that don't
t, is shown in a projection. But once she arrives,
the child actor of the lm runs out on stage, into the
farmhouse.
Among the outstanding elements of this
staging is the use of some delightful young actors
in the cast. Three little girls alternate in the roles of
Conxa as a child and later as her daughter Angeleta;
three little boys alternate in the roles of her son
Mateu and later her grandson Jaumet. (I did not
notice an identication of which two children were
performing the day I attended.) Marina Barber is
the adolescent Conxa and then her older daugher,
Elvira. The doubling reinforces the passage of time,
as does Roger Casamajor's dual portrayal of Jaume,
as a young man, and then of the adult son Mateu.
From the early scenes in which Conxa's feet
12
hurt her severely, feet and shoes become a leitmotif.
The concern immediately expressed by Aunt
Encarnaci (Rosa Cadafalch) indicates that aunt
and niece will develop a loving relationship. When
Conxa and Jaume meet at a village dance, her joy is
reected in the projection of her lovely red dress and
shoes. The intense grief Conxa experiences with her
husband's violent death and her own incarceration
and that of her daughters is intensied by her being
barefoot.
Although the three adult women actors play
only one role each the third is Conxa's loyal friend
Delina (Annabel Castan) all of the male roles are
doubled. Eduard Muntada admirably portrays both
Conxa's uncle and the gluttonous local priest. The
cast for Pedra de tartera was uniformly excellent.
Indeed I found outstanding actors in all the plays
I saw this spring in Spain. Many of the younger
performers have received training at the theatre
schools located in major cities.
In Madrid, in spite of or because of the
economic crisis, the surplus of ne actors has given
rise to a number of new, small theatres. I was told
that these new playhouses have been established and
paid for by RESAD graduates in order to use their
skills.
13
The mythical Grcia venue of the Lliure
has reopened. Barcelona's Teatre Lliure came to
symbolize the excitement around the transition to
democracy. A exible venue, it allowed for many
different congurations and presented classic plays in
stark uncluttered fashion that broke with the labored
stagings of the Franco era. Now it boasts a 736-
seat auditorium in Montjuc (Sala Fabi Puigserver
named after its founder and director) as well as the
350-seat Grcia venue. The 200-seat Espai Lliure
in Montjuc will now close. Artistic director lex
Rigola has chosen to open the refurbished Grcia
venue with a new production of Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, presented in Catalan in a co-production with
the Centro Dramtico Nacional in Madrid. Rigola
has made some drastic cuts to the play. There are no
minor characters here, just the dysfunctional family
whose tortured relations are played out during the
play's durationRigola's version runs at a compact
hour and a half.
Rigola makes some intelligent dramaturgical
decisions: Mae (Ester Cort) and Gooper (Santi
Ricart), so often presented as cardboard caricatures
are here given more prominent roles, presented as
symbols of 1950s afuent complacency and middle-
class manners. (Mae's outt in particular presents
a pastiche of the Audrey Hepburn look.) Joan
Carreras offers a sullen awkward Brick unable to
communicate with Chantal Aime's poised Maggie.
But it is Andreu Benito's Big Daddy who steals the
show. He is not a loud man but dominates through
sheer physical bulk and an authoritative stalking
and control of the stage. He controls his world
effortlessly, offering a note on the piano as he walks
past, pulling up the cotton plant in a vain frustration.
He orders the pianist out of the room when he wants
privacy and expects compliance and obedience. His
wife (Muntsa Alcaiz) is a mere shadow that follows
Relocations, Reworkings, Reopenings:
Catalans in Madrid, Argentines in Barcelona
Maria M. Delgado
Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by lex Rigola. Photo: Ros Ribas.
14
him, devoid of spirit and character and it is evident
that Carreras' Brick is conceived in her image. He
opens the production against the back wall of Max
Glaenzel's set, a languid being in a burgundy-
patterned dressing gown that accentuates his pasty
complexion.
Rigola creates a production poised between
the realisticas with a 1950s costume designand
the conceptual. Glaenzel offers a cotton eld
evoking (at least abstractly) Kolts's seminal play
where a marital bed sits under a sparse, shrivelled
tree, its outstretched arms offering neither shade
nor protection: just the image of a barren landscape
that can bear no fruit. Beside Brick a pianist (Raffel
Plana) tickles the ivories; Brick sings gently; on top
of the piano a makeshift bar. Up above, a neon lit
sign asks "Why is it so hard to talk?" It is this that
Rigola makes the leitmotif of his reading. Brick and
Maggie talk to each other across the width of the
stage, gulfs of silence and misunderstandings. Brick
is more comfortable hovering around the bar than
close to his wife. She evidently disgusts him and he
freezes when she is close to him. But Rigola chooses
to have them as far apart as possible for long chunks
of the action. It's almost like a stage tennis matcha
methodology used literally by The Wooster Group
with words catapulted from speaker to speaker
across the void and is a device he has employed to
productive effect in his previous productions. This
proves problematic in never allowing a variation of
pace. Carreras plays Brick as a sozzled, comatose
alcoholic, existing on the margins where release
comes through alcohol or the soothing tunes of the
discreet pianist.
The pianist works well, underscoring as well
as observing the action and providing an ambience
and mood for the production that is not always
matched by the actors. Chantal Aime is particularly
uncomfortable as a poised Maggie whose anxiety
and fears are never palpably conveyed. Ultimately,
even when she strips for Brick there is an element of
disdain rather than desperation or desire. It's a frigid
performance; she walks out indignant when he rejects
her and remains naked to greet her sister-in-law as if
wanting to proffer the image of a couple for whom
sex in the middle of the day is a way of life. But for
all her aggressive advances and abrasive attempts to
give her husband a blow-job, he resists her, pushing
her away violently as she kneels before him or
turning his head when she attempts to kiss him on
the lips. In many ways it is a tame production; there
are no sexual reworks here. Rigola acknowledges
the referents that he is dealing with when Aime and
Carrerras openly state that they are neither Elizabeth
Taylor nor Paul Newman. The production would
have benetted from more such moments of rupture.
Mother and son are rarely without the prop
of alcohol. Muntsa Alcaiz's mother also seeks
relief in cigarettes. It's a world where appearances
are prioritised and the faade of propriety must
be maintained by Brick's family whatever the
consequences for those who fall into their orbit.
Rigola offers an intelligent reading of the piece but
ultimately it's too cool, too clinical, too composed,
too clipped and too cut to really animate. It's been
greeted by excellent reviews and full houses but
ultimately I wouldn't categorize this as vintage
Rigola.
At the Sala Fabi Puigserver, maverick
musician-director Carles Santos has presented his
new work, Chicha Montenegro Gallery, premiered
at Girona's Temporada Alta festival a week earlier.
The production is a collage of individual scenarios
that are almost like stepping into different rooms
of an art exhibition or installation, all thematically
conceived but differing in execution and tone.
Santos has composed an original score, executed by
four singers (a tenor, baritone, mezzo, and soprano),
a dancer and an actor. There is no narrative, although
Santos states that each have, at some moment and
in some way, had a relationship with the mythical
Chicha Montenegro. Some of these relationships
have been amorous, some platonic, others involved
rejection rather than that acceptance. Chicha is the
absent other that haunts the piece, a larger than life
being that looks to be the alter ego of the composer.
The production begins by suggesting a conjuring
trick: a cloud of smoke from which emerges a
puppet-like body in white dominated by a vast
mane of hair. Two gures in black drag the woman
in white from one side of the stage to another. The
mane of hair is shaken and stirred. The two puppet
masters stop her from rising, trapping her like an
insect in a web. She ends in a heap on the oor
with her two masters looking down at her and is
then swept up into the heavens, disappearing with
the same sense of thrilling magic that governed
her appearance. Both the a cappella structure and
vertical register of the production are set up in the
opening scene. Chicha Montenegro Gallery has
characters falling from the heavens, ying from the
wings, and crawling on the oor. Earth, water, and
air feature as conspicuous organizing elements. It's a
battle between the horizontal and the vertical where
characters meet in a suspended space in between
where they rise and fall like bouncing balls at the
15
mercy of an overexcited child.
Four gures identically dressed in colourful
Chaplinesque music hall suits with a magnicent
embroidered long jacket of solid and rich mauve
move like trapeze artists across opposite metal walls
stage left and right. As they y across their feet bang
across the metallic surface, creating an echoing
bang that offers a rhythmic pulse or a metronome
of sortsa favorite device in Santos's work. When
the singers rest on the wall, they look like Humpty
Dumpty gures suspended precariously before what
we anticipate will be a fall. Beckett's clowns also
come to mind, destined to return to their starting
point in the search for a Godot that never arrives.
The Chicha Montenegro songher name repeated
in a layered chat in quick succession by the four
singersis almost like a machine gun ring across
the auditorium.
A mysterious box in the middle of the stage
holds a secret. The box is cut open from the inside:
a brilliant white line of light emerging as the ssure
appears. Out of the nished hole a woman appears
in a neat black skirt and white jacket. She proffers
a formal address to the audience at a breathtakingly
rapid pace. Her forty-two ways of killing a priest
includes offering him high concentration bleach,
dynamite in the prostrate, sticking his head in a pool
of water containing a communist piranha, substituting
anisspecically Anis del Mono, Joan Brossa's
favourite drinkfor blood in a transfusionand the
placing of three scorpions in his mouth. At the end
she falls into a vomiting t, spraying a trail of bodily
uids across the oor, trapped in the stream of vomit
like an insect caught in a web of its own making.
Scenes follow in quick succession.
Four performers jog up and down on harnesses
performing liturgical chants; their skirts swish
like the movement of the bell. Ropes fall and a
desk, music stands, leaves, boats and sh follow
like mobiles oating through the air. On planks,
suspended from the metallic side walls, two male
performers are own down as if they are swimming
through the air. At times they resemble crabs with
pincer-like movements capturing some invisible
substance in the air. A humming accompaniment
serves as the percussive pulse of the scene.
A eld of microphones glisten through
the darkness. Into this space the performers fall
like spacemen. Two corseted female performers
push their way through a eld of microphones, the
echoing sound of the microphones pushing against
each other reverberating through the auditorium in a
percussive symphony of sound. From the wall above
a large woman appears as a parody of femininity. As
Chicha Montenegro Gallery, written and directed by Carles Santos. Photo: Courtesy of Sala Fabi Puigserver.
16
she ies through the air, her giant prosthetic breasts
squirt copious streams of milk over the performers
below.
The four singers attempt to sing hooked
to a supply of blood. Between adrenaline rushes,
they splutter the red viscous liquid across the stage.
As with so much of Santos's work, sound and song
comes through (and in spite of) the impediments.
Physical obstacles are there to be overcome and
the singers work over, across, through, and with the
elements they are presented that form part of the
stage world created by Santos and designer Montse
Amens. Elements go as swiftly as they appeared.
The microphones are raised as quickly as they
appeared. Costumes appear to be put on. Performers
bounce up and down on a exible lead from the top
of the stage. Recoiling like wispy oating vampires,
they sing with impediments in their mouths. Their
legs are lost in a costume that ends in a tail of wispy
fabric.
A dancer falls upside down while a counter
tenor (Flavio Olivier) sings a version of Ecclesiastes
offstage part of what was to have been a project
for the Grec festival. She resembles a round stuffed
oliveone of numerous food motifs in the production.
The characters only really touch the ground at the
beginning and the end of the production, before that
they are suspended up in between; a musical quartet
trying to nd each other (or Chicha?) across the
abyss of the stage. Witty, amusing, and engaging,
Chicha Montenegro Gallery delivers the thrills of
the para-theatrical with an understanding of how
instants of desire and endeavour can be structured
to offer short, sharp vignettes on the power games
that govern social and sexual relations. Tenor Antoni
Comas, baritone Toni Marsol, soprano Begoa
Alberdi and mezzo Claudia Schneiderall Santos
regularsperform with agility, commitment, and
humor. Queralt Albinyana and Ana Criado writhe,
spit, splutter and support with gusto and drollness
as the actor and dancer. The pulley operators who
control the show from the wings received warm
applause on opening night, recognition of their own
contribution to the effective running of this box of
tricks. Chicha Montenegro Gallery is a cacophony
of sounds, textures, and colours that dees any
attempt to impose linear order. Watch, submit to the
experience, don't ask how or why, and enjoy.
First premiered in 1875 at Paris's Opra
Comique, Carmen has been used by numerous
auteurs to comment on both the construction of
signiers of Spain in the popular imagination
George Bizet's Carmen, directed by Andreu Bieito. Photo: A. Boll.
17
(as with Carlos Saura's 1983 dance lm) and on
the destructive paradigms of male obsession (as
with Peter Brook's 1983 La Tragdie de Carmen).
Brook's reworking shaved the chorus and conceived
the piece for a cast of four singers and three actors,
imprisoning the characters in bleak and lonely
scenarios that highlighted their sense of exclusion
and marginality. The backdrop of folkloric Seville
all castanets, fans, and polka dot dresseswas
also dispensed with in favor of a sparse arena of
earthen sand. Certainly there has been a move, in
recent years, to eschew the picturesque approach,
as David McVicar demonstrated in his 2002 version
with Anne Soe von Otter dispensing with the
Latin temptress in favor of a raunchier dirtier gypsy
whose mucky milieu was more nineteenth-century
Paris than eighteenth-century Andalusia. Jonathan
Miller's production for the English National Opera
in the mid-nineties was informed by Cartier-
Bresson's black and white photography while David
Pountney's 1986 staging for the same company
provided a world that was less Spain and more the
tin pot dictatorship of a South American nation, a
cemetery of discarded cars that evoked something of
Fernando Arrabal's world of the absurd.
Those who admired the thrusting energy
of McVicar's production will nd points of contact
with Bieito's treatment of the piece (adapted from an
earlier outing for the Perelada Festival eleven years
ago with the same design team and Roberto Alagna
in the role of Don Jos). Bieito understands that you
can't strip Carmen of its "greatest hits." Like Don
Giovanni, Carmen is an icon of Spain constructed
through the foreign imagination. For his 2001
Don Giovanni, Bieito set the action in an empty
Olympic village where predatory forces operate
their clandestine deals. Celestina also, realized for
the 2004 Edinburgh International Festival, resituated
the procuress of Fernando de Rojas in a tacky bar
replete with football ags, sangria, and fusion
amenco rumba where the ctional archetype was
interrogated through performance. With Carmen too,
Bieito opts to dissect the iconography surrounding
the archetype. This production takes place in a
border space: it could be the area between Ceuta and
Morocco in north Africathe last bastion of Spain's
long defunct empireor it might be somewhere
between Spain and France in the Catalan border
town of La Jonquera where prostitutes can often be
spotted on their deckchairs by the side of the road
waiting for customers. Indeed Bieito's production
demonstrates an awareness of how Franco
appropriated the iconography of Bizet to offer a
neutered image of Spain as the land of passionate
happy-go-lucky seoritas and swarthy bullghters.
Not insignicantly the action takes place in the
nineteen seventiesin what might be the dying
days of the Franco regime or the early years of the
transition to democracy. As in his 2004 King Lear,
the concept of the border serves as a powerful trope
for the production.
Abdel Aziz El Mountassir's Lillas Pastia
opens the production performing an elementary
magic trick for the audience. All bling and tacky
white suit, he appears less the jovial barman than
a canny entrepreneur. His ethnic differenceas
an Arab man within a Spanish military unitis
signalled, presenting the embodiment of "otherness"
that marks the world of Bieito's staging. A soldier
runs across the space in repetitive circular motions:
his state of undresshe is clad in underpants, rie in
hand suggests a punishment. For those that refuse
to tow the line, punishment is public and performed
as a way of defying further disorder. There is no
respite: the soldier runs until he collapses with
exhaustion and only leaves when dragged off stage.
It is into this world that Marina
Poplavskaya's Micala appears. This is no prim local
girl but rather an attractive young woman embracing
the possibilities of hippie culture: her sequined
psychedelic boho gypsy top, dangling earrings
and long hair gathered loosely at the back suggest
a middle class woman in search of an adventure
with altogether seedier company, who ultimately
will return to her bourgeois life. This is a Micala
not afraid to kiss Don Jos. We rst see her taking
photos with a small camera and she visibly poses
with Don Jos's cap when telling him of his mother.
The military camp, presented as a stage where she
has come in search of thrills, is in itself a no-go zone.
The beggar woman who approaches the audience tin
in hand appears at its peripheries. The women who
work at the tobacco factory hover around its margins.
The soldiers prowl and spy on the women. On duty
they are ordered in regimentalized lines, models of
instruction and restraint. Off duty they drool, watch
and wait. When Carmen makes a call from the phone
box stage rightone of the few decorative items on
Alfons Flores's sparse setthey climb on the box
like animals trying to access a cage they have been
locked out of. Carmen rst appears imprisoned in
a glass box, a display "peep show" item which the
men would fondle and paw but for the protection of
the telephone box. When she leaves decorating the
wall of the stage with her lipstick, they vandalize the
box, an image of masculine aggression un-tempered
18
and un-moderated, and a sign of the violence later
unleashed on Carmen by Don Jos. This is a world
where the women dispense sexual favors as a way
of surviving: the "Chanson Bohme" sees Mercedes
performing oral sex on Morales. Brought up in a
society where women are commodities to be bought
and sold, it is perhaps not surprising that abuses
prevail: Zuniga, for example, seems worryingly
besotted with Mercedes's small daughter, suggesting
wider, more ominous malaise generated by this
culture of abuse.
The open circular set created by Alfons
Flores is part bull-ring, part beach. In act 1 a tall
central agpole stands center stage. It is climbed by
Sergeant Morales as he escapes the factory women
harassing him about Carmen. It is hugged by Don
Jos in an image of loyalty to la patria and used as
a prison when Carmen is tied to it: the image of the
women tied at a stake recalling the virgin martyr
Joan of Arc. The Spanish agitself a contentious
symbol in Cataloniais hoisted up during act 1. It
reappears at the beginning of act 4 as a kitsch towel
stretched out by a bikini-clad tourist as she prepares
to apply her sun cream. The recognizably Spanish
phone box, situated stage right, functions as the link
with the outside world for the soldiers who populate
the stage, threatening to tip into the orchestra pit in a
further image of masculine excess.
Lillas Pastia's tavern is no rickety bar but
rather a 1970s Mercedes car that appears on stage
with passengers spilling out of its windows. Eliana
Bayn's Frasquita falls outall white boots and
mini dress swigging from a bottle of gin. Itxaro
Mentxaka's buxom Mercds is her partner in crime.
Two pimpsMarc Canturri's black-suited Dancare,
a lean bundle of energy, and Francisco Vas's more
ostentatious Remendado in a shiny gray, ill-tting
outtpresent the faces of crime on the coastline,
leaving Carmen on a deck chair soliciting customers
for her pimps's prots. The military are complicit in
the corruption. A drunken soldier is seen dancing
with his trousers down. Josep Ribos's imposing
Zuniga is bound up with the crooks, criminals, and
reprobates that represent Carmen's coterie. Even
Escamillo in Erwin Schrott's characterization comes
across as a seedy raconteur milking the attention he
receives from the adoring soldiers who
follow him like devoted puppies.
Lillas Pastia hovers around the
action busying himself with the creation
of a hispanidad that can be marketed and
sold to the interested shopper. He sets up
the roadside deckchair in which Carmen
preparing to tout her wareswill sit. A
Christmas tree adorned with miniature
Spanish ags announces a forthcoming
celebration. The gaudy polka dot dresses
that he expects Frasquita, Mercds
and Carmen to wear are unpackaged
from giant laundry bags. Frasquita and
Mercds willingly attire themselves in
the folkloric outts but Carmen refuses
(despite having a knife held to her throat),
pointing to a deance that further comes
into play in act 4. This is the packaging of
Spain for tourist consumption that marked
the boom years of the 1960s. Carmen the
gypsy refuses to willingly submit to this
exploitation. The young gypsy girl that
opens act 2, scolding her doll, provides an
indication of the fate that awaits women
who don't or won't do what they are told.
The threat of violence and the nancial
exploitation of women for sex pervades
the whole staging. Carmen's position,
Bizet's Carmen. Photo: A. Boll.
19
lying still on the sand as Don Jos sings his act 2,
aria offers a premonition of a death foretold. As
Don Jos lies beside her, the shadows on the wall
behind them point to the culture of surveillance that
underpinned Franco's dictatorship.
This is a production where the minimal
items of decor have multiple functions. Lillas
Pastia's car is the space of seduction for Don Jos
and Carmen and her act 2 duet "Je vais danser en
votre honneur" is undertaken across the car door.
The chorus create pockets of action when Zuniga
is beaten by the brigands and bandits during the act
2 nale. Circles proliferate through the production
as the arena of the bull-ring is created across the
four acts through different chorus congurations.
Early in act 4 Lillas Pastia appears to paint a simple
white circle that suggests the ongoing imprisonment
of Carmen within ever decreasing circles. A rope
hung across the front of the stage keeps the crowds
from dropping into the orchestra pit. The manic
ag waving with crowds scrabbling for the best
view and ashing cameras evokes something of the
celebrations through Madrid that marked Spain's
2010 celebrations at winning the World Cup. They
may be looking out for a brief glance of Escamillo
but he appears from within the mass: a lonely gure
in a suit of lights remaining in the middle of the ring
when the crowds have pulled away. The culture of
celebrity renders Escamillo as much a victim as
Carmen and indeed the analogy in act 4 is implied
through Carmen's own attire: a pink dress adorned
with sequins that becomes her own shroud. The
crowds stalk Escamillo and Don Jos stalks Carmen,
watching her from the aisle of the theatre stalls as she
enters with Frasquita and Mercds and blissfully
waves them off.
Osborne's bull, a once familiar sight across
the plains of the country, dominates the stage in act
3, and signicantly it is pulled down by the soldiers
at the beginning of act 4, dismantled perhaps into
scrap metal to be bartered and/or sold. Just over two
months after bullghting was banned in Catalonia
with effect from January 2012, this very visible
pulling apart of such a potent image of Iberian
culture remains a resonant (and some might argue,
contentious) gesture. It is here under the watchful eye
of the toroitself an image of masculine libido
that ten aging Mercedes cars are driven on stage
creating a tapestry of undulating metal that provides
a mountainous surface for the brigandswho
emerge from the carsto clamber over. It allows
for different levels for the ensuing action: Don Jos
chases Escamillo over the cars after pulling a knife
on him. Don Jos grabs Carmen on the car as he tries
Carmen, directed by Andreu Bieito. Photo: A. Boll.
20
to force himself on her. Micala pulls him away. The
cars also provide spaces for concealment, as when
Micala hides in the back of a car with a blanket over
her as she awaits the arrival of Don Jos. An array
of contraband goods emerge from the cars, passed
from felon to thief in a sequence choreographed
to provide a potent image of illegal imports and
smuggled goods negotiated across the border space
that the camp creates. The camp is moved on as
quickly as it is created.
There is a stark simplicity to the production
that proves hugely effective. The chorus's movement
is uid and cleanly choreographed. Dcor and place
created across the bodies of the performers in a
manner that evokes Brook's compressed La Tragdie
de Carmen. The woman lifted onto the ag-pole at
the end of act 1 recalls both Paca la Rosetathe
"loose" woman visited by the male villagers in
The House of Bernarda Albaand Mari Gaila,
the wayward protagonist of Valle-Incln's Divine
Words. A soldier strips at the beginning of act 3
and undertakes a dance by moonlight emulating the
lithe moves of Escamillo. As the brigands approach
he hurries offperhaps a further comment on the
bullght ban that will turn the balletic bullghter
into a criminal.
Batrice Uria-Monzn's mellow Carmen
is less the ery rebrand and more a streetwise
whore who moves from man to man as much
through necessity as desire. Her clothes are more
functionalblouses that can easily be untied, skirts
that can be raised without too much effortthan
sexy. Sensuality prevails because it is understated.
This Carmen disdains her suitors, rather in the
manner of one of Salvatore Rosa's portraits. She
bluntly removes her red underwear as she prepares
for sex with Jos. Her quest for freedom is less
about extolling the nomadic, itinerant way of life of a
supposed gypsy way than an escape from the sexual
slavery into which she is bound. She sees Don Jos
as route to a better life and can't disguise her bitter
disappointment when he fails to deliver. She then
pragmatically turns to Erwin Schrott's vain chulo
Escamillo, but he is presented as a self-obsessed
narcissist, toying with her for his own pleasure. He is
indeed part of (rather than an escape from) the sordid
underbelly of petty crime and prostitution represented
by Lillas Pastia, Dancire, and Remendado. At the
end of the opera, balancing precariously on one shoe
she is an image of vulnerability and fear: knowing
that the end is nigh and that she cannot physically
escape the enclosed space. Desolation is conveyed
through the bleakness of the location as well as the
desperation that governs the characters' moves.
Both the "legitimate" military and the
clandestine bandits are implicated in and feed off the
corruption. Morals (lex Sanmart) is all aviator
glasses and smarmy smiles, looking out for a quick
bargain and a vulnerable being he can pick on.
Josep Ribot's Zuniga is as much of a thug as Vas's
Remendado. Schrott's Escamillo (while not vocally
as exciting as Alagna's Don Jos) captures the
egotism and arrogance of a minor celebrity milking
any attention in the pursuit of self-promotion.
The "Toreador's song" of act 2 xes him as a
vainglorious self-obsessed egotist. In act 3 he taunts
Don Jos, enacting a bullght with Don Jos as the
latter approaches. He provocatively kisses Carmen's
neck with Don Jos in full view; the latter charging
towards him like a raging bull to put an end to the
irtation.
Roberto Alagna captures the psychotic
desperation of the rather cumbersome Don Jos.
This is less a lithe gigolo than a socially awkward
bruiser with something of the nightclub bouncer
about him. Brute force is the answer to opposition
as demonstrated in his stghts with Zuniga in act 2
and Escamillo in act 3. In act 4 he surveys Carmen
like a furtive predator. He places shoes on her in act
1 as if dressing a doll. Alone in the bull-ring in act
4 he clutches at her legs like a desperate child and
then sulkily kicks the contents of her handbag across
the stage like a child in a tantrum. He pounces on
her and puts a hand on her crotch as if about to rape
her. He cuts her throat it is as if he were slaughtering
an animal, then dragging her corpse off stage as
if it were a carcass about to be skinned. Vocally
powerful and physically agile, this is a Don Jos that
intimidates.
His performance is underpinned by a strong
musical energy led by Frenchman Marc Piollet
in the pit. Don Jos is a role which suits Alagna
down to the ground and he produces some thrilling
vocal reworks in his confrontations with Carmen
at the end of acts 3 and 4, contrasted with some
beautifully pianissimo singing in the act 1 duet with
Micala. The French is enunciated with precision
and accuracy across the board and Bieito's decision
to use (and further trim) Ernest Guiraud's adapted
recitatives keeps the pace sprightly. Broadcast in
over 300 cinemas worldwide on 13 October from a
live transmission at the Liceu, this is a production
that conrms Bieito's status as a superb director
of singersAlagna has never been more credible,
Uria-Monzn offers a Carmen whose tragedy is all
too palpableand reaps rewards in the emotional
21
intensity of the performances realized across the
visual economy of Flores's open stage.
Sergi Belbel has created a range of
monstrous mother gures in his own dramaturgy:
the senile pensioner who confesses to her daughter
in Caresses that she wishes she had aborted her;
the bitter matriarch in Strangers who unleashes
venom at her husband and children; the obsessive
motorcyclist's mother in To Die (A Moment Prior to
Death). His staging of Tracy Letts's August: Osage
County serves up a further mother eaten up with
self-destructive venom and bile. Violet Weston is a
mother who hovers between the drug-addicted Mary
in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, the
nagging Halie in Shepard's Buried Child, the abusive
Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
and the grotesque Southern belle Amanda Wingeld
of Williams's Glass Menagerie. Only this is an
American vernacular refracted through the prisms
of television soap operas. This Oklahoma reworks
our myths of the American Midwest offering a
landscape as harsh, relentless, and excessive as
anything Desperate Housewives or Twin Peaks
might offeralbeit with a sensibility that owes more
to melodrama than surrealism.
Max Glaenzel and Estel Cristi design
a three-tiered house where much is exposed to a
voyeuristic public. Part haunted house part doll's
house this is the family home where the drunken poet
and professor Beverly Weston (Carles Velat) lives
with his pill-popping wife Violet (Anna Lizaran).
The former drinks to excess; the latter takes an array
of drugs to assuage the pain of tongue cancer and
the demons that haunt her. Beverly's disappearance
merely exacerbates the problem and mother Violet
continues on the downers until elder daughter
Barbara confronts her mother and conscates all her
pills.
The play might have been called an
"American Three Sisters" for Chekhov's Olga,
Masha, and Irina are here reimagined through more
extreme prisms. Barbara (Emma Villarasau) is
separated from her husband Bill (Abel Folk) with
a teenage daughter Jean (Clara de Ramon) hooked
Tracy Letts's August: Osage Country (Agost), directed by Sergi Belbel. Photo: David Ruano.
22
on weed and beginning to play around in ways that
suggest an unhappiness that her parents are largely
unaware of. The shy mousy Ivy (Rosa Renom) is
secretly involved with her cousin Charlie (Albert
Triola) who she doesn't yet realize is her half-
brother. Pushy Karen (Montse German) has own in
from Florida with new anc in towthe smarmy
businessman Steve (scar Molina). Karen has
found her Moscow, only this isn't the paradise she
envisaged. Barbara left her childhood beau (Deon,
the current Sheriff) for brighter shores elsewhere
only to nd that husband Bill plays with his students
and has now left her for a younger woman. The
painfully shy Ivy thinks she has found love with
cousin Charlie only the sins of the father mean that
her planned escape to New York can only remain a
dream cruelly taken away from her by her family's
revelations.
Beverly's disappearance offers the narrative
mechanism to bring the extended family together;
his wake throws further complications into the mix
as drink, accusations, and recriminations combine
to proffer a veritable power tussle between Violet
and her eldest daughter Barbara. Even Violet's sister
Mattie Fay (Maife Gil) has her own secret battles as
her hen-pecked husband and son receive dismissive
comments from her venomous tongue.
Letts provides all the ingredients to ensure
a volatile wave of confrontations. Beverly's opening
prologue, rocking gently on the porch as he calmly
confesses to the new home help he has hired that his
wife takes pills and he drinks"that's the bargain
we've struck." Already there is something of the
living dead about him as he bobs up and down on
the chair like a puppet. Violet rst appears falling out
of an upstairs window, cigarette dangling in hand;
it's a telling image of a woman on the precipice. As
Beverly walks off stage at the end of the prologue,
the house appears to follow him stage left, opening
out to show the hidden innards that he was just
describing. At the end of act 3 it closes again, giving
something of a circular structure to the play: the
sense of nothing having moved on that befalls so
many American family tragedies.
Joan Sellent's taut translation offers Belbel
and his cast a solid base for the family histrionics
that ensue. Pepe Bel's soundscape (offering crickets,
approaching cars, and a soulful blues lament) further
adds to the atmospherics. Even if the lighting by
Kiko Planas is not as shadowy as that created by Ann
G. Wrightson for the Steppenwolf premiere in 2007,
it ably demarcates the different zones of the house.
Ultimately, however, this is a production that rises
and falls by the quality of its cast and the tensions that
these create as the family dramas unravel. Here Anna
Lizaran builds on the obnoxious mother she created
for Belbel's Strangers, creating a compelling Violet.
This is a woman who always has to have the nal
word. She craves attention and simply can't deal with
coming second. She cruelly mimics her daughter,
shows no discernable interest in her granddaughter,
and offers coarse remarks to anyone who dares
disagree with her. There are moments when Lizaran's
complicity with the audience threatens to destroy the
tone of the production: "Watch me," her performance
seems to suggest, "I am Anna Lizaran playing the
crazy Violet." These moments of playful connivance
transport the play into a kind of vaudeville and I am
not entirely convinced of the pathos of her drug-
addled state. More effective are her less showy
performances at the dinner table as she throws out
curt, cruel replies to her family's questions and
observations. She laughs with demented pleasure
bringing up every taboo topic to the displeasure
and discomfort of her family. She meets her match
in Emma Vilarasau's earthy Barbara, struggling to
keep hold of her errant husband (an excellent Abel
Folk) and an increasingly unhappy, bored daughter
(a trying too hard to be moody and overly nuanced
Clara de Ramon). Indeed, the scenes with Folk
betray a nervous exhaustion that expertly charts the
demise of their marriage.
Montse German draws the short straw
in that Karen is the least delineated of the three
sisters. She is at her best when drinking with Ivy
and Barbara at the beginning of act 3 and less
convincing in the scenes with Steve who is drawn
as a two-dimensional letch. We know what is to
come in act 3 if he can't keep his hands off Jean's
knees in act Two. Rosa Renom is able to suggest
the pathologically shy Ivy without recourse to easy
theatrics; it's a moving performance of a middle-
aged woman whose stab at love is cruelly thwarted
by the family's revelations. Albert Triola is not able
to move beyond the stereotype in his Little Bo Peep
characterization of the boyish Little Charlie. Jordi
Banacolocha imbues Violet's brother-in-law and
Little Charlie's father, Charlie Aiken with a stoic
compassion that belies his supposedly bumbling
nature. Maife Gil, replete in white-rimmed glasses
and matronly kitsch, offers a compelling Mattie Fay
whose constant nagging belies a deeper unhappiness
with her own self. Almudena Lomba as the Native
American home help Johnna functions as an effective
audience substitute: the outsider who witnesses the
self-destructive implosion of this American family.
23
There are times when the production fails to
really convince. Little Charlie is too much Barcelona
boho with his Camper pelota shoes. Violet's cold
turkey appears too brief: blink and you might miss
it. The nal act tries to do too much and the brief
pithy scenes that replace the languid development of
acts 1 and 2 suggest a writer struggling to determine
how to end his play. Nevertheless, Belbel once again
demonstrates that he's a director who knows how
to handle multiple-character narratives. The dinner
party scene in act 2 is up there with his nest work,
handled with a symphonic attention to pacing and
tone. Vilarasau and Lizaran's battles are angry,
vicious confrontations dened by a force that never
falls into facile histrionics. This is a production
about families at warresonant in the climate of
contemporary Spain where memories of the Civil
War and its aftermath still linger. Agost has proved
the hit of the season, packing audiences into the
cavernous Sala Gran of the Teatre Nacional de
Catalunya. An antidote to the saccharine Christmas
fare on offer on Spanish television, Agost offers a
take on the unhappy dysfunctional middle-class
family in emotional freefall that clearly strikes a
chord in Catalonia.
Josep Maria Pou has brought one of the
hits of the Buenos Aires stage, Maria Goos's Cloaca
(here presented as Baraka) to Barcelona, presenting
it for a ten-week run at the Goya Theatre. After
a two-year run at Buenos Aires's Metropolitan
theatre, expectations were high. For those of us
who remember the turgid production of this Dutch
writer's play that opened the Old Vic's rst season
under Kevin Spacey's artistic directorship, Javier
Daulte's production is a pleasant surprise. The four
Argentine actors who play the old friends coping
with the trials and tribulations of middle-age race
through the play at a cracking pace but not even their
sparkling performances can mask the play's creaky
construction and predictable characterization. Pedro
(the suave Dario Grandinetti) is smart, good-looking
and gay and having problems with his employers:
a disgruntled civil servant, he's helped himself to
a number of unwanted art works in the city's art
collection that he's now being asked to give back.
Needless to say he's not terribly pleased by the
prospectespecially as he's sold a couple to pay for
his apartmentand his three friends offer advice
and assistance as he attempts to hold on to them.
First up is the ambitious and self-interested
Juan (Juan Leyrado), a politician with a mistress
whose wife has nally seen the light and thrown
him out. Juan hopes that lawyer Toms (Jorge
Marrale) might be able to help but Toms has been
in a psychiatric hospital following a breakdown and,
while willing to take the case on, has little practical
Baraka, directed by Josep Maria Pou. Photo: David Ruano.
24
guidance to offer. And then there's the slimy Martn
(Vando Villamil replacing Hugo Arana who pulled
out of the Barcelona run), an aging theatre director
who is sleeping with Juan's eighteen-year-old
daughter who has a small role in his new production.
The rst act establishes the situation
(albeit through a clumsy phone call) and sets up the
relationships between the four men. All are nicely
delineated. The tall Grandinetti creates a stylish
Pedro who diligently services his three friendsall
ostensibly there to help him. He rst appears in his
underwearundressed so to speak and exposed
when Leyredo's silver-haired Juan appears looking
for a place to stay as his long-suffering wife Conny
has thrown him out. Juan is obsessive, persistent
and tenacious and only interested in his friends
when he needs them. Leyredo conveys the vanity
of a man who is unable to deal with the onslaught
of middle-age or the possibility of coming second
to anyone. Marrale is all ticks, quivers and shudders
as the ex-cocaine addict currently in the fragile state
of post-rehab. It's a performance of great technical
virtuosity. It is, however, stretching the imagination
to conceive that Pedro would hire him as his lawyer
when so much is at stake.
But then credibility is not really the play's
forte. The characters are too broadly drawn and
rarely move (however amusing the dialogue) beyond
the stereotypical. Certainly there are laughs to be had
along the waythe scene with the Russian prostitute
sent by the friends to service Juan on his birthday is
funny with a menacing twist as the mean Martn tries
to have his way with her. Ultimately, however, it's
a temporary distraction in a piece that never really
adds up to the sum of its parts. The plotting leaves a
lot to be desired as awkward exposition gives way to
melodrama. Toms's further lapse into addiction and
Pedro's suicide appear too easy an option for ending
the play. The two most compassionate characters
disappear so to speak, leaving the self-centerd duo
of womanizers, Martn and Juan, to inherit the earth.
It's a pessimistic state of affairs. Goos's play lacks
the lithe energy of Yasmina Reza's Art or the brutal
poetics of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Alicia
Leloutre's set (bringing together a bar-cum-living
room where the men eat, drink, and play) is effective
if rather too much like an IKEA showcase space.
Javier Daulte's pacy production speeds through the
play; its effervescence is infectious and even if the
four actors don't quite sparkle as they did when the
production rst opened in the city, Baraka (the title
coming from the men's greeting to each other) serves
as a telling reminder of the technical skills and vocal
dexteritySpanish spoken at breakneck speed and
with a musical precisionof Argentina's current
crop of acting talent.
Llus Pasqual used his 2000 production
of The Cherry Orchard to bid farewell to the
Teatre Lliure's Grcia home; ten years on Julio
Manrique has used it to announce his appointment
as Calixto Bieito's successor as artistic director of
the Teatre Romea. While Manrique has realized
some taut productions of contemporary dramatists
Ravenhill's Product, Mamet's American Buffalo
and LaBute's tryptich of short plays, Romance,
The Furies and Helter-Skelter, he has come a bit
of a cropper with Chekhov. Certainly the play has
a different rhythm to the cinematic pacing and
zippier language of the aforementioned dramatists.
And while he has opted for Mamet's sparse version
of the play, directing The Cherry Orchard as if it
were a Mamet piece throws up a number of serious
problems. Cristina Genebat's translation is both
appropriately sparse and poetic but the actors race
through it with a hysterical energy that never really
gels. The approach is not unlike that Sean Holmes
took for his Three Sisters at the Lyric Hammersmith
in 2010, only Holmes's production was more elegant,
more choreographed and ultimately more coherent.
This is not to say that the production is an
unadulterated failure. Lluc Castells offers a glass
house where the outside world is never too distant,
a fragile space that never appears too robust. The
suitcases in the lobby are brought on by Ranevskaya
and her entourage and feature a framed portrait of
Chekhova witty meta-theatrical nodas well as
a reminder of a world in transit. It's a world that at
once suggests the late nineteenth-century and as well
as a more modern landscape and Maria Armengol's
costumes similar opt for a classical design given a
contemporary twist. The production's acting register,
however, never quite nds a way of enacting this
fusion of epochs as rushed encounters give way to
droopy posing.
There are nevertheless some interesting
casting decisions. Oriol Vila is a persuasive Tromov
bringing the right balance of fervour and idealism.
David Selvas is a bright young Lopakhin whose
furious energy offers an antidote to Ranevskaya's
languid, directionless pacing. His arrival in act 3
from the auction in an intoxicated state merges a
degree of incredulity with drunken revelry. It is
both dangerous and vulnerable: like a boy who has
overdosed on zzy drinks and can barely contain
his enthusiasm. This is a Lopakhin who appears
infatuated with Ranevskaya even if he can never
25
fully articulate it and who barely registers the dowdy
Varya (Genebat). There's little of the course merchant
about him, rather he appears more poised and genteel
than Ranevskaya. Montse Guallar's Ranevskaya is a
mannered artiste who draws on a limited repertoire
of gestures. It's a limited performance that traps
the piece within an irritating, affected aesthetic.
Mireia Aixal's Anya is similarly one-dimensional: a
giggling teenager playing at the innocent girl on the
cusp of womanhood. Eyes wide open as if looking
at the world with intense wonder, her performance
never moves beyond clich. Dunyasha (Gemma
Bri) also appears to be trying too hard to play the
infatuated servant stealing glances at the indifferent
Yasha (a credible characterisation from Xavier
Ricart). Sandra Moncls is similarly overemphatic
as the German governess Charlotta with forced
routines that never strike the appropriate, playful
tone. Ferran Ra is a moving Gaev, unable to really
come to terms with the changing world around him.
He always appears lagging behind, snooker cue in
handan inappropriate gure in the world he now
nds himself in. Cristina Genebat's Varya is passable
but appears more a sour-faced party pooper than a
frustrated woman seeing her dreams slip away from
her.
There are three major problems with the
production beyond the casting issues delineated
above. Firstly, the pacing: the actors give the
impression that they are in a rush to make it to the
pub before last orders. There's no variation, no time
for the play to breathe. Everyone is rushing to catch
the last train in the rst act. Lines are hurried without
distinction. It fails to give the production a sense of
urgency or pathos and merely bemuses and irritates
for all the wrong reasons.
Secondly, the set loses its way. A huge
cherry tree falls into the room in act 2 and proves
an impediment to the actors. (It appears also in act 4
to unnecessarily reinforce the metaphor of loss.) In
act 4 curtains are drawn around the glass house, only
the characters fail to use them in a meta-theatrical
way. Rather they are awkwardly pulled apart for
entrances and exits giving an ungainly tone to the
production. The idea could have worked well but
it needed further elaboration and a more precise
choreography from the actors and director.
Finally, the small boy who appears on stage
intermittently as the ghost of Ranevskaya's dead
child really grates. The movements appear very
Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Llus Pasqual. Photo: David Ruano.
26
forcedas if he's not quite sure where to go. In the
nal scene he appears with the abandoned Firs and
functions as an unnecessary distraction at the front
of the stage.
The captions ashed against the back
glass again point to the meta-theatrical emphasis
of Manrique's production without really being
followed through. The music (Leonard Cohen makes
a pronounced appearance) delineates a melancholia
that is overly inscribed. Less would have been
morean approach used to brilliant effect in the
LaBute trilogy. I have been a fan of Manrique's work
as an actor (especially in Oriol Broggi's Hamlet)
and his three productions as a director to date have
been very ne indeed but here he's painfully out
of his depth. Perhaps the production will serve to
point to the kind of repertoire he should opt for
especially in his new role as Artistic Director of one
of the city's most emblematic spaces (an inspired
choice by production company Focus who run the
Romea). Perhaps it will point to the need to allow for
extended rehearsal time for certain types of works.
One simply hopes the lessons will be learned in time
for his next production.
Look at what's on in Madrid and there are
a number of Catalan practitioners presenting work
in the city. At Madrid's Espaol theatre (under the
invigorated artistic directorship of Mario Gas) both
Nuria Espert and Josep Maria Flotats are playing in
the studio space and the main theatre respectively
while La Fura dels Baus are in town playing at
the Teatros del Canal, currently under the artistic
direction of Albert Boadella, the artistic director of
Els Joglars (once stalwarts of the Catalan performing
arts scene).
It's obviously exciting to note that a Sasha
Guitry play that has never previously been seen on
stage is getting its premiere at Madrid's Espaol
Theatre under the direction of Josep Maria Flotats.
The French-trained Flotats has presented a range
of French works with his own company (as with
Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac 1985, Molire's
Misanthrope 1989, Reza's Art 1997-2000, Jouvet's
Paris 1940 2002-03, Brisville's The Supper 2004-05,
and Meeting between Descartes and Pascal Joven
2009). Guitry is in many ways a logical choice for
Flotats as the plays offer many of the characteristics
he has favored in his directorial choices to date:
verbal air and pleasurable wit in the writing; a
focus on plays where characters speak thoughts,
emotions, and desires; overt theatricality and meta-
theatricality; heightened sexual politics through the
pairings of mismatched couples; master-servant
foibles and frivolities.
Perhaps it is the cynic in me but I am always
slightly concerned when a play has lain dormant for
fty years. There is usually a good reason for this
and in the case of Guitry's Beaumarchais, the writing
(while boasting the playwright's habitual wit) is not
vintage stuff. It's not surprising that a dramatist who
wrote 124 plays should have the odd dud work in the
pile and Beaumarchais should, if nothing else help
turn attention to his more pliable works that are all
too rarely staged in twenty-rst century Europe.
Beaumarchais is a biography of sorts,
crafted in short scenes that move, in veritable epic
style, from early career to death. Flotats offers a
framing device that sees Flotats/Guitry assemble the
company in 1950 to present the premier of the work.
It's laborious as an opening because it overstates its
casepresenting the perfect company that looks too
good to be true and offering a level of discursive
engagement that moves beyond the requirements of
such a meta-theatrical mechanism.
Indeed, the play would itself have
benetted from some trimming. A number of scenes
are overly written with characters explaining their
position to the point where nothing is left to the
imagination. As such, a potential biographer who
calls on Beaumarchais indicates at length what he
wants, setting up a further overly creaky literary
device to set up the play's ashback structure. The
play is prescriptive and predictablean old man
looking back at the "greatest hits" of his lifeand
the need to ensure the audience are orientated and
aware of who is where means that nothing is really
left to the imagination. The inventor of the guillotine
is introduced with laborious explanations. Napoleon
articulates his position with prosaic pedestrianism.
Prison scenes are repetitive and fail to effectively
move the action on. Beaumarchais too fails to
develop as a character. A bit of a rogue with the
ladies is as far as dramatic tension really goes. This
is a gure that's just too good to be true; a rose-tinted
idealist standing up for the values of freedom and
free speech in autocratic times.
There is, however, much to admire in the
production. The new translation by Mauro Armio
is uid and droll. Flotats's technique as a performer
is impeccable. Timing is perfectespecially in
the comic scenesand there is a tangible rapport
with the audience. The French accent that he
uses to create the Guitry character in the opening
moments occupies a place between the understated
and pastiche that works to conjure the mood of the
production. Flotats brings a slightly impish, camp
27
quality to the larger than life role of Beaumarchais
and orchestrates some delightful comic moments. A
mistress is revived with champagne. The valet and
footman search for their master as he is threatened
by his mistress's irate, aristocratic husband. A double
act of deadpan servants comment on the action
through their gestures rather than words. "God
Save the Queen" plays on a music box as the action
relocates to London and a catty housekeeper sees to
the Gentleman of Eon and his French guest.
There are a number of scenes that defy the
pompous tone of much of the writing and these are
stylishly directed by Flotats. The encounter with
the transgendered Gentleman of Eon is a wonderful
study in restraint and suggestion with Ral Arvalo's
superb Eon and Flotats's Beaumarchais delicately
pacing the room to the frequent interruptions of a
male servant in amusing drag turning up her nose
at the goings on in the house. The meeting with
Benjamin Franklin (Constantino Romero) is again
understated as both feign ignorance of the other's
languageto the bemusement and confusion of the
translator who accompanies them.
The problem is that these scenes are few
and far between. The elegance of Ezio Frigerio's
sumptuous set realized as images that ash on the
screen creating the sense of a luminous e-book
presented on a giant ipad at the back of the stage,
further reinforces the meta-theatrical vein of the
production. The projections offer a high window
for a prison cell, modish chandeliers for a drawing
room, opulent doors and dcor that suggest the
splendor of Versailles, and bookshelves that conjure
Beaumarchais's library. Franca Squarciapino's
costumes are similarly gorgeousand interminable
as characters switch attire with great frequency.
Frocks, coats, petticoats, cloaks in sumptuous silks
suggest decadence and excess. Pacing, however, is
sometimes affected by the need to accommodate
the costume changes. Scene changes have to
allow Flotats to switch through a dizzying array of
costumes that take the viewer from Beaumarchais in
prison to Beaumarchais as man of leisure at home.
There are some strong choral moments
from the cast of thirty-two. Characters sweep in and
out and gather in groups, almost dancing on and
off stage in elegant congurations that suggest the
busy aristocratic-cum-mercantile world in ux that
Beaumarchais's plays capture so effectively. Vinicio
Cheli's lighting is similarly evocative and works
to convert the grand stage of the Teatro Espaol
into smaller pockets for the more intimate scenes.
Nevertheless, the production never quite manages
to suggest that the play is worthy of the lavish
treatment that Flotats bestows on it in this grand
staging. Particularly problematic is the ending,
which sees Beaumarchais received in heaven
by cranky academics and a luminous Molire in
pristine, glowing white. The masked, grotesque
characterizations of the out-dated members of the
French Academy never really gels with the inated
language and ends the play on an unconvincing and
excessively mannered note.
In the Espaol's smaller studio venue,
another veteran performer turns to a canonic writer.
Again here, it's a work that's often relegated to the
"oddity" corner of the author's repertoire and has
never previously been presented in Spain. The Rape
of Lucrece has been a long cherished project of Nuria
Espert's. It's just taken her a while to bring it to the
stage. This is no mean feat when you're seventy-ve
and you propose taking on all of the roles yourself. It
would have been a much easier feat to just undertake
a recital of the poem but Espert's trajectory has never
been about taking the easy option.
Collaborating with Madrid-based director
Miguel del Arcowhose La funcin sin hacer/The
Performance not yet Presented, an adaptation of Six
Characters in Search of an Author has proved one
of the most impressive (and resonant) productions
of the past three yearsEspert opts for a bedroom
scenario for the action. It is, however, a space of
secrets and mysteries. A four-poster bed is hidden
behind the curtains that enclose it, the delicate fabric
swaying provocatively in the light breeze that runs
across the stage. A table and chair offer refuge to
the narrator who begins the story, sharing with the
audience and a mysterious phone caller the fact that
the recital is about to begin. Tumbling over the words
of the opening of the poem, it is as if she is trying to
get her mouth around its poetry, a form of warm up
before the "performance" begins. The mechanism
of inserting a DVD into its player creates the sense
of an opening; the narrator settles into her chair and
enters into the narrative.
At rst the pacing is hesitant and cautious,
as if she herself is trying to work out what is
happening. The sound of a neighing horse plunges
the audience into Lucrece's world and suggests the
imminent danger of a masculinity personied by the
errant horsean image all too present in Lorca's
world too.
In the early stages of the poem, Espert
watches over the story that emerges: it is as if the
performers are in front of her and she is observing
Collatinus boasting over the chastity and loveliness
28
of his wife Lucrece before the duplicitous Tarquin.
She makes her way to the bed as the action moves
closer to the rape and nally pulls the curtains
away as if to have a better look. The bedspread
becomes Tarquin's cloak; and she lowers her pitch
and widens her mouth to create a piercing image of
the feline stealth that denes her characterization of
Tarquin. Returning to the narrator the tone is higher,
the delivery faster. On the bed the curtains create
Lucrece's violated body, shielded from Tarquin's
imposing gure, looming over her like a giant
winged bat. The sounds of a struggle are evident as
Lucrece tries to get him to move away. The narrator
places her hands over her ears to shut out the sounds
of the rape.
Espert darts from role to role with effortless
ease. A slight move of the shoulders or the donning
of a single prop indicates a change of character. A
black cape brings on Tarquin, a shimmering cloak of
violent hues creates Lucrece. The maid responding
to Lucrece's call and Lucius Brutus rallying Collatine
to action are the briefest of moments but she is able
to indicate the shift that has taken place through the
tiniest hand gesture and shift of the upper torso. After
the terrible deed, she makes her way shakily to the
table to take a glass of water to settle her after: the
shock of what she has witnessed is all too evident.
Lucrece emerges from the curtains, her
face and body hidden in shame beneath the layers
of cloth; her voice a mass of rage, shame, and anger.
For Lucrece's suicide, Espert climbs onto the bed
beside the shimmering cloak that she has removed.
With a petrifying stillness, she lies beside the cloak
that takes on the role of the now dead Lucrece. It is
an image of emptiness, of life draining away, of the
ritual of mourning.
Jos Luis Rivas's translation avoids
excessive rhetoric, opting instead for a directness
that recalls Homer's Iliad. The story is here narrated
with the same sense of urgency that so marks
Homer's warring Trojans and Greeks. The language
also signals an afnity with Shakespeare's better
known works: Tarquin's lack of control points to the
excesses of Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure,
and Othello. Lucrece's sense of honor is not a million
miles from that of Desdemona; her insistence on
sacrice recalls the forceful Isabella of Measure for
Measure. Sandra Vicente's sonic landscape offers a
tangible sense of fearslamming doors, a key in a
door, a horse in the distance, the wind that encircles
the characters. It is itself a further character in the
action.
Espert rehearsed the piece with del Arco
for two months, describing it as "the most difcult
The Rape of Lucrece, directed by Nuria Espert. Photo: Courtesy of Teatro Espaol.
29
thing that I have ever undertaken on stage." Her
gnarled hands and weathered face certainly point to
the ravages of age, but her move across the different
characters and moods of this dramatic poem intimate
an understanding of theatre as transformation. Nuria
Espert becomes the other in The Rape of Lucrece,
transcending the all too prevalent equation of
performer and role. Espert reminds her audience
of the power of storytelling and the ways in which
stories are shaped through the very process of the
telling. Del Arco's production is both swift and
sharp, patient and urgent. He has described the poem
as a horror lm that reminded him of a Tarantino
screenplay when he rst read it but he stages it with
admirable simplicity and a lack of gore on Ikerne
Gimnez's functional but brilliantly effective set.
Simplicity is not the order of the day in
La Fura dels Baus's treatment of Titus Andronicus,
which opts for excess in all the corners and crevices
of the staging. The play is stripped down to the bare
narrative and tossed at the audience in aggressive
fashion. You catch what you can as you are pushed,
prodded and shoved across the cavernous space of
the Teatros del Canal's Sala Verde. The auditorium
is conceived as a giant pit where the audience is
thrown in with the warring factions of Tamora
(Diana Bernedo) and Titus (Ramon Tars). Bernedo's
Tamora is an angry punk with dramatic eye make up
extended across the width of her face. She prowls
and watches; she jumps and pounces. Words are spat
out as venom. Her two sons Chiron (Ral Vargas)
and Demetrius (Daro Ese) hover around her like
brutish bodyguards.
Director Pep Gatell opts for an excess of
violenceand in this case more is denitely less.
The speeches are overly rhetorical and enunciated
as if volume were the only priority. The raped and
maimed Lavinia moans as she is wheeled across
the performance space with blood falling across
her face. Her arms ail around mercilessly, with
branches tied to the stumps that were once her
hands. Knives are a conspicuous part of the stage
picture, used consistently by chef Javier Ahedo
who works through the production putting together
a range of aperitifs as well as the nal meal where
Tamara devours the esh of her children. Celebrated
Basque restaurant Mugaritz has collaborated in
what is termed the "gastronomic direction" of the
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, staged by La Fura dels Baus. Photo: Lpez de Zubiria.
30
production, putting together the dishes that are
made and consumed during the duration of each
performance.
Pockets of snacks are handed out to the
audience on giant poles dangled by the characters:
the audience jump up like performing dogs to pick
up the titbits on offer. From crispy seaweed to candy
oss, the foods offer a taster of the feast that is to
come. A select number of audience members are
chosen to sit at the high table through the production's
website. They are both participants in and witnesses
of the feast prepared by Ahedo as Tamara is fed
the esh of her sons. There are plenty of takers but
watching the participants smile their way through
dinner, a part of me wonders why they would wish
to partake of a meal that is ostensibly presented as
human esheven if the reality of what Ahedo
prepares is somewhat different.
The De Dietrich pristine, metallic kitchen is
suspended on a platform where Javier Ahedo labors
through the production. The smells lter through the
auditorium creating a tangible sense of expectation.
It is a shame, however, that the idea is never fully
realized, for Ahedo sits somewhat outside the action,
never really fully integrated in the events happening
around him. The production is at its most effective in
the moments when he does enter into the action. His
removal of the attire of Tamara's dead sons (who are
presented to him bound in a black sack), and hanging
them up in his kitchen on meat hooks is one of the
staging's most unnerving moments.
There is certainly a worthy attempt to
return to La Fura's early productions, like Accions
and Suz/o/suz. Cars are driven through the space
lling the auditorium with the smell of petrol. Tall
towers on wheels house the feuding warriors. The
towers are manoeuvred by beefy warriors, like the
giant pieces of a chessboard, forcing the audience to
move out of the way or face the consequences of the
characters' wrath. There is a palpable sense of danger
in the confrontation and the general unpredictability
of the moves. The dead semi-mummied bodies of
Tamara's family are carried across the stage in search
of their nal burial place, looming dangerously
on stretchers over the audience's heads. At times
the feeling is one of terror and it is here that the
production is at its best, consistently unnerving an
audience who may think they have seen it all before.
Too much, however, seems at the stage of
an embryonic idea rather than a fully thought through
concept. Shadow play is used intermittentlyas
when Titus cuts off his hand. Projections ash
across the four giant screens that enclose the space:
marching troops, the imagery of gaming, the pages
of a book, writings on the oor. But the images
follow thick and fast and don't linger with enough
time to be fully processed. Lavinia comes across as
little more than a Lolita temptress. She appears as a
pole dancer in her giant tower throwing grapes to the
cook: her sexual precocity emerges also in the screen
images of her projected across the screen-walls.
Characterization is rather simplistic across
all the major roles. Lavinia pouts. Titus marches
purposely and shouts. Demetrious and Chiron
behave like playground bullies. There are thrills for
sure but this truncated adaptation of Shakespeare's
most savage tragedy presents a rather one-
dimensional, almost cartoonish reading of the play.
Poetry is left far behind as atrocities and horrors
become the primary prism of the production. The
parallels with our own society are only too evident,
but it is a shame that these are not more fully teased
out. La Fura have opted for an aggressive "in-yer-
face" approach that never moves beyond surface
violence and gore. After each tragedy, people keep
eating. "Bon apptit," reads the nal projection. It's
hard to disagree, although I'm still left wishing the
message could have been delivered in a somewhat
more challenging (and complex) manner.
31
This March I divided my time in Spain between the
cities where I usually go, and other places, in order
to see theatre in action outside the two major centers.
For the past twenty years, the Comunidad de Madrid
has had a network of public theatres in fty-eight
towns surrounding the capital. I saw productions
at two of these, both named after famous actors:
the Francisco Rabal Theatre in Pinto and the Jos
Mara Rodero Theatre in Torrejn de Ardoz. Taking
advantage of Spain's impressive system of high
speed trains, I attended a performance at the Teatro
Principal in Zaragoza, Spain's fth largest city
with a population of over 700,000, and, via slower
transportation, another at the Palacio de la Audiencia
in Soria, a small provincial capital with some 40,000
inhabitants located 115 miles from Madrid. Three
of these productions were on tour, but Zaragoza has
an important resident theatre company, Teatro del
Temple [WES 12.3, Fall 2000], and more than one
public theatre, the other being the small Teatro del
Mercado.
In Pinto I saw Rumbo a Guachata (On the
Way to Guachata), the latest production from Yeses,
the company of women prisoners, now housed in
Alcal de Henares. Elena Cnovas has been directing
the group for a quarter of a century [See WES 9.1,
Winter 1997; 15.2, Spring 2003; 17.3, Fall 2005;
21.2, Spring 2009]. The current tour, organized from
4 to 19 March in conjunction with International
Women's Day, included one-night performances in
municipal theatres or cultural centers in ten towns.
Pinto, with space for 488 spectators, is the largest;
the others range from 139 to 400 seats. At the smaller
auditoriums, Yeses plays to full houses. Entrance is
by invitation; there are no paid tickets.
In Torrejn I saw Maniobras (Maneuvers),
a disturbing drama, based on a real episode of alleged
sexual assault on a woman soldier by her superior
ofcer. Author Eduardo Galn [See WES 18.3, Fall
2006; 19.2, Spring 2007] for several years has been a
producer as well as playwright. Galn observes that
the network of theatres in the Comunidad de Madrid,
consisting of fairly new playhouses, tends to have
excellent stage machinery and lighting although
some were built without proper attention to audience
concerns. Such is the case in Torrejn, where the
seats are all on more or less the same level and it was
hard to hear even from a middle row. In Pinto, on the
other hand, the theatre is twice as large but stadium
seating and good acoustics assure that spectators can
Theatre in Spain: Not Limited to the Biggest Cities

Phyllis Zatlin
Elena Cnovas's Rumbo a Guachata, staged by Yeses. Photo: Courtesy of Alcal de Henares.
32
see and hear with ease throughout the auditorium.
Rumbo a Guachata differs in several ways
from other Yeses productions that I have seen. Four
of the eight women in the cast had important speaking
roles and were capable of carrying the story line with
relatively little input from two professional male
actors. By contrast, in the 2005 script, Juan Carlos
Talavera by himself skillfully pulled the various
skits together. In this 2011 production, there was
only one musician, on an electronic keyboard, rather
than a three-man orchestra as on other occasions,
but because of the strong singing skills of this year's
women actors, the performance, which made use
of well-known songs, at times approached musical
comedy. This was particularly true of a carefully
choreographed number with the four key characters
in one of the early scenes. Offstage, perhaps the
most surprising change was the lack of a visible
police escort. Unlike the party open to everyone at
the Rivas Vaciamadrid cultural center that I attended
in May 2005, there were no alcoholic beverages,
no music, and no dancing of prisoners with civil
guards. This was a much more sedate gathering
with refreshments for the cast and invited guests in
a dressing room. There was a prison matron keeping
an eye on the cast.
Typically Elena Cnovas writes each script
in collaboration with her actors. This time she asked
well-known playwright Ignacio del Moral to lend
a hand with the two male roles, which relate to
activities outside the train car where the four main
female characters are traveling to the destination
of their dreams. Principal among these is a train
conductor. Although Yeses some years ago staged
one of Del Moral's plays, he had not previously
cooperated in writing a special text. He states that he
was honored to receive the invitation; he contributed
a plot line to provide a unifying thread for scenes
that Cnovas had already written.
Earlier scripts for Yeses have highlighted,
sometimes with humor and sometimes with pathos,
the stories of how women came to be in prison.
Perhaps the tales in Rumbo a Guachata could also
be interpreted that way, but here they transcend
the familiar framework. The train is taking the
passengers to a place of freedom where they may
start a new life; in the nal scene, all of the cast
members joyfully dance about the stage. As usual,
the company utilizes a minimalist, exible set to
create spatial uidity, and there are frequent costume
changes. The motion of the train is evoked through
the actors' movements.
The women board the train one by one. The
rst two squabble comically about their assigned
seats, but by play's end the four passengers have
bonded and project an image of female solidarity.
When a runaway bride drops her veil while dashing
through the train in her wedding apparel, the others
Elena Cnovas's Rumbo a Guachata. Photo: Courtesy of Alcal de Henares.
33
quickly hide the veil and give misleading directions
to the man who pursues her. Their own stories
involve a rental agency where the employee, who
hasn't been paid in months, steals a deposit left by
a client; a television fortune teller who decides to
quit; a woman who has been duped into working in a
Chinese sweat shop, and one who has met a man on
the Internet and is red for communicating with him
on the job. The latter receives her train ticket from
her potential partner while the others are handed
theirs by mysterious strangers. Each tale is acted
out with appropriate props. The most colorful scene
is in the sweat shop, with rows of red cardboard
cutouts for sewing machines and women wearing
stereotypical Chinese robes and pointed hats.
I attended this performance with four
friends, all of whom thought the acting was of
professional caliber. As testimony to the quality and
interest of Yeses performances, I note that three of
these spectators had also been to the March 2009
production and were eager to see what Yeses had to
offer this time.
Eduardo Galn (born Madrid, 1957) has
had a varied and distinguished career in theatre and
education. His years as a teacher are reected at times
in his plays: original children's theatre, adaptations
of classic works for school audiences, and subject
matter of some works for mature audiences, such
as his latest script, Los viernes, tutora (On Fridays,
Private Class), which opens in Segovia in May.
He has been president of the Spanish Society for
Children's and Young People's Theatre (AETIJ) and
in 2000 was awarded that organization's national
prize for children's theatre. From 1996 to 2000, he
served as undersecretary for theatre of the National
Institute for Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) of
Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports.
Among his noteworthy accomplishments in that
capacity was a policy requiring public theatres to
remain open in the summer, an emphasis on staging
living Spanish playwrights, and better connections
between Spanish and Latin American theatre.
Galn's positions in the Ministry of
Education have been political appointments, subject
to change when the other party takes control.
Finding himself unemployed, in 2004 he created
the production company Secuencia 3. He believed,
correctly, that he had sufcient background in the
eld to make a success of the endeavor and continues
to do so, even during the current economic crisis.
Secuencia 3 has staged some dozen theatre and
dance productions, marketed them to a number of
cities, founded Gescenic (a coalition with societies
from Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands),
and is exploring a new audiovisual project.
Often actors involved with Secuencia 3 are
simultaneously in the casts of more than one of the
company's productions. That group included all three
male actors in Maniobras, who the previous night
had performed in Caldern's Golden Age comedy
El galn fantasma (The Ghostly Lover) in Logroo.
While Torrejn is only sixteen miles outside Madrid,
Logroo is 155 miles away. Secuencia 3 is, indeed, a
traveling company.
Were actors not cast in more than one play,
at the time of this writing Galn would have a total
of twenty-nine actors touring in ve productions. In
June, El galn fantasma, with seven actors, will be
replaced by a new version of the classic La Celestina,
with nine actors. The complexity of mounting the
various plays in this repertory is obvious.
Some Secuencia 3 productions enjoy
relatively long runs in Madrid theatres, but at
times the traveling company, like its predecessors
in past centuries, is limited to one-night stands.
Galn's original light comedy, Curva de felicidad
(Beer-Belly), written with Pedro Gmez, opened
in September 2005 at the Lara in Madrid and is
still being performed in Spain and abroad. His
adaptation of Lazarillo de Tormes, written with his
son Luis, premiered in October 2006, also at the
Lara, and has now played to 60,000 spectators. For
spring 2011 it was scheduled mornings, along with
Galn's adaptation of the Entremeses (Interludes) of
Cervantes, for school audiences at the Bellas Artes
Theatre in Madrid. Three other productions in March
2011 were on the road: Maniobras, one night each
in Torrejn and towns in the provinces of Murcia,
Cdiz and Alicante; El extrao viaje (Strange
Journey), three nights in Granada and one each in
Soria, Cdiz and Mlaga; El galn fantasma, one
night each in Logroo and towns in the provinces of
Almera and Murcia.
Maniobras, directed by Mariano de Paco
Serrano, is a physically demanding play for the
actors and, despite some moments of comic relief
most notably ght scenes between Daro (Alejandro
Arestegui) and the Director (Manuel Gallardo),
never moments in the army campa difcult one for
spectators because of its subject matter. Galn is well
aware of the number of cases that have arisen in the
U.S. military of women soldiers being raped by other
soldiers or ofcers. He believes the situation occurs
as well in other countries. To focus on the abuse of
power in more than one sphere, Galn has juxtaposed
the military story, based on a widely-publicized trial
34
in Spain, and a sordid tale of a casting room couch:
a male director coercing Daro into sexual acts in
order to get the role of Willy Loman's son in Death
of a Salesman. Beln (Olalla Escribano), the woman
soldier who is sexually harassed repeatedly and then
raped by the Lieutenant (Juan Calot), is the actor's
domestic partner. The scenes of violent sexual assault
are offstage, but the audience is fully aware of what
is happening. Beln's screams are chilling.The cast
for this difcult play was uniformly outstanding.
By play's end, when the lieutenant has been
found innocent of the charges brought against him,
the couple separate. Daro is too traumatized by his
own experience to be of much help to Beln; his
testimony about her return home in which he reveals
that he was too stoned to notice what had happened
to her, is less than useful.
The play begins with the trial and then
tells the double story in a long ashback. In keeping
with the tradition of rising when the judge enters
a courtroom, the audience is asked to stand as the
witnesses enter the theatre through the auditorium.
On a darkened stage, the four, dressed appropriately
for a court appearance, in turn are spotlighted
downstage as they testify. The lieutenant seems to be
a ne, sober gentleman in this setting, totally unlike
the drunk we will later see who is obsessed by the
woman's breasts and forces her to strip during her
outdoor test for withstanding cold weather. When he
begins his assault on Beln, other soldiers make no
effort to intervene.
Maniobras challenges the audience in a
number of ways, including use of imagination for
the rapid scene changes and ability to handle almost
simultaneous action. At times the actors talk over
each other and were hard to understand because of the
decient acoustics. A single set and lighting effects
(designed by Antonio Llamas and David de Loaysa)
with great economy represent several locations: the
young couple's apartment, the director's studio, and
the military camp, both inside and out. The set is also
designed to be struck quickly; the crew had already
loaded much of it on a truck before spectators
who stayed in the lobby to talk with actors and the
playwright had left the theatre.
Galn chose a monologue from Caldern's
Life Is a Dream for Daro's audition as a "wink at
the profession:" It is a passage that actors want
to perform and is well known by the audience.
Indicative of the lopsided Beln-Daro relationship,
she encourages him in his profession, even assisting
him in rehearsing the monologue. The reference to
Death of a Salesman is inspired not only by Galn's
deep admiration for Arthur Miller but also because
it deals with life as failure, a theme of Maniobras,
written when unemployment in Spain, as elsewhere,
is very high. Beln, whose father was an army
ofcer, joins the service when she loses her job and
cannot get another. The two intertexts shift between
Caldern's tragic view of life as a dream to the
disintegration of the American dream.
Somewhat less convincing is the choice
of Edouard Manet's "Le djeuner sur l'herbe" as a
full-stage projection at play's end. Certainly the
nineteenth-century painting, shocking in its time,
relates to the exploitation of woman as object for
the pleasure of men. For Galn, who has frequently
focused in his works on the lack of equality for
women, the painting serves as a metaphor for his
play. Like the female gure in "Luncheon on the
Grass," Beln is stripped and appears nearly naked
throughout much of the action. Olalla Escribano
even walks down into the audience with bared
breasts. Rather than titillating, her nudity emphasizes
the abusive treatment of women. Perhaps if Manet's
painting were shown smaller, its anachronistic tone
would have jarred me less. A minor point in this
production is Daro's energetic practicing of soccer
moves for his audition. Biff, of course, would play
American football, not futbol. On the other hand,
Spanish spectators would probably not have caught
the signicance of moves related to the American
game, so the director's decision is understandable.
El extrao viaje is a particularly interesting
project of Secuencia 3 and, judging from the
enthusiastic audience reception in Zaragoza, is
slated to be one of the company's big hits. Besides
touring provinces, it is slated for performance at
the Bellas Artes Theatre in Madrid this summer.
Actor Guillermo Montesinos and costume designer
Marta Fenollar's script is an adaptation of a 1964
black and white movie associated with two leading
gures of Spanish cinema: it was based on an idea
by Luis Garca Berlanga (1921-2010) and directed
by Fernando Fernn Gmez (1921-2007) [WES
15.2, Spring 2003]. Censored by the Franco regime,
it circulated clandestinely to become a cult classic
and is now considered one of the most important
works in Spanish lm history. The fast-paced stage
production is directed by Gabriel Olivares.
Olivares is very familiar with the movie,
but Vctor Ullate Rocha (Fernando), who plays the
role originally created by acclaimed actor Carlos
Larraaga, says that Olivares did not ask him to see
the lm, which he only vaguely remembered from
years before, and he did not do so. It is likely that
35
many spectators would be in the same position as
this actor. They would be seeing El extrao viaje
in the same way that audiences might view The 39
Steps, the play most frequently-staged at Theatre
Communication Group theatres in the U.S. during
the 2010-11 season. Theatre spectators might not
directly relate the play to the Alfred Hitchcock lm
(1935).
The 39 Steps is closer textually to the
cinematographic original than is the Olivares
production of El extrao viaje, but, probably by
coincidence, the same key strategy is used in the
adaptation process: stick puppets, silhouetted
upstage in blatantly theatricalist fashion, represent
a number of minor roles from the movie, as well
as the car in which three characters of the Spanish
play begin their strange journey. While Patrick
Barlow's stage adaptation of The 39 Steps in tone is
a hilarious parody of his thriller source, Secuencia
3 to a large extent retains not only most of the story
line and images of the movie, but at least part of the
tone. However, this adaptation, too, is more comic
than the original; nearly four decades after Franco's
death, sexual repression with its concomitant terror
from that bygone era is no longer relevant. In 2011,
Beatriz's reluctance to have Fernando kiss her on
her lips provokes laughter, as it would not have in
1964, and a comic action is added to point out that
Fernando is sexually aroused. But our main concern
here will be the play on stage, not a comparison with
the lm or the changing sociological context.
The action for El extrao viaje is set in the
early 1960s, when Franco-era National Catholicism
was still attempting to impose its morality in dress and
behavior. In a small rural town, not far from Madrid,
the older people are appalled by how skimpily the
seductive Angelines (Mar del Hoy) dresses and
how she dances when musicians make their weekly
visit from the city to provide entertainment for the
villagers. Lovely Beatriz (Ana Villa), who hopes to
marry the singer and guitar player Fernando (Ullate
Rocha), also dresses in a modern stylenot the black
clothing of older womenbut is far more proper;
she always worries about what people will say. The
epitome of rigid morality is Ignacia, played by Juana
Cordero, a tall, thin woman who would be a perfect
Bernarda Alba. Ignacia towers over and tyrannizes
her siblings, Venancio (Guillermo Montesinos) and
Paquita (Juana Andueza).
These six characters are supplemented
by stick puppets (designed by Alejandra Prieto
and Felype de Lima) and projected caricatures. In
particular, two gossipy older men, shown through
a window, are quick to criticize declining morality
El extrao viaje, staged by Secuencia 3. Photo: Courtesy of Secuencia 3.
36
while eagerly ogling Angelines. Her repeated line to
men in the town is "Pero qu burro eres!" (You're
such an idiot).
The cast members live up to their
impressive resumes. Ullate Roche is a dancer and
singer who has a background in musical comedy.
Other members of the Madrid band are represented
only by puppets and recordings, but Ullate Roche
sings several numbers. Montesinos is a well-known
actor of stage, screen and television. As adapter, he
asserts that the movie El extrao viaje was the rst
to mix subgenres, ranging from comedy, macabre
humor, zarzuela, and rural drama to suspense, the
supernatural and terror. He and Juana Andueza carry
much of the comic burden in the stage production.
Their appearance, exaggerated actions and costumes
are guaranteed to evoke laughter. Moreover, the
middle-aged, plump Paquita has her hair in little-girl
pigtails, tied up with bows. A highlight near the end
of the production is the radical change in the brother
and sister's clothing for a beach scene, played on the
apron.
To Juana Cordero, also well known in
movies and television, falls the role of heavy: not
only does she mistreat her frightened siblings, hoard
money from their vineyard, sell the family property
without their knowledge, and perhaps willing to
dispose of her siblings to start a new life, but she is
a thorough hypocrite. She imposes rigid standards
on others but allows her sensuality to surface when
secretly luring Fernando to her bedroom. His
footsteps and the unexpected light under Ignacia's
door, combined with electrical storms and power
outages, are what initially ll Paquita and Venancio
with terror. Fernando buys sexy attire for Ignacia.
Venancio is understandably if laughably terried
when he inadvertently sees his domineering sister
wearing frilly lingerie. Fernando at times models
for Ignacia; his ability to wear her clothes, thereby
passing for her, provides the mechanism for the
denouement. Fernando eventually poses as Ignacia
by wearing her long, dark red dress and a black veil.
Stagehands also wear this costume for some set
changes.
The challenge of recreating on stage the
complex action of the movie is resolved by the
clever set designed by Anna Tusell and Ikerne
Jimnez. Several cutout windows allow for the use
of stick puppets and projections; puppets, including
a cat, also appear at times on the roofs. The sleeping
quarters of Venancio and Paquita, located stage right,
convert into huge wine vats where Ignacia stores her
merchandiseand where the others eventually store
her corpse. Ignacia's bedroom is stage left. Table
and chairs representing the dining room are placed
at appropriate moments between the two bedroom
areas, but a door on a revolving platform proves to
be the main element of the set. Through movement it
functions as several different doors in the house; as
it rotates faster and faster, it adds to the production's
farcical rhythm. The set is wisely designed for easy
travel, and I have no doubt that this entertaining
strange journey will go far.
According to the tourist information ofce
in Soria, there once was a luxurious theatre in the
center of the city. It was built early in the twentieth
century by a wealthy Spaniard returning from Cuba.
But that theatre has been torn down. Currently the
Palacio de la Audiencia, which ofcially opened to
the public in 1991 after restoration, houses a modern
theatre, two exhibition halls, and conference rooms.
The exterior building, dating from the 18th century,
over the centuries has served as courthouse, town
hall and prison; it is famous for its clock and bell
tower, mentioned in the poetry of Antonio Machado.
The Palacio de la Audiencia tends to host
nine or ten attractions a month, primarily theatre,
concerts, and dance but also an occasional opera or
magic show. The program for March included seven
plays, one night each, from different production
companies. Some performances are contracted
through the national theatre network or the regional
one (Red de Teatros de Castilla y Len). The
auditorium has 525 comfortable seats, in tiers; the
mezzanine is parallel to the stage, but rows in the
orchestra are slightly curved to enhance visibility
from the seats near the right and left aisles. There
are no problems here for spectators as there are in
Torrejn. For the staging of El extrao viaje on a
Thursday night, the theatre was almost full, with a
good balance of men and women of various ages.
For sheer elegance, the standout theatre
I attended this March was the Teatro Principal
in Zaragoza. Eduardo Galn afrms that in the
nineteenth century wealthy patrons in provincial
cities built ornate playhouses that would rival or
even surpass the best that Madrid or Barcelona
had to offer. Surely the Principal, which opened its
doors in 1799 and was restored in 1987, is included
in this group. The interior, decorated in red and
white with four tiers of boxes ringing the orchestra
seats on the main oor, is reminiscent of Madrid's
Teatro Espaol. However, with over 1000 seats, it is
some thirty percent larger than the capital's historic
playhouse. For the period January-April 2011, the
Principal scheduled fourteen productions by various
37
companies, most of them running four nights each.
Teatro del Temple, like Secuencia 3, is a
company that organizes production tours, often of
several plays simultaneously. Founded in 1994, it has
mounted more than twenty plays and has taken them
throughout Spain and abroad, including the United
States. The company is headed by Carlos Martn,
director; Alfonso Plou, dramaturge; and Mara
Lpez Insausti, producer. Some of their scripts were
written by Plou while others have been drawn from
national and international repertory.
Don Juan Tenorio (1844) by Jos Zorrilla
is not only the most popular stage version of the
Don Juan myth and one of two nineteenth-century
Spanish plays that are still performed with any
regularity, but also the most frequently produced
play in the history of the Spanish stage [See WES
13.2, Spring 2001]. Many of those performances
have come in November in conjunction with El Da
de los Difuntos (All Souls' Day). This supercial
popularity does not mean that the Zorrilla text is
universally admired. Indeed in performance the text
is generally cut in half and at times even reduced to
just the best known scenes. The original is a historical
drama, inspired by the forerunner Golden Age text
by Tirso de Molina and set in Sevilla in 1545. On
occasion Don Juan Tenorio has been changed in
style to neoclassic, romantic, surrealist or Flamenco.
The production which premiered in Zaragoza on 8
March for a week's run, although remaining generally
respectful of the original author's intentions, follows
that tradition of considerable pruning. In this case the
action is shifted to the 1970s, a period still imbued
with the repressive morality that underscores El
extrao viaje. From Zaragoza it was to travel at the
end of March to a theatre festival in the Pas Vasco.
The shift from a nineteenth-century
historical drama set three centuries earlier to a
twenty-rst-century period piece, set four decades
earlier, clearly involves changes in costume, props,
and attitudes. Years ago it was noted that Tirso
de Molina's theology, as adopted by Zorrilla, no
longer had meaning for audiences. To the protests
of some critics, Teatro del Temple made its most
severe cuts to the second part of the Zorrilla play,
removing a statue's supernatural appearance at a
banquet and suggesting that the frightening knocks
at the outer door merely reect the mental state of
the protagonist. It is worth noting that Plou's eld of
university study was psychology.
Alfonso Plou, who adapted the text for
Teatro del Temple, says that Zorrilla had major
Jos Zorilla's Don Juan Tenorio, staged by Teatro del Temple. Photo: Courtesy of Teatro del Temple.
38
problems with his own father and created Don Juan
as an alter ego who expresses rebellion through
violence and sexual seduction. The company saw
parallels between Zorrilla's father and the oppressive
atmosphere of the declining years of the Franco
regime. It was the conservative, nal part of the
nineteenth-century work, with its emphasis on the
redemption of the soul, that made the play a favorite
of National Catholicism and that seemed to the
contemporary group to have little relevance today.
Because the original Don Juan Tenorio
takes place in the 16th century, it belongs to the
cape and sword genre. For the 1970s, the weapons
of choice are knives and a pistol. Other visible
changes in the modernization, beyond eliminating
the usual elegant costumes, are wads of bills instead
of gold coins, liquor served from bottles, and the
style of furniture in the tavern. Background music
also highlights the chosen period. There are more
than twenty characters in the source text; Plou's
text reduces them to sixteen, who are played by a
cast of eight. The only actors who do not double in
two or more parts are Francisco Fragas (Don Juan
Tenorio), Gabriel Latorre (Don Gonzalo de Ulloa),
and Marco Aurelio Gonzlez (Don Luis Meja).
Showing the changing status of women in society,
female actors in this production take on roles,
like the tavern keeper and the sculptor, that were
traditionally played by men. On the other hand, it
is a male priest, rather than a nun, who dominates
the convent and thereby represents how men have
repressed women.
A crucial element of the design by Toms
Ruata is a group of metallic-looking, perforated
panels that serve a variety of functions. They are
used to form the bar in the tavern and later become a
table for the banquet scene. Lined up vertically, they
are a hallway in the convent that Don Juan invades in
order to abduct Doa Ins de Ulloa (Ivana Heredia).
In the nal scenes in the mausoleum, again vertical,
they become tombs.
Set changes in this production are done
ostentatiously, as if they were part of the stage action.
For each appearance, the stage hands, sometimes
helped by cast members, come out in different
headgear or costumes, ranging from gray helmets
or tan hats to gray suits. The nal time, in the shift
from the banquet at Don Juan's house back to the
mausoleum, the crew and cast members, including
Doa Ins herself, wear bright red devil's masks.
For a 10:00pm performance on a Saturday
night, the large theatre was almost full and the
audience response was enthusiastic. I considered
their warm reaction real praise in that I conjectured
that many of the spectators had seen the play multiple
times and had a basis for comparison. Alfonso Plou,
however, believes that Don Juan Tenorio, while
a well-known classic text, has been less staged in
recent years. Others I spoke to in Zaragoza told me
they did remember productions from the past or had
seen performances on television. Plou also believes
that for a classic to succeed on stage today it must
continue to have something to say to contemporary
audiences. The Teatro del Temple production of
Zorrilla unquestionably proves that this 19th-century
work does have that capacity.
39
Since Ariane Mnouchkine and her
legendary Thtre du Soleil present a new work
only every three or four years, each new offering
is a major and eagerly awaited theatrical event. It
is a great pleasure to report that their most recent
production, Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir, which
opened in Paris in February of 2010, amply fullls
expectations. It is a classic Soleil piece, complex and
richly textured, deeply concerned with basic human
values, and gloriously theatrical. The complex
creation of this work is suggested by its ofcial
subtitle: "a collective creation of the Thtre du
Soleil, partially written by Hlne Cixous based on a
mysterious posthumous novel by Jules Verne." This
"mysterious novel," Les Naufrags du "Jonathan"
was in fact completed by Verne's son Michael from a
manuscript left by his father and rejected as too dark
by Verne's editor.
The Soleil company has taken the story of
the shipwrecked passengers of the ship Jonathan
as a parable of the shipwreck of an expansive and
forward looking Europe by the disaster of the First
World War, which broke out a decade after Verne's
death. Their central concept is the creation of an
innitely receding set of narrative boxes, however,
dominated by an early highly improvised French
lm company whose amboyant leader Jean
Lapalette (Maurice Durozier) conceives the idea
of creating a spectacular lm version of the Verne
novel, which he plans as an optimistic socialist
political fable designed to educate the masses in the
democratic utopia of the near future. Rejected by the
established French silent lm companies for these
political views, Lapalette takes his company and
Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir
Marvin Carlson
Hlne Cioux's adaptation, Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir, of Jule Verne's novel Les Naufrags du "Jonathan," staged by
Ariane Mnouchkine's Thtre du Soleil. Photo: Courtesy of the Thtre du Soleil.
40
project to the capacious attic of Felix, the hospitable
proprietor of a Parisian cabaret, the Fol Espoir. In
keeping with Mnouchkine's practice of turning her
entire theatre into a kind of site-specic performance
venue, the Cartoucherie has been converted into the
Fol Espoir, with the main entrance now bearing
that title with suitable auxiliary signs and inside the
usual performance-themed repast, here a simple but
hearty bistro meal of soup and meat. Proceeding
on into the main playing area, the audience nds
the main stage converted into the Fol Espoir attic,
in turn converted into an improvised early lm
studio, where Lapalette's cinematic vision is to be
realized, comprising the main action of the play.
The lming is presumed to begin on the fatal day
of 28 June 1914, the date of the assassination of
the archduke Ferdinand and the lm's opening
scene establishes its trajectory by depicting another
Hapsburg assassination, that of Rudolph of Austria
at Mayerling in 1889.
This opening, far removed from the
Verne novel, suggests the historical and narrative
complexity of the Soleil project. The Mayerling
assassination was a major turning point in modern
European history, removing the obvious heir to the
Austrian throne and beginning a period of instability
in that major nation which spread to all of Europe
with the assassination of Ferdinand twenty-ve
years later. Despite its tremendous consequences, the
death of Rudolph remains shrouded in mystery. Was
it in fact an assassination or a suicide, and in either
case, what was its motivation? These questions have
never been answered, but Mnouchkine's creative
lm-maker provides an answer in keeping with his
political concerns. Rudolph and his cousin, Jean
Salvatore, who may have in fact been engaged in
a plot to overthrow emperor Franz-Joseph, are in
Lapalette's lm planning to use Austria/Hungary
as the basis of a new international socialist society,
devoted to universal peace and prosperity, but no
sooner have they completed their manifesto than
masked, never identied gures burst onto stage,
kill Rudolph and his mistress and destroy the records
of the project. Only Salvatore escapes to carry on
Rudolph's vision through the rest of the production
and to serve as the protagonist of Lapalette's lm,
played by Serge Nicola.
The historical Salvatore's death was as
shrouded in mystery as that of his cousin. He was last
seen in Argentina preparing to depart on a voyage of
Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir. Photo: Courtesy of the Thtre du Soleil.
41
discovery to Patagonia but his ship disappeared and
its fate remains unknown. His story in turn inspired
the Verne novel Les Naufrags du "Jonathan."
In this novel, the passengers of the ship Jonathan
are shipwrecked in a small island near Cape Horn
ruled by a European anarchist and former aristocrat,
Kaw-Djer, modeled on Salvatore. The work is in
large measure a kind of allegorical meditation on
various forms of government, since Kaw-Djer
must continually confront two strong proponents of
alternative forms of social organization, a French
socialist and an American communist. Lapalette's
project thus serves as a kind of continuation of
Verne's political speculations, but taken in a very
different direction.
Verne's three-sided contest between his
anarchist protagonist and his socialist and communist
challengers is converted in Lapalette's lm into a
very different and more contemporary three-sided
contest between the socialist vision of Salvatore, the
rapacious capitalism of the Gautrin brothers, Emile
and Simon (Maurice Drozier and Sebastien Brottet-
Michel), and the doomed indigenous population,
whose spokesman is young Yuras (Seear Kohi).
Behind these leading gures swirl a host of others
the mixed emigrants, entrepreneurs, and sailors who
make up the "ship of fools"-like passengers of the
doomed ship, Darwin and Queen Victoria, priests
and nuns, natives, ambassadors, the commissaires
of Chile and Argentina, locked in comic-opera
continual combat. Some thirty actors play about three
times that many roles, dividing their efforts between
their "real" personae as part of the lm project and
their parts in the lm, which often require further
doubling.
The production operates dizzyingly yet
always clearly and effectively on its self-created
variety of levels. A female voiceover (Shaghayegh
Beheshti) provides bridging, a running commentary,
and a certain historical perspective (among its key
references the book of reminiscences and regrets
about Europe, Le Monde d'hier, written by Stefan
Zweig in Brazil in 1941 not long before his suicide
there). What we actually see on the stage is the
Les Naufrags du Fol Espoir. Photo: Courtesy of the Thtre du Soleil.
42
vast but crudely equipped studio of the improvised
lm company in the summer of 1914, lled with
a constant urry of actors running in all directions
and yet somehow magically putting together scene
after scene of their evolving lm utilizing the most
primitive meansseagulls on the end of long
poles, coats and scarves apping in the wind by
stage managers tugging at strings attached to the
garments, snow thrown manually onto the actors
from a few feet away. Whenever the camera sweeps
across a scene, rows of actors drop to the oor, like
the victims of a machine-gun attack, in a frantic
attempt to get out of the line of sight.
The key roles in the production are
engagingly portrayed by three pillars of the company,
Maurice Durozier as the lm-maker Jean Lapalette,
Juliana Carneiro de Cunha as his sister and long-
suffering cinematographer Gabrielle and Duccio
Bellugi-Vannuccini as Lapalette's right hand man
Tomasso, in a perpetual state of supercharged Italian
energy as he pops up all over the stage attempting
to bring some sort of order to this maniacal project.
There is often a general and occasionally a specic
reference to the frantic activity of a keystone cops
comedy, hardly surprising since sequence after
sequence calls up warm memories not only of silent
lm comedy but of the whole panoply of silent lm
genres and techniquescliff-hanging suspense,
passionate love scenes, overblown spectacle,
fantasy, farce, and pathos. Projected dialogue
provides a running accompaniment to the "lmed"
action, as if the lm we are seeing created were
already also being screened, and thus provides a
third level of dialogue, in addition to the narrative
voice-over and the actual on-stage conversations
(both within and outside the lm itself). An engaging
and almost continuous musical score is provided
by Mnouchkine's usual composer, Jean-Jacques
Lemtre, who weaves his own music together with
quotations from dozens of standard nineteenth and
early twentieth composersDebussy, Dvorak,
Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and so onvery much in the
manner of early lmic musical accompaniment.
The imaginary time-span of the play
is a single frantic month, July of 1914, from the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo
until the assassination of Jean Jaurs in France
marked by a general mobilization, the rush of France
into the war, and the closing down of the unnished
lm and of the unnished utopian world it heralded.
As the external political order is collapsing,
the later scenes of the lm take on an increasingly
darker tone. Salvatore's attempt at establishing
a utopian community on the island collapses in
discord, greed, and competition for power. In the
closing image from the lm the still undefeated
Salvatore, who has cast his lot with the Indian Yuras,
pushes on through the snow, his vision still driving
him onward. Today, a century after the events
depicted in Mnouchkine's dazzling production,
Salvatore's vision seems perhaps even more remote
and utopian than ever. Yuras' people, the Alakaluf,
have totally disappeared and social inequality and
war still ravage the globe. Yet neither the events of
this comical tragedy nor our inevitable application
of its concerns to subsequent history leave us with
a sense of hopelessness or despair. Mnouchkine
herself explains clearly in notes distributed at the
presentation her own motivations:
"In the theatre, there are always several
stories being told. There is never a theatre
performance that is not also a story that takes place
within. Even when a production presents the story
of a catastrophe, displays the dark side of human
relationships, that never destroys a central Hope in
Humanity by the very fact that this play exists and
that human beings are involved in presenting it. It
is not possible to create theatre if one is not aware
of this."
Here then is the "Fol Espoir" of this
memorable production, the perhaps irrational hope in
the positive side of humanity, continually and almost
miraculously preserved by the artists and visionaries
among us, and admirably evidenced by the inspiring
and ongoing work of Ariane Mnouchkine and her
remarkable Thtre du Soleil.
43
The Thtre Hbertot, a Louis-Philippe
jewel built in 1836 in the village of Batignolles, now
part of Paris's Seventeenth arrondissement, has a
long and partly illustrious history. Until the end of the
nineteenth century, the gilded, galleried house known
as "les Batignolles" alternated melodramas and the
kind of comedies that, in the words of its current
Artistic Director Pierre Franck "made nobody laugh
except imbeciles" (L'avant-scne thter, 2010).
The philanthropist Jacques Rouch changed all this
when he transformed the Hbertot into a theatre
for serious French drama. Pguy, Montherlant, and
Cocteauand later on, Camustrusted him with
the premieres of their plays, and between the wars,
George and Ludmilla Pitoff played at the Hbertot,
where they introduced the larger Parisian public to
the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, and Pirandello.
Among the great French actors who have played the
Hbertot are Grard Philipe, Edwige Feuillre, Jean
Marais, Maria Casars, Michel Simon, and Jean-
Louis Trintignant. The current administration offers
a repertory of classic and modern plays, both French
and foreign.
This Solness is the brainchild of Hans
Peter Cloos, a highly respected German director, the
founder of the Rote Rbe (Red Beet) company, who
has worked often in France and whose Threepenny
Opera (Opra de quat'sous) at the Bouffes du Nord
in 1979 won him the Prix de la Critique. Cloos,
unlike other well-known current directors of classic
plays, respects the original texts, and he has worked
closely here with translator Martine Dollans.
In the program, the script is carefully called an
"adaptation," but in fact, it is a cut and modernized
French version of Ibsen's text. One could quarrel
here and there with a particular translationthe
kingdom of Orangia has become the kingdom of
the "Pomme d'Or," the golden apple, which leads to
mythological confusionbut the script, except for
the cuts of most of Ibsen's careful repetitions, is a
faithful rendering of the original.
I would normally object to such cutting, but
Solness le Constructeur Thtre Hbertot
Joan Templeton
Henrik Ibsen's Solness le Constructeur, staged by Peter Cloors. Photo: Courtesy of Thtre Hbertot.
44
in this case, I was grateful; the performance ran for
an hour and forty-ve minutes without intermission,
and nobody, I think, would have wished it longer.
Members of the audience unfamiliar with Ibsen's play
must have been mystied by what they saw; indeed,
this production was a perfect example of Ibsen's early
reputation in France as a writer, in Sarcey's famous
phrase, of "brume scandinave" (Scandinavian fog).
The reason is the incomprehensible portrait of
Solness rendered by the veteran and popular actor,
Jacques Weber. Cloos has said that he would not
have attempted Ibsen's play without Weber, and
one has to wonder, "Why on earth?" Weber, in his
rst Ibsen role of a very long career, seems too old
for Solness, and worse, his huge physiquegreat
height, a massive frame, and a large girthmakes
him seem more a candidate for the role of Falstaff
rather than Solness. The Hilde, Mlanie Doutey, is
small-boned and extremely slim, and the sight of
the two of them together inevitably calls to mind
King Kong and Fay Wray. But the most important
failure of Weber in the role is his constant portrayal
of a man who is the master of his universe; Solness's
large size seems to go hand in hand with the total
control he exercises over Brovik, Ragnar, Kaja, and
his wife, and altogether he seems a man without a
weakness. Bored rather than tormented by life, and
relentlessly cynical, when he confesses to Hilde the
"great anguish" and the "great fear" he feels, we
simply cannot believe him. Surely a man so sure of
himself, so sophisticated, and so experienced with
womenhe is presented as a great womanizer, with
Kaja as the current smitten mistresswould have
pegged Hilde as a crackpot and, if he liked, would
have made love to her. And in fact, Solness's reaction
toward this young woman who is supposed to be
the dangerous muse he longs for is so utterly blas
that he remains unaffected throughout the entire
scene of their meeting, indulging in a long t of
laughter when she recounts the scenario of Lysanger
and deliberately lying when he concedes he might
have kissed her. Later, his willing participation in
the Romantic love duets of towers and castles in
the air seems not only impossible but preposterous.
Compounding the problem is the Hilde of Mlanie
Douet, who is completely unequal to the role.
Her Hilde seems silly rather than psychologically
disturbed (it is impossible to believe that she ever
read a book in her life), and petulant rather than
offended, a bratty, chiding child who is neither
threatening nor enticing. A master builder who is the
master of himself and a supercial Hilde, of course,
make nonsense of Ibsen's play.
Veteran Edith Scob as Aline Solness, in an
enormous contrast to the performances of Weber
and Doutey, is wonderful, the best Aline I have ever
seen. In striking contrast to the whining, washed-
out woman that actresses usually make of Aline,
Scob gives us a "grande bourgeoise" who seems
to be on anti-depressants: she is nice to everybody,
performs her duties willingly"noblesse oblige"
and understands her husband's indelitiesno petty
sniping at Kaja or Hilde. Of course such a woman
would genuinely mourn the loss of her ancestral
home and its belongings and would hate living next to
small villas whose inhabitants can see into her living
room. It is the rst time in my experience that the
great lines about the nine dolls who "burned alive"
in the re seemed perfectly natural. Having played
Irene in When We Dead Awaken and Mrs. Alving
in Ghosts, Scob perhaps had an advantage over
her colleagues, but for whatever reason, she gives
us a brilliantly coherent Aline. In a very interesting
example of the importance of "chemistry" between
actors, while Doutey and Weber fail to suggest the
erotic tension between Hilde and Solness, Scob and
Weber succeed completely in acting the emotional
tie between Aline and Solness.
The supporting cast is excellent; Jacques
Marchand is an effectively sad and tormented
Brovik; Sava Lolov as Dr. Herdal is a ne useless
non-entity; Thibault Lacroix's smart, edgy Ragnar
who knows his worth and Nathalie Niel's frank,
sexy Kaja are refreshing changes from the usual
depressed and oppressed employees. Jean Haas's set,
a contemporary drafting room against a backdrop
of a cityscape of Hausmannian and skyscraper
buildings, is striking. Marie Pawlotsky's costumes
are excellentHilde's short shorts have the right
contemporary touch and Aline's ensembles are
elegantas is Peter Ludwig's music; having the
annoyed Ragnar whistle "In the Hall of the Mountain
King" under his breath is inspired. What a pity that all
this talent and all this work was spent in the service
of a production that, because of its leading actors,
gave us only a glimmer of Ibsen's great play. One is
nevertheless very grateful that under the direction of
Danile and Pierre Franck, the Hbertot, a private
theatre which receives none of the generous subsidies
France grants to its public theatres, continues to take
chances with its box ofce by offering great plays
that do not draw the general public. No theatre on
Broadway would dream of such a thing.
45
In staging Lulu, leading French director
Stphane Braunschweig, the Artistic Director of
the Colline, was realizing what he called in several
interviews "an old dream of mine." Braunschweig
notes in the program that he was inspired to attempt
Wedekind's play by the great German director
Peter Zadek, who in 1988 resurrected the text of
Wedekind's rst version of Lulu (Pandora's Box,
1894) and put it on stage for the rst time. (The
playing text for Lulu before Zadek's production was
Wedekind's nal version of the drama, composed of
Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, rst performed in
1898 and published in Wedekind's Collected Works
in 1913). Wedekind, as the program booklet informs
us, called his rst Pandora's Box "a tragedy to make
you tremble," and this "primitive version," wrote
Braunschweig, "is altogether cruder, wilder, less
expository, and less wordy than the 1913 version."
He added, "we have also taken a few variants, like
the scene backstage, from the 1913 version, and we
have made a few cuts that allowed us to put on the
play in a single evening."
Braunschweig's production of Lulu runs
for four hours, three hours and forty-ve minutes
of which are playing time (there is a fteen-minute
intermission), and I wish I could say that this long
production constituted a dream come true. In fact
and this was the overriding opinion of the French
criticsthis Lulu was a Wedekind acionado's
nightmare; sentimental rather than ironic, and vulgar
rather than venomous, with a large amount of crude
farce and slapstick. The production seemed to be the
work of anybody but Wedekind. The most important
failure was that, incredibly, there was not the least
feeling of discomfort, much less of anguish. The
production also seemed the work of anybody but
Braunschweig, who has the reputation of being
among the most intelligent directors (if not the most
intelligent) on the French stage today. (His brilliant
Peer Gynt is by far the best production that I have
ever seen of Ibsen's great drama.) It is clear from
Braunschweig's notes in the program that the fault
did not lie in an intellectual misunderstanding of
Wedekind's drama: "The person of Lulu incarnates
for every man a different identity, a different image.
I see, especially, the way that men project different
fantasies onto her, onto her body. But the play is
profoundly contradictory; on the one hand, Wedekind
demysties the whole masculine fantasy machine,
for example he shows how men use Lulu to act out
their fantasies, but on the other, he himself is caught
up in the same kind of fantasy-making in his creation
of her character. But I discovered in working on the
text that Lulu also has her own fantasies of herself.
Lulu
Joan Templeton
Wedekind's Lulu, directed by Stphane Braunschweig. Photo: Courtesy of the Colline.
46
The whole play makes up a kind of system in which
everybody fantasizes, including the person who is
the object of the fantasies of the others."
However well he appreciated Wedekind's
drama of the sexes, Braunschweig, the critics agreed,
made a huge mistake in his casting of Lulu, who is of
course the soul of the drama. The petite Chlo Rjon
seems to be playing a kind of "Baby Doll" gure
(she actually wears a "baby doll" dress in the rst
half of the production), but it is a baby doll stripped
of sexuality. Rjon's Lulu is not even a Lolita, much
less the erotic, mythic Lulu, the "Eve," as the text
has it, of all time. She spends much of her time as
the jaunty playmate, laughing and joking, and, in
an about-face which equally fails to do justice to
Wedekind's portrait, crying, whining, and snifing.
One critic maintained that Rjon's performance
embodied Braunschweig's misguided aim to get
beyond the Lulu as "femme fatale" of Pabst's famous
lm (with Louise Brooks as Lulu) and Berg's even
more famous opera by substituting an exuberant
and instinctive young woman (Manuel Poleymat,
"Une Lulu Sans Asprit," "A Lulu Without Bite"),
La Terrasse, 2010). Whatever the reason, Rjon's
uninteresting, harmless Lulu is constantly at war
with Wedekind's terrifying victim and victimizer,
and it is impossible to believe that any man could
fall under her spell, much less kill himself because
of her. In one particularly ludicrous scene, childlike
Lulu, who remains unerotic in spite of her black
stockings, black stiletto heels, and black g-string,
cavorts across the stage in a kind of buttery cape
accompanied by twin boy-toys singing rock and roll
and a black stud carrying a dildo. Rjon pronounces
"How wonderful to fall into the arms of a sadist!" as
though she were Julie Andrews singing "The hills
are alive with the sound of music!" The only time
that Rjon succeeds in making Lulu come alive is,
tellingly, in Wedekind's sentimental (and vicious)
nal scene, when she is a penniless prostitute with
a heart of gold who begs her famous last client, Jack
the Ripper, to spend the night with herfor free.
Among the male actors, only John Arnold,
in the role of the vile Schigolch, Lulu's incestuous
father, is convincing, and this surely has to do with
the fact that his role requires him never to fall under
the spell of his daughter, whom he prostitutes until
the end. One cannot help feeling sorry for Philippe
Girard, wonderfully cast as the corrupt pedophile
and masochist Ludwig Schn, the most important
of Lulu's protectors/lovers, as he valiantly tries
to embody this grotesque portrait against hapless
Rjon's Lulu. (Girard also doubles as Jack the Ripper
in the last scene.)
It is a relief to turn to the production's
scenography, also by Braunschweig. Making use of
his theatre's vast technical resources, Braunschweig
has the painter's studio of scene one, in which
Lulu's rst husband dies of a heart attack when he
nds her in painter Schwarz' arms, dissolve into a
series of spectacular mirrored sets revolving on a
turntable. In one, the naked Lulu, her back to the
audience, appears on a gigantic white bed in the
pose of a Titian Venus; the stage then revolves to
show Schwarznow Lulu's husbandas he works
on an enormous canvas of a blonde model spread-
eagled on a bed, with a blood-red bedspread between
her legs; later, the stage turns to show the bloody
corpse of Schwarz, who has cut his throat because of
Lulu's indelities, on the same bed, on the same red
bedspread. At the end of the play, Jack the Ripper
cuts out Lulu's vagina (offstage, to her screams) and
displays it, shining red, in a large glass specimen jar.
Spectacular in themselves, Braunschweig's tableaux-
sets are related thematically, to each other and to the
play as a whole, by color and symmetry and capture
the violent, lurid sexuality of Wedekind's outrageous
play. If the dialogue of the production is a travesty
of Lulu, the scenography is a tribute to itor at least
part of the scenography. Unfortunately, the initial set
of part two announces that the Feydeau-like aspects
of part one of the production, in which the scantily
clad heroine runs about chasing and being chased by
various men, have triumphed: a series of four doors,
outlined in neon, make up the backstage wall and the
atmosphere of Feydeau's "L'htel du libre change"
begins to establish itself. There is even a bell-hop
in uniform. As the action proceeds, various minor
characters run in and out of the doors in various
stages of undress, with stockings and pants falling
around their ankles. Lulu herself strips the bell-hop
of his uniform and appears in it running across the
stage, breasts exposed. One was relieved when this
set disappeared and the wonderfully seedy "lower
depths" of the last scene, a dismal room in a London
tenement, appeared. But even here, Feydeau lives.
One of Lulu's clients, a Swiss virgin who speaks
French with a thick accent (guaranteed laughs from
the boors in the audience) can't keep his pants from
falling around his knees.
After Jack the Ripper exits with the new
jar to add to his collection, the turntable revolves to
present the dead, mangled Lulu, spread-eagled on
the oor, her groin and legs bathed in blood. The
sight is both brilliantly horrifying and a sad reminder
of the play we did not see.
47
The Thrill of It All, Forced Entertainment's
recent production at London's Riverside Studios,
was an examination of our vapid contemporary
culture wrapped inside a hyper-manic, glittering,
tawdry package. Conceived and devised by the
company under the direction of Tim Etchells,
Thrill exhibited many of Forced Entertainment's
performative innovations and displayed the
theatrical power that a highly trained ensemble can
generate. Their collaborative method of creating
theatre pieces gave the show a weirdly intimate yet
fractured sense of storytelling. Structured like a tired
vaudeville show staffed by semi-competent and
mildly talented performers, Thrill laid bare through
their hectoring incompetence the nature of popular
entertainment these days. Throughout the show, the
performers' aggressive fun-making was contrasted
by their agellant-like zeal for discussing personal
struggles and inadequacies. It parodied variety
performance and satirized the weepy confessionals
of TV talk shows, but denied the audience any sense
of smug superiority over its subject matter. Instead,
the performance exposed a hollow core to our way
of seeing, experiencing, justifying, and quickly
ignoring the problems and hurts of others. The
relentless glitz of the show was meant to entertain,
but the problems of the performers were supposed
to be equally entertaining. The driving force of this
bizarre variety act was its cloying need: to prevent
us, the audience, from becoming bored and directing
our attention elsewhere.
The show began with the thunderous noise
of peppy Japanese lounge tunes, a musical genre that
punctuated the many dance numbers. The cast (they
all used their actual rst names) consisted of four
women and ve men: the women wore matching
blonde wigs, white cocktail dresses, and red boots;
the men adorned themselves with black wigs,
white suit jackets, red shirts, black pants, and white
snakeskin slip-ons. The effect was pure Las Vegas
Dance First and Think Afterwards: The Thrill of It All
by Forced Entertainment
Kevin Byrnes
Forced Entertainment's The Thrill of It All. Photo: Courtesy of Riverside Studio.
48
cheese. The playing space afforded plenty of room
for the badly choreographed and executed dance
routines: a wide open space with various props and
scenery pushed to the edges, which were rolled or
carried center stage when needed. The set included
several red rugs, a collection of papier-mach palm
trees, a white couch, and a ladder. (The ladder was
rarely used. With the couch and ladder pairing, I
was reminded of Danny Kaye's famous "Make 'Em
Laugh" number from the backstage movie musical
Singing in the Rain. Some umbrellas made a brief
appearance as well.) At the start, the performers
danced to three full songs in a row. The rst number
was silly due to the obvious lack of training by the
identically clad cast, but they got through it without
problems. With the second number, some cracks
started to appear in the wide-eyed and toothy-grinned
faade. A performer was knocked to the ground
after a mis-step, but none of her cohorts paused or
even acknowledged her potential injury. They just
kept the show rolling. By the third numberat this
point the novelty and easy humor was gonea cast
member grabbed one of the microphones from the
back of the stage, and made a startling (yet obvious)
declarative (yet pathetic) statement: "I'm over here!"
She ran. "Now, I'm over here!" She ran some more,
laughing. "And now, I'm over here!" This demand
for recognition was a constant motif of the show.
The microphones were the show's most
important props, both for what they signied and
in how they were used. The performers all spoke
through them; no attempt was made to speak to the
audience unamplied, not even when someone was
lying on the ground after a beating. This obsessive
mediation was evocative of many things: of news
reports and reporters, of talk shows and game
shows. Even when conversing with each other,
the actors faced the audience in recognition of our
important watchful gaze. The distancing effect these
microphones created was accentuated by the sound
designer. When speaking through them, voices were
amplied, of course, which made everything said
more prominent, regardless of its banality. But the
voices were also highly distorted and fuzzed, giving
them the quality of a damaged speaker. True to their
costumes, all the women sounded the same as did
all the men.
The show's structure was not that of classic
drama, with rising action and falling denouement;
rather, it oscillated between high and low energy
levels in its effort to engage the crowd. There was
a balance between confessional, individual, mic-
distorted talking by the performers and collective,
choreographed, not-too-successful dancing. The
style of dance was as groovy as the music: lots
of kicks and hip shakes and nger waving. The
connection between the two components of the
showdancing on the one hand, talking/confessing
on the otherwas a tensive pairing of chaos and
order. Whenever a skit or scene devolved into
bickering or wandered away from its purpose, which
happened frequently, and the show threatened to
become too treacly, somebody would perk up and
call for a dance number. This was a way of restoring
the energy that the show wanted so desperately to
maintain, though never fully could. The alteration
between breakdown and rejuvenation continued
through the two-hour, intermissionless performance,
and as it progressed, these repeated attempts at
bringing back the fun became increasingly desperate
and sad in their own way.
The scenes between the dances were an
attempt to connect with the audience on a deep
emotional level, despite the wigs and distorting
microphones. These interludes consisted of personal
anecdotes of suffering and/or saccharine platitudes
of wish-fulllment. These scenes' bathos was funny
and cutting, and almost all of them took place on
the white couch that was wheeled center stage.
An early scene set the pattern for those that would
follow. The cast assembled on the couch, looking
like a family photo, to talk about their dreams. All
were crowded on it, bickering and shoving and
occasionally groping, and as the mics were passed
around they became tangled in the cords. "Wouldn't
it be nice?" they asked in turn, and then followed
this up with quotidian or sinister ights of fancy.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a rainbow to greet
you every morning when you stepped outside your
door? Wouldn't it be nice if men's sweat tasted like
champagne instead of salt? Wouldn't it be nice if
heroin wasn't addictive, so you could have a great
weekend and still be fresh Monday morning? The
audience was invited to share in these personal
fantasiesmaybe you have them too? In another
interlude, called "Small Things," one of the male
performers expounded upon the sad and pseudo-
profound as a way of reminding us of the articles we
take for granted. He described a series of images of
Dickensian domesticity: a single baby shoe left in the
drawer of a building about to be demolished, a box
of mementos forgotten in an attic. The melodramatic
solemnity of these pictures made them funny, as did
the fact that the pronouncements were accompanied
by interpretive movements by the female cast
members who performed "falling dust" and "crust of
49
Forced Entertainment's The Thrill of It All. Photo: Riverside Studio.
50
bread." But then the other male performers tried to
get in on the act. Their suggestionsa bird's head
on a stick and a giant's unnished supperkilled
the mood with their ridiculousness. As always
happened, the scene turned from somber to bizarre
and was "ruined."
The connection between the performers
and the audience was a constant source of tension
and discussion. The entertainers frequently shouted
"You're losing the audience!" and "You're boring
them!" at their fellows with a panicked ferocity. Their
understanding of the crowd was highly antagonistic:
they needed us to be there but also constantly
thought of us as needy. They were desirous of our
collective approval but were annoyed at constantly
being judged. The incessant pressure to look like
they were having a good time led to increasingly
bizarre dance routines and surreal confessionals
about "How I've Suffered and Triumphed!" This
performer-audience relationship was the most
interesting aspect of the show. At one point, a dance
sequence was interrupted so that a performer could
profess his love for a woman in row J, which led
another performer to announce his love for a group
of women in the audience, which led the rest of the
performers to explicitly describing their own sexual
desires. Then back to dancing!
Benetting the themes of the show and
the theatrical techniques of alienation, the cast was
incredibly well trained in how to act badly. That is, they
struck the right timbre between expressing emotion
and saying nothing, real panic and fake enthusiasm,
being entertainers and being entertaining. This kept
the show from mere straightforward parody, which
would have been repetitious and dull. Also, the
performers were not dancers and their choreography
was executed amateurishly. This meant that, by the
end of Thrill, they were clearly exhausted. The show
was physically taxing (the actors are all in their
forties, or thereabouts), which also contrasted with
their pained smiles and crocodile tears.
The later scenes of the vaudeville were
increasingly desperate in their attempts to convey
pathos. These included one performer's long
personal story about how her dreams of a life on
stage led her to replace many of her organs with
wiring. A pair of performers had onstage heart
attacks. ("I'm dying," one croaked, still clutching
the microphone.) Another entertainer professed to
being too depressed to continue, too full of ennui
to even fake happiness. For his transgressions,
he was pleaded with, menaced, and eventually set
upon by his fellow actors, some of whom dragged
him behind the couch and beat him severely. The
savagery of these actions was shocking, but was
in keeping with the performers' motivations. They
were trying to obliterate sadness from the stage, both
to save the audience from the sight of it and to stamp
out their own feelings of unhappiness. This led to
the striking image of a group of identically dressed
men assaulting another identically dressed man for
not acting happy enough.
The last scene before the nal dance
perfectly summed up the confessional masochism
of the proceedings. A beleaguered cast dragged
themselves one more time to the couch, to discuss
what we've learned. Such tacked-on moralizing was
in keeping with the prurient Jerry Springer/Oprah
Winfrey sermonizing that inspired the production.
The meaning of it all, according to the performers
themselves, was a collection of random clichs for
self-improvement; such as, if you pay peanuts, you
get monkeys. Then they gathered their strength for
a nal dance, and the show concluded with blaring
Japanese pop.
The Thrill of It All was certainly thrilling,
but what was the "It" of the title? The performers
offered their own, wholly inadequate, interpretations,
but what were we being thrilled by? This may
not be a fair question, given how often the show
confounded expectations and meanings. But if I may
offer my own oxymoronic assessment, I would say:
at its core, it was a show of and about artice. That
the performers' relentless confessions of personal
horrors actually increased the sense of fakery speaks
volumes about our over-exposure in a constantly
exposing culture.
The real impact of the show hit me three
days later, as I found myself watching an episode
of the hugely popular British TV show X Factor, a
reality program in which amateur singers perform
pop tunes in an effort to win a recording contract.
(It is the precursor to and inspiration for American
Idol.) A contestant had just been voted off the show,
doomed to the semi-obscurity of a game show
loser. Rejected by a panel of judges and millions of
viewers across the nation, the woman was subjected
to a last primetime humiliation: a microphone was
shoved in her hands and she was asked how she felt.
Her response was the expected collection of useless,
meaningless phrases strung together: how she gave
it her best shot, and made some great friends, and on
and on. Her eyes misted with tears, the host nodded
gravely, the audience applauded. It was time for a
commercial.
51
For its annual Christmas production in
2010, Dublin's Abbey Theatre drew upon its tradition
of reviving Irish classics, presenting Arrah-na-
Pogue, one of the most Irish plays of the great
nineteenth century Irish-American master of popular
entertainment, Dion Boucicault. Set in County
Wicklow in the late 1700s, the play is steeped in
references to Irish country life at that period, and
driven by the tensions between the native population
and the occupying British forces.
Finding the proper balance between a
tongue-in-cheek commentary on the complex
and conventionalized characters, emotions, and
situations of a piece in this tradition, and attempting
something close to a period reconstruction, this
production certainly favors the former option,
doubtless encouraged by the Christmas slot to
present something much more in the nature of a
seasonal pantomime than an homage to an earlier
dramatic tradition. This is director Mikel Mur's
debut on the main stage of the Abbey, though
he is familiar to audiences there for a serious of
productions in the smaller Peacock stage, where
he has offered both new plays and familiar classics
from Synge and Shakespeare. The tone of this
production is clearly indicated in the Abbey's own
description of the production as a "rollicking good
tale of romance and misadventure with rascally
rebels, villainous villains, love struck young
uns an sheep." The scenery, designed by Sabine
Dargent, with props by Matt Guinnane, is self-
consciously articial, with crude pop-up style bits
of bushes, rocks or cottage walls, even a moon and
stars jauntily carried on and off stage by the actors
themselves. There is a constant sense of movement,
with actors dashing on and off stage, sliding in an
out on upstage ramps, and bouncing their way across
the stage with the aid of three small trampolines
actually set into the stage oor. Whenever possible,
actors are shown frantically dashing on horseback
across the countryside, carrying the horse head and
shoulders in front of them and providing the horse
legs themselves as their fellow actors simulate
their rapidity by rushing past them holding cut-up
representations of passing bushes.
This same cartoon-like aesthetic is utilized
throughout. A cut-out moon appears upstage on a tall
pole, a ramshackle prison tower is hastily assembled
Arrah-na-Pogue at the Abbey Theatre
Marvin Carlson
Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue, directed by Mikel Mur. Photo: Courtesy of Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
52
on stage, a company of redcoats is represented by
two actors in British uniform carrying between
them a pole supporting three additional puppet
gures also in uniform who represent the rest of the
company. This style is most engagingly and most
elaborately seen in the second part, a room in Dublin
Castle, in which all the furnishingschairs, tables,
a bookcase with a bust, even a tiger-skin rug, are
all created by actors costumed to represent these
various items. Far from attempting to quietly present
their congurations, they enthusiastically join in the
action, the tiger-skin rug even breaking into a dance.
The fteen-member cast captures
well the amboyant and exuberant spirit of the
whole. At the center are the young lovers whose
marriage is threatened by a series of melodramatic
misunderstandings, British oppression, and the
manipulations of the villain Feeney, performed with
ghoulish relish by Jack Walsh. Aaron Monaghan
as Shaun is full of energy and warmth. Perhaps
the emotional center of the play comes when he
gives in to the urging of his friends and neighbors
at his wedding celebration to sing, quietly and
intensely, but with many a nervous glance around,
the forbidden "Wearing of the Green." Monaghan is
no conventional Irish tenor, simply an actor with a
pleasant but rather average voice, and this gives the
moment an air of simple conviction that is deeply
moving. In the hushed silence that follows the song,
a muppet-like sheep that is carried throughout the
show on the arm of one of the villagers, breaks the
mood with a hearty bleat and we are off again in the
rollicking world of the production. Mary Murray
as Arrah offers a charming and emotionally strong
companion to Monaghan. The other major couple,
Mary O'Driscoll and her lover, the sympathetic
outlaw Beamish McCoul (Rory Nolan) provide
strong support in their secondary romance. Peter
Hanly brings commendable warmth and sympathy
to the key role of Colonel O'Grady, whose dedication
to justice is central to bringing about a happy and
romantic ending to all of the lovers in the play except
himself.
The occupying British are on the whole
rather surprisingly sympathetic, partly due to
Boucicault's script, which maintains a strongly
sentimental edge despite its political implications,
and partly due to the warmth and engagement of
the two leading representatives of English power,
the understanding Sergeant of the prison, played
with bluff good humor by Gerard Walsh, and the
shrewd and playful Secretary of Peter Gowen, who
inhabits the strangely anthropomorphic quarters in
Dublin castle. Whatever menace he may represent
by his position is much qualied by the antics
of his furniture, the farcical development of his
scene, complete with multiple characters hiding in
alcoves, and the antics of his gnome-like servant
Winterbottom (Ciaran O'Brien), who is presented as
a living pun, appearing in long-john pajamas with
their rear ap open so that he is constantly mooning
the audience.
An important element to uniting the
evening and to establishing and maintaining its tone
is the almost continuous piano accompaniment to
the action provided at an onstage piano played by
Conor Linehan, who composed the music as well.
There was little attempt in the production to present
an authentic reconstruction of this classic piece,
nor to make connections with either the historical
political tensions embedded within it or the very
serious economic concerns that haunt both Ireland
and its theatres today. This Arrah-na-Pogue was
frankly and unashamedly escapist entertainment, a
charming and convivial evening among friends, like
the wedding celebration at its heart, and it provided a
welcome and warming experience on a cold January
night in Dublin.
53
Despite weather so cold and icy that it made
the headlines in the Berlin newspapers, the three
opera houses were crowded in late November and
early December. At the Deutsche Oper a short run
of Lucia di Lammermoor was particularly popular.
An element which Donezetti used very successfully
in this opera is the sudden shifts of mood and tempo
in the music. That was demonstrated in the rst
moments of this production. The curtain opened
to reveal a highly romantic setting: trompe l'oeil
blue curtains swirled at the sides of the stage and
dimly seen in the background was a softly lighted
scene of mountains and a lovely woman standing in
moonlight. Soft music complemented the untroubled
Scottish Highlands setting, then suddenly, with
great force the music became intense and dark,
foreshadowing the tragic events which would occur
in the idyllic place.
The setting changed to reveal hills and the
magnicent Ravenswood Castle in the distance.
This and the following settings by Filippo Sanjust
underscored repeatedly the importance of the
struggle between Ravenswood (Lucia's brother)
and Ashton (her lover) for wealth and power. In
this struggle Lucia is forced by her brother into a
wealthy marriage which drives her to madness and
the murder of her husband.
This opera rst achieved full recognition
and popularity when Maria Callas sang the role and
it is clear that despite the importance of the men's
roles, the success or failure of the opera depends on
the performance of Lucia. Jane Archibald, who sang
the role, is a young Canadian singer who studied
and performed in the U.S. We will undoubtedly
hear more of her in the future. She not only sang
wonderfully but was a ne actress. In the midst
of the singing and dancing of the wedding guests
between the formidable columns supporting lofty
Ravenswood Castle, she entered carrying a dagger.
She was still beautiful, as in the earlier scenes, but
her startling entry wearing a wedding dress spattered
with blood clearly revealed her madness. She rose
to the challenge of the lengthy aria in which each
coloratura note must not only be dramatic, but
accurate as Lucia's voice is underscored by a ute
hitting the same notes. The cast as a whole was
superb and the audience received the famous sextet
with cheers of pleasure.
The total romantic effect of the story based
on Sir Walter Scott's novel was perfectly conveyed in
the staging and the costumes. The men were dressed
in the cavalier style of the period and the elegant
gowns of the women created the appropriate aura.
Initially, Lucia was quietly dressed in a light saffron
colored gown with a owing blue cape. Sanjust
designed the costumes. The staging, complete with
sword ghting and active crowd scenes, was also by
himclearly a man of many parts!
This has been a year of excitement and
change for the Staatsoper unter den Linden. The
familiar elegant building in the east will be closed
for three years for restoration and in the west the
Staatsoper is in the Schiller Theater. A combination
of new productions and revived old ones celebrates
both the change and the history of this opera
company.
A revival of the famous August Everding
staging of Mozart's The Magic Flute lled the
house at 6:00p.m. on Sunday December 5, but the
performance was nearly cancelled at the last minute!
The audience held its breath as it was announced
that Tamino was to be sung by Stephan Ruegemer
but as he was ill Michael Schade was ying in to
take his place, but had just telephoned to say the
plane was still on the ground being de-iced. So
Martin Homrich (who was to sing in a concert in
Berlin at 8:00p.m.) had agreed to sing the rst act
because "The performance must not be cancelled."
At the end of the rst act he was gratefully cheered
for his beautiful performance and given a bottle of
champagnea truly heroic Tamino.
Everding directed this opera several times
before this most famous of his productions because
he found the opera so complex and challenging.
In 1994 with designer Fred Berndt he recreated
the brilliant designs of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for
the 1816 premiere in Berlin. Dorothe Uhrmacher
recreated the lavish costumes. The richness of the
spectacle and the historical signicance encourage a
detailed description of the production.
The libretto of this opera by Emanuel
Schikaneder is lled with magical changes, people
disappearing, mountains, grottoes, and rivers
moving on and off the stage, Tamino and Pamina
moving off the stage in a small sailboat, people in
baskets lowered from great heights, and the stunning
appearance of the Queen of the Night singing an
aria lled with coloratura, standing on a slender new
Berlin Opera and Ballet
Yvonne Shafer
54
moon which was slowly lowered to the stage.
The twelve elaborate architectural designs
by Schinkel begin with a mysterious setting in which
the hero Tamino is singing for help as he is pursued
by enormous monsters spouting re. Later in the
opera, after receiving the magic ute, he was again
threatened by animals including lions, a rhinosceras,
an ape, and others. But when he played the ute they
all engaged in a delightful dance. (These animals
and others such as a unicorn were performed by
actors in contrast to the Komische Oper production
which featured amazing automatons.)
Other settings featured palm trees with
mountains in the distance, a sphinx, scrims painted
with settings which raised to reveal yet another
setting, and great halls and statues. The trompe
l'oeil was almost overwhelming. No doubt the most
famous setting was the test of re and water in which
Tamino and Pamina pass into a cave lled with re
and smoke and then pass through a heaving river.
The major singers were up to the high
standards of this company and the sound of the large
chorus and orchestra was thrilling. Hanno Mueller-
Brachmann as Papageno, half man/half bird, was
covered with feathers the color of peacocks and was
very funny without being clownish. When he was
joined by a similarly clad Papagena and then sixteen
of their children, the audience was enchanted. The
last scene in the sacred temple showed the huge
stage and apron absolutely lled with the chorus,
the stars, children and animals. The combination
of beauty, music, comedy and drama provided a
memorable look at the dramatic staging of the early
nineteenth century.
Presumably the star of The Rake's Progress
was the director Krzysztof Warlikowski and the
co-stars Malgorzata Szczesniak, scene designs and
costumes, and Felice Ross, lighting. A framing
element introduced the opera in which the singer
who was to play Anne was interviewed onstage. The
television interview was displayed on huge screens
at the sides and back of the stage. These elements
dominated the production. Whatever occurred
on stage was also presented in giant fashion on
the screens. So, when Tom Rakewell was eating
something, we saw his mouth, greatly magnied,
chewing, when the devil was luring him with a
sexy woman, we saw huge pictures of her face from
different angles. When Anne Truelove, the supposed
savior of Tom Rakewell appeared seeking him in
Mozart's Magic Flute, staged by August Everding. Photo: Courtesy of the Schiller Theater.
55
London, she wore black bikini underwear and drank
from a bottle while singing about her innocent love
for him. Behind her was a man doing an erotic dance
and all this was projected on a large screen upstage.
One had to wonder why Anne had not led Rakewell
down the path to damnation before the devil, Nick
Shadow appeared on the scene.
Gidon Saks as Shadow dominated the
action in every scene in which he appeared.
Compared to him Rakewell (conventionally dressed
as today's hero in jeans and a tee shirt) was a pale
gure. The tall, long legged Saks bestrode the stage
singing beautifully making it clear why he has had
so much success in almost every country playing
such roles as Claggart in Billy Budd, Sarastro in The
Magic Flute, and Scarpia in Tosca. It would be very
exciting to see him in an opera production in which
the focus is more on the singers.
Given all the spectacular elementsa
raised stage behind the screen with parties non-stop,
a train which came on stage with bright lights in its
interior, and other aspects too numerous to mention,
The Rake's Progress will undoubtedly be one of the
hits of the season.
Caravaggio was presented by the
Staatsballet playing at the Schiller Theater in the
repertoire of the Staatsoper. The ballet began with
a play of light downstage center around which
were seated the corps de callet. In the center was
a nearly naked man with his back to the audience.
This dancer, apparently, was Vladimir Malakhov
embodying Caravaggio whose struggle as a person
and as an artist would be enacted.
Malakhov's strength and abilities were
demonstrated throughout the evening as the other
dancers interacted with him and with each other.
Some highlights were dances performed by two
male dancers (who sometimes lounged against the
proscenium watching and drinking). They were
scantily clad in faux Greek costumes. Actually there
was no clear sense of period or country offered by
the costumes designed by Kristopher Millar and
Lois Swandale. They were mostly beige with some
splashes of purple on the women.
The art of Caravaggio inspired
choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti to create this piece.
The stage design and lighting were designed by
Carlo Cerri. Certainly the famous dark and light of
the painter were clearly inuential. On the nearly
bare stage the background was nearly always entirely
The Rake's Progress, directed by Krysztof Warlikowski at the Staatsoper unter den Linden. Photo: Courtesy of the Staatsoper.
56
black and the foreground brightly lighted. The
dancing was largely a manipulation by one body of
another, with occasional forays of broad movements
by groups across the stage. The gymnastic abilities
of the dancers were fully demonstrated, particularly
by the women who were lifted, twisted, folded,
and otherwise moved into positions which were
sometimes beautiful, sometimes purposefully
grotesque. The anguish of the story was clear from
the grasping, wrenching tortured movements of
Caravaggio and others.
Many people would describe the
choreography as "unconventional." But when
the dance is breaking conventions which were
artistically assaulted by Martha Graham and others
long ago has it not become the convention? At this
point in time, what, indeed, can a choreographer do
to defy convention when what was shocking and
daring when Graham choreographed in the 1930s
has long been accepted?
The Komische Oper presented a rich
variety of operas, some of which were designed
to appeal to the holiday crowds. The ballet of the
Snow Queen fairy tale is often performed at this time
of year, with the focus of the story on the magical
queen. In Pierangelo Valtinoni's opera of the same
name the focus is in quite another directionit
has to do with true friendship and trust between a
young girl, Gerda, and a boy, Kay. When he is hit
by a splinter from the devil's mirror he becomes a
lost person and the opera depicts Gerda's picaresque
adventures as she tries to nd him. The young Anna
Borchers was excellent as Gerda, appearing in every
scene, singing, dancing, struggling against soldiers,
and even riding piggy-back on a "reindeer."
The adventures began in an exuberant scene
of a carnival with a practical ferris wheel, balloons,
and bright light. Kay has contempt for the children's
play but struggles unsuccessfully to understand adult
concepts such as geometry and mathematics. The
stage so happily lled with children and lights was
now lled with fog and stunning projections on the
stage oor of geometric designs as Kay spun around
alone singing his sorrows.
The following scenes showed the full
capacities of the Komische Oper for staging
(designer Kenrik Ahr), costuming (Miriam Draxl,
Cristina Nyffeler), and lighting (Franck Evin).
Brightly costumed birds singing to Gerda led her
to a boat. Soon the little white boat was rocking
up and down and out of the center of the stage a
blue cloth ew and lled the stage as a dangerous,
billowing sea while the lighting moved from blue to
dark purple. Later Gerda encountered a raven with
a funny walk and a wonderful voice. (Singer Mirko
Janiska was specially applauded at the end.) Then
came an eccentric ower lady (delightfully sung and
acted by Elizabeth Stazinger) surrounded by many
singers, each with a great ower as a hat. In a later
scene Stazinger appeared as a sort of comic Mother
Courage pulling a wagon as the revolve turned
around.
In one scene dark panels came down from
a great height giving the impression of a forest
in which robbers were waiting to attack Gerda.
Perhaps the most memorable scene was an intense
storm in which light, snow, the full operatic voice
of a laughing devil, and the dramatic music created
a stunning effect. In contrast the last scene was all
light and music with Gerda and Kay sing a lovely
duet. Then all the characters burst upon the scene,
the carnival came to life, there seemed to be falling
snow which burst into reworks, and lights played
not only on the stage, but all over the auditorium.
Caravaggio, choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti. Photo: Courtesy of the Staatsoper.
57
Prokoev's 1921 opera The Love of Three
Oranges is so charming that one can only wonder
why it isn't performed more often. The presentation
at the Komische Oper was not only a full
representation of its merits, but a high imaginative,
unexpected visual delight as directed by Andrea
Homokis. The program states that this has been the
"Hit in Repertoire" since 1998, but has only been
reintroduced this December. After the re-opening
one critic wrote, "such contagious enthusiasm came
over the stage that the public wholly shared it."
The opera begins in an unusual way, calling
to mind The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The music
began and onto the stage swarmed several dozen
gures singing their contradictory demands for what
performance should be given: the serious ones want
a tragedy, the fun loving a comedy, the romantics
a lyric drama, and the thoughtless only a farce.
All the gures, from men in top hats and women
in fashionable 20s clothing to workmen wearing
caps, were all white: their clothes-- their shoes, their
gloves, and their faces. The stylized movements
against a changing background of many colors were
continually striking.
Given this framing of the opera story it
was not surprising to see that the stage itself was a
series of frames in which the gures interacted. The
characters in the "real" opera, the king, his melancholy
son, the various magicians and princesses (from the
Russian fairy tale on which Prokoev based the
opera) wore charming costumes in primary colors
or with enormous stark black cloaks. The changing
background of colors, the white gures who moved
the properties and brightly costumed characters in
the story presented a continually delightful visual
aspect. The properties did, too. There were gigantic
books with magic words in them, a huge ladle
(calling to mind Peer Gynt), and enormous playing
cards. These were a major symbol because the good
and bad magicians played to win. The white gures
danced about turning the cards back to front as the
action progressed.
Despite the absence of an orchestra due to a
strike, the two piano accompaniment was satisfactory
and the production was given a very warm reception.
Im Weien Rl was the last production I
saw and it provided a delightful evening at the opera.
The tone of the opera is most clearly given by the
major aria in it: "My Love Song Must be a Waltz." I
was surprised that in the present atmosphere of irony
and sophistication such a piece would be revived.
However, it certainly is a hit in Berlin, perhaps
because it brings a fresh breath of love stories and
innocent complications and misunderstandings. I
attended the rst performance after the premiere and
people were standing in front of the theatre in the
Pierangelo Valtinoni's Snow Queen at the Komische Oper. Photo: Courtesy of the Komische Oper.
58
bitter cold weather trying to buy a ticket for the sold-
out performance.
Although presented in one of the three
Berlin opera houses, this is not properly speaking,
an opera. It is a Singspiel, that is, a play with music
most of which was written by Ralph Benatzky.
The libretto was by Hans Mller and Erik Charell.
It was one of the greatest successes of the Weimar
Republic, produced at Reinhardt's now lost Grosses
Schauspielhaus in 1930. It enjoyed several lm
versions and many revivals, but not for many years.
It is set in Switzerland at the White Horse
Inn. It has both an old-fashioned romantic quality
and also a suggestion of erotic elements. The very
attractive female innkeeper, Vogelhuber, sings,
"Here the love ower blooms the whole summer
and love blooms the whole year." The central story
deals with the love of the head waiter, Leopold, for
the innkeeper but there are several other romances.
These are reminiscent of Feydeau with people set
up in the wrong rooms, a heart shaped window in
the most desirable room which opens off and on
to reveal people in various activities, sometimes
dishabille. The original production was elaborate
with tourists arriving by a lake steamer, a rain storm,
and the ostentatious arrival of Kaiser Franz Joseph.
In constrast, this setting by Janina Audick, was a
simple, charming representation of the inn with
a terrace and tables, and owers at windows and
around the setting.
Director Sebastian Baumgarten set a lively
pace for this three and half hour performance which
included many funny elements. When Leopold,
rebuffed by his love decided to leave the inn, he
performed a very amusing piece of business in
which the suitcase he held in his hand seemed to be
suspended in the air and try as he might, right or left,
he couldn't move it Other scenes involved people
in old-fashioned bathing suits in comical business.
There were many songs and dances by the chorus
and the major performers in fetching costumes
designed by Nina Kroschinske.
The large cast and chorus (as usual at the
Komische Oper) was excellent, but the standout for
me was Dagmar Manzel as the innkeeper. I had seen
her over a period of years at the Deutsches Theater.
She was in the long-running production Sartre's The
Flies as a dark and bitter Electra. Her performance
in The Niebelungen was unforgettable as a vengeful
gure sitting downstage right counting the number
of enemies she had killed. She demonstrated her
comic ability in Das Ktchen von Heilbronn as the
selsh high born woman kidnapped by a suitor: tied
in a sack which came down to her waist. With her
feet tied, she somersaulted across the stage effecting
her escape. To see her after those roles on the opera
stage, singing like any other successful soprano was
a delightful surprise.
Shortly after the reunication of East and
West Berlin questions were raised about funding for
the theatres and operas. One of the chief queries was
whether Berlin needed or could support three operas.
Judging from this last experience visiting all three, it
seems that the answer is a very positive yes.
Prokoev's The Love of Three Oranges at the Komische Oper. Photo: Courtesy of the Komische Oper.
59
Black Box Teater of Oslo's annual two-
week festival of experimental performance,
Marstrand, celebrated its third anniversary in
February 2011. This year's program, organized
around ideas of aesthetics and politics, takes its title,
A la Grande Nuit, from Artaud's 1927 declaration
of independence from the Surrealists, "In Total
Darkness, or the Surrealist Bluff." Curated by Jon
Refsdal Moe, Artistic Director of Black Box Teater,
the festival featured a healthy mixture of international
and Norwegian artists. Forced Entertainment, Gisle
Vienne, and Showcase Beat Le Mot are perhaps
the most recognizable names among the festival's
nearly dozen performances, lectures, and concerts.
I was invited to present a lecture as part of the
festival's academic offerings, which allowed me to
take in Namick Mackic's Salting the Tail and Gisle
Vienne's I Apologize.
Conceived and directed by Norwegian-
based theatre artist Namick Mackic, Salting the
Tail unfolds as a deceptively simple series of acting
exercises. A barefoot Mackic, dressed in jeans and
t-shirt, and his co-collaborator-performer Diane
Busuttil, wearing high heels and a thigh-length blue
rain jacket, enter the stage, introduce themselves
to the audience, and explain that they will engage
in a series of exercises. Mackic, functioning as a
director, asks Busuttil to "enter a room" or "discover
something" among other boilerplate acting exercises.
As she carries out her tasks, miniature power
struggles emerge between the two performers, who
exchange glances of approval or quips of frustration
about the effectiveness of Busuttil's work. It is a
familiar artistic relationship that comes into focus
slowly, but veers sharply off course when a huge
roll of Mylar is introduced to the action. Busuttil
Black Box Teater of Oslo's "Marstrand III" Festival:
Namik Mackic's Salting the Tail and Gisle Vienne's I Apologize
Andrew Friedman
Gislle Vienne's I Apologize. Photo: Mathilde Darel.
60
burrows into, wrestles within, and is eventually
buried beneath the plastic sheeting, all the while
creating a series of evocative images of the body in a
losing struggle with the material. Set on a stage with
a simple white wall, a white desk, two free-standing
theatre lights, and a sound desk all brightly lit by
the theatre's uorescent house lights, the humanoid
shapes of Busuttil in battle with the heavy plastic
sheeting suggest booth the comic and horric. The
scene is reenacted to equally engaging effect when
Mackic, in an effort to correct Busuttil's performance,
himself does battle with the roll of Mylar. In this
particular exercise, one can glimpse the subtleties of
negotiating aesthetic tastes (as well as suggestions
of character) through the two performers' different
approaches to the nonsensical task.
The exercises continue to build toward the
absurd. Mackic dresses Busuttil in a full-body black
plastic suit before she participates in a strobe-lit
sword ght, prepares a pizza crust, wears the dough
as a mask, and mysteriously vanishes through the
desk, which she desperately attempts to keep Mackic
from shaking. The development of these actions is
directed through the introduction of simple props (a
rolling pin or rising mound of dough, a shaking desk,
etc.). Unapologetically non-narrative, the sequence
of events develops imaginatively over the course
of an hour. Themes of power and the masking or,
perhaps more accurately, de-facing of performers
recur throughout the piece. These themes seem to be
an outgrowth of Salting the Tail's overriding concern
with the performer's imaginative engagement with
the material world. Most impressive, however, is
Mackic and Busuttil's condence in and staging of
the human body engaged in simple if absurd tasks,
which when set in the stark relief of the stage take on
their own powerfully suggestive life.
French director-choreographer Gisle
Vienne's I Apologize similarly favors the use of
simple images over a clearly articulated narrative.
Vienne is best known in the United States for Jerk
(2008), a gruesome solo puppet show based on
American author Dennis Cooper's novel Jerk (1991),
which chronicles the crimes of David Brooks, an
accomplice to the 1970's serial killer Dean Corll.
Seen at both Seattle's On The Boards and New York's
PS122, Jerk features actor Jonathan Capdevielle
playing out the fate of Brooks and Corll's victims
with a series of animal hand puppets. Cooper's
matter-of-fact text, Capdevielle's cool performance,
and the cuteness of the hand puppets recreate the
violence of the murders with an uninching and
shocking level of intimacy.
I Apologize, originally staged in 2004, is
the chronological and thematic precursor to Jerk.
It marks the rst of seven works in the ongoing
collaboration between Vienne and Cooper. Subtitled
The Reconstruction of an Accident, I Apologize,
like Jerk, employs dolls to stage and restage the
violence of youthful sex and desire. The single
stage set is roughly two dozen pine wood cofns
stacked to varying heights on an expanse of white
plastic ooring. Faded bloody handprints and
ominous smudges are visible on some of the cofns.
The chilling austerity of the image is broken when
the nameless protagonist, played by Jonathan
Capdevielle, stalks onto the set clad in dark jeans,
sneakers, and a black hooded sweatshirt.
Pacing like an animal, Capdevielle
unpacks the cofns. Inside of each are purpose-
built mannequins of twelve-year-old girls. Created
by Raphal Rubbens, Dorotha Vienne-Pollak,
and Vienne, each doll is dressed in a variation
of a schoolgirl uniform, with their own distinct
porcelain face and head of hair. Capdevielle stages
the mannequins in a variety of scenes that suggest
both the quaint (a tea party and school recital) and
obscene (isolated in back corners of the stage,
wrapped in a cloth like a corpse, blindfolded,
masked, or recklessly placed like a discarded toy).
In a post-show discussion, Vienne summarized the
piece as being "about a character (Capdevielle) who
wants to experience death without dying." To this
end, Capdevielle restages various suggestive crime
scenes, including his own death, with the aid of two
fellow performers and the dolls. Once the tableaux
are set, he inspects his work before the other
performers leave the scene or he impulsively returns
the dolls to their respective cofns. The repeated
populating and depleting of the stage constitutes the
primary action of the piece.
Two live female performers suggestively
juxtapose the articiality of the mannequins. The
nameless women played by Anja Rttgerkamp and
Anne Mousselet appear in black wigs, one dressed
as a pale-faced, femme-fatal, vampire-cheerleader
(Rttgerkamp), the other as an introvert (Mousselet),
shyly burying her hands and face within the
pockets and hood of her black sweatshirt and jeans.
Mousselet's introvert (a role originally developed and
played by the visual artist Jean-Luc Verna) functions
as a living surrogate for the dolls. She allows herself
to be staged and restaged by Capdevielle in a crime
scene complete with a pool of stage blood. When
set in tableaux, her stillness recalls the mannequins,
creating an unsettling echo between the animate and
61
Showcase Beat Le Mot's Salting the Tail, directed by Namick Mackic. Photo: Courtesy of Black Box Teater Oslo.
62
inanimate, the living and dead. Rttgerkamp, while
never playing the victim, underscores the same
tensions between the articial and real through a
series of stylized dances. Choreographed by Vienne,
Rttgerkamp executes a sequence of emotionless
gestures and dances that suggest the accelerated
short-circuiting of a mechanized doll. The sequences
seem staged to highlight the difculty of the actions
(a slow-motion split unfolds like a tutorial in physical
discipline), as well as their robotic articiality.
Together with Capdevielle, Rttgerkamp
and Mousselet represent a now common image of
disaffected youth whose conation of sex, violence,
fashion, music, and subculture breeds a sense of
both confusion and self-entitlement. It's a depiction
popularized by the lms of Larry Clark and Gus
Van Sant, but has its roots, for Vienne, in the poetry
and novels of Dennis Cooper. Cooper's text for
I Apologize consists of a half dozen prerecorded
monologues and poems read by the author and
played through the theatre's speakers during various
moments of the action. Cooper's writing is lean and
muscular, eschewing the oral for the frank in its
discussions of sex, violence, drugs, and self-loathing.
Read in Cooper's unassuming voice, the text does
not relate explicitly to the choreographed action of
the show, but rather resonates thematically through
the author's trademark tales of disaffected young
men situated in the cross hairs of sex and violence.
The distance between the text and performers,
narratively as well as practically through the use
of pre-recorded dialogue, heightens the cold and
clinical air of the piece.
Compounding the production's sense of
alienation is Peter Rehberg's sound design. Famed
experimental musician and member of electronic-
noise duo KTL, Rehberg has provided sound
designs for nearly all of Vienne's works to date. His
design for I Apologize is a handful of audio tracks
featuring a collision of drones, rumbles, clicks,
and uncategorizable sounds played at deafening
levels (ear plugs are provided upon entry to the
theatre). The density and volume of the sound
design envelops the audience and action with
the same sense of icy detachment shared by the
unnamed characters, the lifeless dolls, and Cooper's
disembodied text. At rst these elements struck me
as unintentionally disjointed, like three variations on
a theme that had not been woven together, but with
time, disjuncture reveals itself to be the subject of
the piece. This disconnect plays out most poignantly
with the dozen or so dolls, whose fully articulate
and weighted bodies occasionally slump, shift, or
collapse with the expressiveness of a human body.
In both performances of I Apologize that I attended,
dolls refused to hold a position despite Capdevielle's
efforts and on more than one occasion fall from their
tableaux after the action had moved on. The willful
behavior of these mannequins instantly draws the
viewers' attention away from the actors and back
to the dolls. The spontaneity of the dolls' provides
a temporary shot of humanity in the cold and brutal
landscape of Vienne's piece. It is a slight of hand that
Vienne pulls off beautifully: raising the dolls to a level
of human-like expression through presenting us with
what seem to be inhuman characters, choreography,
and narratives. Blurring the line between the living
and dead, I Apologize, offers us an opportunity to
glimpse the imperceptible: something like a ghost
escaping a lifeless doll.
63
Finnish director Kristian Smeds has
adapted and directed Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo for
the Finnish National Theatre. Smeds's interpretation
of the novel, while subjecting it to the inevitable
constraints of a stage performance, does perfect
justice to the original work by exploiting all the
magic that theatre has to offer. The tale of Walt the
Wonder Boy and his companions becomes a dramatic
narrative in which fact and ction merge to create
a mesmerising theatrical tour-de-force. Auster's
classically American story is seamlessly set into
the context of Finland's national stage, overlapping
layers of both history and show business. The spirit
of Auster's novel is powerfully evoked not least in
Walt's own story, but also in the thematic fabric of
the performance.
As the play opens, the audience is seated
on a purpose-built structure situated on the revolving
platform of this hundred-year-old stage. The iron re
curtain is down and the spectators nd themselves
in an environment which is probably unfamiliar to
many of them, one where theatre's sleight of hand
is seen for what it is: technical equipment and
black walls are exposed to view as the audience
is rotated beneath chandeliers and surrounded by
men in black lighting innumerable candles. The
space is designed to emphasize the notion of back-
stage. On one side we see a dressing room. Behind
it, the back wall is plastered with old posters of
the theatre's performances from the early part of
the twentieth century. Photos of former star actors
adorn the dressing tables. On the opposite side and
to the rear are makeshift platforms which function
as stages. The technicians are all visible and their
presence is felt. In one corner, a jazz trio plays at
regular intervals. When the re curtain is raised, the
fourth wall, now seen from the other side, opens up
to reveal by turns either the back of the plush red
velvet curtain or the empty auditorium, bathed in the
beautiful, shimmering glow of the house lights. All
this sets the scene for where Master Yehudi (Jukka-
Pekka Palo) meets the street urchin Walt (Tero Jartti)
Auster and Smeds
Pirkko Koski
Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo, adapted and directed by Kristin Smeds. Photo: Antti Ahonen.
64
and strikes a bargain with him, promising to teach
him to y. This is where Walt undergoes his painful
initiation into the art of ying, as the revolving stage
spins to follow his running trajectory. Walt learns to
levitate, and gradually, after an initial set back at a
country fair, wins over his unseen ctional audience,
as well as his real one. We witness his kidnapping by
Uncle Slim and his subsequent escape. The rst act
traces Walt's rite of passage, which is enhanced by
the colorful characters of Mrs. Witherspoon, Aesop,
and Mother Sioux.
The theatre's locality places its own
demands on the narrative. Aesop's character is
played by Esa-Matti Long, a white male Finn who
doesn't even pretend to be African, but the racist
banter of Auster's narrow minded Walt is still
included in the script. One could speculate about
the casting: perhaps designed to avoid any undue
connotations of contemporary Finnish immigration
issues, or possibly determined by the fear of over-
exoticizing the character in a society with little
historical experience of ethnicity. Practicalities are
a more likely explanation. Aesop's role remains a
very minor one in this play, and Long plays many
other roles as well. Mother Sioux is played by the
ofcially retired actress Tea Ista, who is almost as
illustrious an institution as the Finnish National
Theatre itself. A picture of nostalgic glamour against
the backdrop of the set's dressing room, Ista is
thoroughly captivating as she delivers a monologue
in which she weaves her memories of touring
America with Buffalo Bill with familiar references
to Finland's entertainment history. Kristina Halttu
plays the striking Mrs. Witherspoon, whose tale is
explored more thoroughly in the second act.
By the time we reach the interval, Walt is
already a master of his art but his levitational skills
are only presented in a comic or implicit way. From
its vantage point on stage, the audience witnesses
his rst failed attempt to perform at a country fair,
sabotaged by a drunk, as well as his unfortunate
but hilarious preparations "back-stage" for his later
successful performances. These ostensibly take place
on the other side of the closed red curtain, beyond
which we can hear the enthusiastic applause of a
ctional audience in the Finnish National Theatre's
real auditorium. Likewise we are given only a small
hint of Walt's ying skills when he escapes from
Mr. Vertigo. Photo: Antti Ahonen.
65
Uncle Slim, as the latter rambles on to us with his
back turned to the eeing boy. Before the end of
the act, Walt nevertheless returns to tell us he has
a dream. As the fullment of dreams is one of the
main themes of Smeds' production, Walt's dream is
promptly fullled. The revolving stage turns to place
the audience facing the auditorium. The curtain rises
and a substantial choir, named the real KOM Theatre
choir, consisting of all the actors and technicians in
the production, enters to sing the following words
plucked from Auster's novel: "Shut your eyes / stop
being yourself / let yourself evaporate / feel your
soul pouring out of you / that's where it begins /
like so / that's where it begins / the way to wonder."
Walt, or rather the actor Tero Jartti, dances a brief,
awkward ballet to the accompaniment of the choir.
The act comes to an end and the smiling audience
is sent off to the interval to ponder the meaning of
dreams.
The rst act bursts with energy and its
progress is fuelled by the dynamic action of the
central narrative. The scenes are highly imaginative
and full of irresistible humor. After the interval,
the narrative pace is calmer, as the focus shifts
to the love story between the Master and Mrs.
Witherspoon. The shift in tempo benets the overall
rhythm of the production. The role of the musical
trio gains importance, as their playing occasionally
takes center stage. The audience is shepherded
around: after the interval, the audience returns to
sit in the main auditorium; later the spectators are
invited back on stage but this time the seating is
placed around the revolve. Towards the end of the
second act, the audience rises and congregates,
standing shoulder to shoulder, in the middle of the
stage. The relationship drama itself does not always
live up to the complex artistry of the staging, and for
those unfamiliar with Auster's novel, this sequence
may seem like a collection of unrelated visual
images. The tale is not as multifaceted as the rst
half of the play, which can also be seen as a study
of the trials and rewards of an artist's calling. The
concluding scene nevertheless draws all the different
themes and plot lines together. In a nal monologue,
Master Yehudi, perched on a stool and surrounded
by the closely packed audience, tells the story of
his own demise, as the revolve starts to turn slowly
once again. The curtain rises and there, high above
the empty seats of the softly lit auditorium, Walt the
Wonder Boy oats in the air, a mystically beautiful
vision in slow motion, swaying to the jazz melody
played by the orchestra. The stage revolves until the
close of the play.
In Smeds's Mr. Vertigo, the audience is
initiated into the process of artistic creation: the
physical struggle, the overcoming of self, the
burden of stardom. There is a cyclical principle to
the production, both in the circle which turns on the
stage and in the way the ever increasing rings of
history and the mind are explored. The line between
reality and ction is revealed, blurred and erased.
The production not only portrays the characters but
also tells us about them, about their dreams, efforts
and moments of triumph. We are simultaneously in
Mr. Vertigo's America and in the Finnish National
Theatre, and paradoxically in this powerfully
localized interpretation, locality loses importance.
The Finnish National Theatre's production of Mr.
Vertigo is a form of director's theatre, but one which
in turn relies on perfectly balanced ensemble work.
Tero Jartti as Walt wins the audience over from
the moment he delivers his very rst line, and the
strenuous physicality of his performance pushes
beyond the boundaries. Jukka-Pekka Palo as Master
Yehudi manages to convey both a hard-nut trainer
and a man of mystery. The ve-strong cast make
a tight team. Set designer Kati Lukka, video and
sound designer Ville Hyvnen, and lighting designer
Pietu Pietiinen have created an enthralling world.
Auli Turtiainen's costumes add the nishing touch.
The outstanding musicians, Verneri Pohjola, Aki
Rissanen, and Joonas Riippa support, intensify, and
accompany the action.
Questions, and even doubts, are often
raised as to the wisdom of adapting major epic
novels for the stage, although perhaps less so in
Finland, where stage adaptations of prose works
are a long established part of the Finnish theatre
tradition. Most often however, such adaptations take
the form of a linear retelling of events, a depiction
of the narrative tale. Kristian Smeds's work belongs
to a different school of dramatization technique,
of which the previous generation's Jouko Turkka
was one of the most signicant radical promoters
and reformers. In the 1980s, Jouko Turkka's stage
adaptations broke the linear time line and placed
the emphasis on theme in simultaneous action and
rapid-cut scenes. In his later work, he often exploited
a carnivalistic blend of ction and reality. Smeds's
form of expression clearly descends from the Turkka
tradition, but it is more theatrical, and parallels can
also be drawn with a number of other directors.
Smeds has not relinquished the epic, but his style of
storytelling exploits a wide range of theatrical forms.
This autumn Kristian Smeds was a recipient
of the prestigious XII Europe Prize New Theatrical
66
Realities award, alongside leading European
directors Viliam Doolomansk, Katie Mitchell,
Andrey Moguchiy, and two theatrical companies.
It is the rst time the prize has been awarded to an
individual artist from a Nordic country. In its press
release, the prize committee praised Smeds for his
"wild, energetic" productions, which are "lled with
many distinctive voices and take full advantage of a
wide variety of theatrical techniques. His language
is rich and colorful, but at the same time natural.
In Smeds's world, the personal and the political are
indistinguishable, and his work is characterized by a
deep concern for human beings." The Finnish writer
Outi Nyytj has described Smeds' productions
as "real stories in theatrical space." The pieces for
which Smeds has gained his reputation have shown
uninching commitment to the social issues of the
day, and it is probably for this reason that they have
received such widespread national recognition. His
postmodern interpretation of the Finnish classic
novel The Unknown Soldier, which he directed for
the Finnish National Theatre in 2007, sparked one of
the most intense public debates on theatre to be seen
in this country.
Mr. Vertigo displays the usual Smeds
credentials, but it also breaks new ground in his
directorial style. This production does not address
socio-political issues, and almost seems to turn in on
itselfon the world of theatre and performance
as if its message were intended only for the
cognoscenti. However, Finnish society does not
perceive theatre as a pastime for the eliteon the
contrary; historically theatre has borne enormous
social relevance. Discussing theatre is a hobby of
the masses, and everyone is an expert. Likewise, it
would be difcult to dene Auster's reading public as
limited to a particular section of society in Finland.
Mr. Vertigo may deviate from Smeds's characteristic
polemic on topical political issues, but it has still
managed to stir up strong feelings of astonishment
and admiration, among both theatre-makers and
theatre-goers.
67
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center,
is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history, and dramatic literature. He is the
1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American
Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory
Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. In 2005 he
received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. His most recent book is Theatre is More Beautiful
than War (Iowa, 2009).
KEVIN BYRNE teaches at Baruch College and LaGuardia Community College in New York City. His most recent
article for Western European Stages was on Frank Castorfs adaptation of Kean/Hamletmachine.
MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts at Queen Mary University of London and co-editor
of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her books include Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the
Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (MUP 2003), Federico Garca Lorca (Routledge, 2008), three co-edited volumes
for Manchester University Press and two collections of translations for Methuen. Her most recent co-edited volume,
Contemporary European Theatre Directors, was published by Routledge in 2010.
ANDREW FRIEDMAN is a Theatre PhD candidate at CUNYs Graduate Center. He co-authored the article Let
Our Freak Flags Fly: Shrek the Musical and the Branding of Diversity, which appeared in the May 2010 issue of
Theatre Journal. Most recently, he presented Keeping Time with Culture: Playing Gombrowiczs Operetta Across
Borders at the Graduate Centers 2010 (Re)Making (Re)presentation conference. He teaches theatre history and
acting at The City College of New York.
PIRKKO KOSKI was the professor responsible for the Department of Theatre Research in the Institute of Art
Research at the University of Helsinki, and the director of the Institute of Art Research until the end of 2007. Her
research has concentrated on performance analysis, historiography, and Finnish theatre and its history. Besides
scholarly articles, she has published several books in these elds, for example Kansan teatteri 1-2 (1986-1987),
Teatterinjohtaja ja aika (1992), Kaikessa mukanaHella Wuolijoki ja hnen nytelmns (2000), Strindberg ja
suomalainen teatteri (2005), The Dynamic World of Finnish Theatre (with S. E. Wilmer, 2006), and The Global
Meets the Local in Performance (edited with Melissa Sihra, 2010). She has also edited anthologies about Finnish
theatre and volumes of scholarly articles translated into Finnish. Pirkko Koski has written (together with a research
group) on the history of the Lahti City Theatre (2005) and (with Misa Palander) of the Helsinki City Theatre (2007).
YVONNE SHAFER has taught at several universities in this country, in Germany, China, and Belgium where she
had a Fulbright Professorship. She has written articles and books on Ibsen and ONeill as well as articles on theatre
architecture in this country and abroad. Her book American Women Playwrights 1900-1950 analyzes the work of
early women who were successful in the American theatre. Her book on August Wilson provides information about
his plays and the critical and popular response to his work. The Plays the Thing, written with Marvin Carlson,
presents coverage of the theatre from the ancient Greeks up to the present. She lives in Historic New Castle,
Delaware.
JOAN TEMPLETON is Professor Emerita of Long Island University. She has also taught at the University of
Paris (Sorbonne), the University of Tours, and the University of Limoges. She has published articles on Ibsen
and other modern dramatists in PMLA, Modern Drama, Scandinavian Studies, Ibsen Studies, and other journals
and is the author of three books, including Ibsens Women (Cambridge UP, 1997; paperback 2001) and Munchs
Ibsen: A Painters Visions of a Playwright (University of Washington Press, 2008). She has served as the President
of the International Ibsen Committee and the President of the Ibsen Society of America and edits Ibsen News
and Comment. She has been an NEH Research Fellow, a two-time Fulbright Fellow, and a two-time American-
Scandinavian Foundation Fellow.
Contributors
68
PHYLLIS ZATLIN is Professor Emerita of Spanish and former coordinator of translator-interpreter training at
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She served as Associate Editor of Estreno from 1992-2001 and as
editor of the translation series ESTRENO Plays from 1998-2005. Her translations that have been published and/
or staged include plays by J.L. Alonso de Santos, Jean-Paul Daumas, Eduardo Manet, Francisco Nieva, Itziar
Pascual, Paloma Pedrero, and Jaime Salom. Her most recent book is Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation:
A Practitioners View.
69
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently
begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community, an
important area within that tradition is still under-represented in
existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the drama from the
Northwest of Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb.
We hope that this rst English collection of drama from this region
will stimulate further interest in the varied and stimulating drama
being produced here. It engages, in a fascinating and original way,
with such important current issues as the struggle for the rights of
women and workers, post-colonial tensions between Maghreb and
Europe, and the challenges faced in Europe by immigrants from
the Arab world.
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four
leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfq Al-Hakims King Oedipus,
Ali Ahmed Bakathirs The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salims The Comedy
of Oedipus, and Walid Ikhlasis Oedipus as well as Al-Hakims preface
to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating
Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only
recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope
that this collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
This volume contains four modern plays from the Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloulas The Veil
and Fatima Gallaires House of Wives, both Algerian, Jalila Baccars Araberlin from Tunisia,
and Tayeb Saddikis The Folies Berbers from Morocco.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
70
Quick Change: Theatre Essays and Translations
Written and translated by Daniel Gerould
Quick Change is full of surprises. It is a nicely seasoned tossed-salad of a
book concocted by an ironic cookmeister with a sometimes wild imagination.
And how many quick changes has he wrought in this book of 28 pieces.
The writings range from translations of letters and plays to short commen-
taries to fully-developed essays. The topics bounce from Mayakovsky to
Shakespeare, Kantor to Lunacharsky, Herodotus to Geroulds own play,
Candaules, Commissioner, Gorky to Grotowski, Shaw to Mroek, Briusov to
Witkacy. From ancient Greeks to Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe,
from pre-revolutionary Russia to the Soviet Union, from France and England
to Poland. From an arcane discussion of medicine in theatre a libertine
puppet play from 19th century France.

Richard Schechner
Quick Change: Theatre Essays and Translations, a volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould
from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. It includes es-
says about Polish, Russian and French theatre, theories of melodrama and comedy, historical and medical simu-
lations, Symbolist drama, erotic puppet theatre, comedie rosse at the Grand Guignol, Witkacys Doubles, Villiers
de LIsle Adam, Mrozek, Battleship Potemkin, and other topics. Translations include Andrzej Bursas Count Ca-
gliostros Animals, Henry Monniers The Student and the Tart, and Oscar Mtniers Little Bugger and Meat-Ticket.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
71
Barcelona Plays:
A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet
i Jornet won his frst drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-three years old, and in recent
decades he has become Catalonias leading exponent of thematically challenging and struc-
turally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into
fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Llusa Cunill arrived on the
scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The
actor-director-playwright Pau Mir is a member of yet another generation that is now attract-
ing favorable critical attention.
Playwrights Before the Fall:
Eastern European Drama in Times of Revolution
Edited by Daniel Gerould.
Playwrights Before the Fall: Eastern European Drama in Times of Revolution contains
translations of Portrait by Sawomir Mroek (PL); Military Secret by Duan Jovanovi
(SI); Chicken Head by Gyrgy Spir (HU); Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Pit and the Rope
by Karel Steigerwald (CZ); and Horses at the Window by Matei Viniec (RO).
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
72
Claudio Tolcachirs Timbre 4
Translated and with an introduction by Jean Graham-Jones
Claudio Tolcachirs Timbre 4 is one of the most exciting companies to emerge from Bue-
nos Airess vibrant contemporary theatre scene. The Coleman Familys Omission and
Third Wing, the two plays that put Timbre 4 on the international map, are translated by
Jean Graham-Jones and Elisa Legon.
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and
prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels,
and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout Europe.
From the time he was af liated with the international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with
pornographic flm star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium,
Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and formidable. Claus
takes on all the taboos of his times.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.segalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
73
Czech Plays: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the frst English-language anthology of Czech plays
written after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. These seven works explore sex and gender identity,
ethnicity and violence, political corruption, and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and
diverse styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on by democracy and
globalization with characteristic humor and intelligence.
Jan Fabre Books:
I am a Mistake - 7 Works for the Theatre
The Servant of Beauty - 7 Monologues
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre has produced works as a performance artist,
theatre maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual artist. Our two
Fabre books include: I am a Mistake (2007), Etant Donnes (2000), Little Body on the
Wall (1996),
Je suis sang (2001), Angel of Death (2003), and others.
Jan Fabre: Servant of Beauty
and I am a Mistake - 7 Works for the Theatre
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
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Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
74
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraf
This volume represents the rst anthology of new Romanian Drama published in the United States and
introduces American readers to compelling playwrights and plays that address resonant issues of a post-
totalitarian society on its way toward democracy and a new European identity. includes the plays: Stop
The Tempo by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera Ion,
Romania 21 by tefan Peca, and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collaboration, bringing together four of the most important
contemporary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-based directors and their
ensembles. Throughout a period of one year, playwrights, translator, directors, and actors worked together to deliver
four English-language world premieres at Performance Space 122 in the fall of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the Snow by
Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Len; Panic by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122 Production,
an initiative of Saln Volcn, with the support of Instituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of Argentina in New
York.
Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and edited by Jean Graham-Jones
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
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Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
75
Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty works for the
stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan theatre
in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling tragedy-within-a-play, and Stages, with
its monological recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important
plays. They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic
form and treatment of provocative themes have made him a major fgure in contemporary
European theatre.
Josep M. Benet i Jornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of Witkiewiczs most important plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlesh, Dainty Shapes
and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub Sonata, as well as two of his theoretical essays,
Theoretical Introduction and A Few Words About the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of
Pure Form.
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and continues the vein of dream and grotesque fantasy exemplied
by the late Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the
surrealists and Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the dramatists of
the Absurd. . . . It is high time that this major playwright should become better known in
the English-speaking world.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
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76
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive catalogue of New York
City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the indexed volume, each facility is briey
described including an outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most
entries include opening hours, contact information and websites. The listings are grouped as follows:
Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language
Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and Other.
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, students, artists, and general readers interested in the theory and
practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and attracted
to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is an essential guide
and resource, providing authors, titles, and publication data for over a thousand books and articles devoted to this
most elusive of genres.
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Dufy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
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77
The Heirs of Molire
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the death of Molire to the French
Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Franois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nricault
Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chausse, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-
Louis Laya. Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of the Molire inheritance, from comedy of character through the highly popular
sentimental comedy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Molire tradition for more
contemporary political ends.
This volume contains four of Pixrcourts most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or Jafar and Zaida, The
Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The
Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodiers Introduction to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixrcourts plays
and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, Melodrama, and Final Refections on Melodrama.
Pixrcourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning efects, and brought the classic situations of
fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th
century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Pixrcourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : The Graduate Center Foundation Inc.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
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Price US $20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)