WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 22, Number 3 Spring 2010

Editor
Marvin Carlson
Contributing Editors
Christopher Balme Harry Carlson
Miriam D'Aponte Maria M. Delgado
Marion P. Holt Barry Daniels
Glenn Loney Yvonne Shafer
Daniele Vianello Phyllis Zatlin
Editorial Staff
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2010
ISSN # 1050-1991
1
Juan Mayorga. Photo: Courtesy Juan Mayorga.
Rayya El Zein, Editorial Assistant Sascha Just, Managing Editor
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
Tori Amoscato, Circulation Manager
2
To the Reader
Instead of a special focus sometimes seen in our winter issue, we are here offering a variety of articles
on recent productions from a variety of Western European theatre centers: London, Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona,
along with a festival report from Alicante, an important Spanish festival we have not previously covered. For
upcoming issues we welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western
Europe, with particular emphasis on summer festivals for our fall issue. 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.
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
Volume 22, Number 1
Mother Courage in London and Berlin
Calderon in the West
Local and Global Shakespeares: Bond and Troilus and Cressida
in London, 2009
Barcelona Theatre 2010: From Santa Teresa to Naples
via Cambridge and Chicago
Alicante's Seventeenth Showcase of Contemporary Spanish Theatre,
November 6-15, 2009
Stemann and the StockyardsBrecht's St. Joan in Berlin
New Productions at the Deutsches Theater
Art. Ricercar
Contributors
Spring 2010
5
11
15
21
33
39
43
49
55
Marvin Carlson
Marvin Carlson
Dan Venning
Maria M. Delgado
Iride Lamartina-Lens
Sascha Just
Marvin Carlson
Manuel Garca Martnez
4
Carmen-Maja Antoni as Mother Courage at the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Claus Peymann. Photo: Monika Ritterhaus.
Happening to be in both Berlin and
London in a week in October when each city was
offering major revivals of Brecht's Mother Courage
and her Children, I could not resist the opportunity
to compare the two productions. The London pro-
duction was the more recent, having opened at the
National Theatre in mid-September in a production
featuring some of the most familiar names in the
contemporary English-language theatre, directed by
Deborah Warner, starring her frequent collaborator
Fiona Shaw in a new translation by Tony Kushner.
The production, designed by Tom Pye, was a spec-
tacular one, taking full advantage of the monumen-
tal technical facilities of the Olivier Theatre, but
whenever possible exposing the workings of all this
machinery to the audience, in the spirit of Brecht, a
device which only added to its impressiveness.
When the audience enters the theatre, the
essentially bare stage is already a beehive of activi-
ty. Stagehands and technicians are everywhere,
moving about set pieces and raising and lowering
flats and Brechtian banner-titles from various parts
of the production. Rushing about among them,
apparently serving as stage manager, is a thin figure
dressed as a contemporary soldier (Gary Sefton),
sending out continual messages by cell phone, paus-
ing only to imitate the sounds of battle in an onstage
microphone, to step on a floor button that creates a
startling and believable sound of an explosion, or
making irreverent and sometimes obscene shadow
pictures on a rear wall in the beam of an onstage
floodlight. Sefton will play the Sergeant in the open-
ing scene but he will more prominently appear
throughout the play as part of the introduction of
5
Mother Courage in London and Berlin
Marvin Carlson
Fiona Shaw as Mother Courage at the National Theatre London, directed by Deborah Warner. Photo: Anthony Luvera.
each scene, giving stage directions into an onstage
microphone, often punctuated by the explosions he
sets off with his nearby foot pedal. The introduction
of each scene is similar, but complex. First one or
more Brechtian banners appear from the flies, with
the basic Brechtian introduction to the scene in
black cursive writing on a white background.
Normally these are simultaneously read by an off-
stage voice (Gore Vidal) and then Sefton at the
microphone adds further descriptive details that lead
directly into the scene. As the dress of the soldiers
(costumes by Ruth Myers) and the mixing in of
apparently real stage crews suggests, the feel of the
production is strongly contemporary, although the
specific references to names, places, and dates
remain as Brecht planned them.
Scene changes are, of course, done as
much as possible in full view of the audience, and
are accomplished by simple means such as dropping
from the flies curtains representing building facades
(often with the name of the building painted on the
side or on an accompanying banner). The powerful
opening sequence is typical of the combination of
stage magic and revealing of the machinery which
characterizes the production. Workmen come out on
stage and set up pedestrian barriers as one might see
on a street around an area in stage center. Mother
Courage's wagon is then rolled into this area and
sinks out of sight into what is now a large pit.
During this, banners from various later scenes are
raised and lowered as if the stage crew is testing
them out. Finally the show proper is ready to begin.
The Mother Courage banner drops into place, there
is a surge of music, and the wagon rises triumphant-
ly out of the pit, surrounded by billowing clouds of
smoke and surmounted by Fiona Shaw as Mother
Courage, seated and waving triumphantly from a
perch atop the wagon. The wagon then circles the
stage, with new legends on the side each time it
passes closest to the audience, introducing the major
Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, directed by Deborah Warner. Photo: Anthony Luvera.
6
characters rather in the style of film credits.
Aside from the overall exposed style of the
production, the most striking element was the origi-
nal music by Duke Special and his band. Duke
Special (real name Peter Wilson) is a highly distinc-
tive songwriter and performer from Belfast.
Although his work has a very contemporary rock
feel, it is also strongly influenced by the vaudeville
and music hall tradition, and therefore mixes ballad,
theatre, and contemporary experimental sounds in a
way that, to my ears, seemed an almost perfect
choice for a contemporary Brecht production,
although most London critics complained of this
"desecration" of the Brecht tradition, and some con-
sidered it the worst element in a totally miscon-
ceived production. Duke Special himself often
appeared on stage as a kind of ballad singer, either
solo or singing along with the major characters. His
warm, mellifluous voice counterpointed both the
jagged edges of many of the songs, but also his
striking androgynous appearance, with long dread-
locks, eyeliner, and costumes in a style he has
described as "hobo chic." While Duke Special
roamed about on stage, his five-member-band was
placed in small elevated side balconies. These, all
regular accompanists to his work, were headed by
percussionist Chip Baily, who often adds such
devices as cheese graters and egg whisks to his
instruments.
Fiona Shaw gives a bravura performance
as the indomitable Courage, but this very power also
prevented her from being as sympathetic as she
might have been in the more delicate, half-romantic
scenes with the chaplain (Stephen Kennedy) or the
famous silent scene over the body of her son Swiss
Cheese (Harry Melling). Her cocky self-assurance
Brecht's Mother Courage, directed by Deborah Warner. Photo: Anthony Warner.
7
(called swagger by some critics) gave something of
a monolithic feel to the interpretation, and did not
offer much opening for real emotional interplay
with the other characters. Kennedy reportedly
stepped into the role of the chaplain at the very last
minute and presented a warm and sympathetic,
though occasionally over-quiet reading. He was,
however, nicely balanced by the more outgoing,
self-assured, even arrogant cook of Martin
Marquez. The two sons were also nicely contrasted,
Melling played a somewhat heavy, oafish, and slow,
but good-hearted peasant with Clifford Samuel pre-
senting an Eilif who was angular, wily, and alert to
the main chance. Sophie Stone rounded out the fam-
ily as the mute daughter Kattrin, the most warm and
human of the group.
Kushner's translation, already familiar to
New York audiences from the Central Park produc-
tion of 2006, is faithful, tough, and serviceable, and
provided solid lyrics for the Duke Special songs.
The fragmentary nature of the play provides a chal-
lenge to any producer, and some scenes seemed
over-extended or repetitive, but the power of Shaw,
the drive of the songs, and the bustling activity of
the always present stage crew, for this viewer at
least, made this a memorable theatre experience and
a solid revitalization of a modern classic.
On the whole, I was much less impressed
by the current Mother Courage at the Berliner
Ensemble, which I saw just four days later. Unlike
the National production, of course, this production
could hardly be seen without some awareness of its
historical context. Although the play was premiered
in Zurich and presented several times in Germany
before the Berliner Ensemble was actually founded,
it was the first play produced by that Ensemble, in
1949. And that productionstarring Helen Weigel,
with music by Paul Dessauhas since become one
of the most famous stagings of the twentieth centu-
ry. When the current director of the theatre, Claus
Mother Courage, directed by Claus Peymann. Photo: Monika Ritterhaus.
8
Peymann, came in 2000, he announced his intention
to move the house from its reputation as essentially
a repository of Brechtian memories to one more
attuned to contemporary political concerns. In the
event, this project has met with mixed success and
Peymann has found Brecht essential to bringing
audiences to his theatre. Accordingly he has staged
several Brecht works, including a new interpretation
of Mother Courage in 2005 as part of the Berliner
Ensemble's contribution to the celebrations sur-
rounding the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht's death.
I found the Peymann Mother Courage con-
siderably less interesting than the Warner one. It
seemed on the whole rather tired and predictable,
and this was not primarily because it has now been
several years in the repertoire. Even at the time of its
opening in 2005, it was on the whole indifferently or
negatively received by most German reviewers. Of
course, Peymann faced a huge challenge in restag-
ing one of the most iconic stage works of the centu-
ry, and a slavish imitation of Brecht would have
simply called attention to this problem. The obvious
artistic choice then, would seem to have been a total
reconceptualization of the production, at least as
original as Warner's current production in London
and ideally even further from the original concept.
This would hardly have been an unheard-of
approach in the modern German theatre, where
departures from performance tradition of classic
works are far more frequent and far more radical
than would even be thinkable on the Anglo-Saxon
stage.
Peymann comes from a generation, how-
ever, that tended to put such youthful high jinks
behind them some decades ago and who have
viewed the deconstructive antics of the new drama-
tists of the last quarter century with disdain and
sometimes outright antagonism (Peter Stein and the
late Peter Zadek both have shown much the same
attitude). To this probably can be added some feel-
ing of respect for the founder and artistic patron
saint of the theatre. For whatever reason, Peymann's
directorial departures from Brecht were mostly
involved with a much less radical updating than the
Warner project, such as putting contemporary rub-
ber wheels on the famous wagon and signaling
Mother Courage's increase in prosperity by mount-
ing a neon sign saying "Courage and Co." atop the
wagon. Instead of the sometimes shockingly con-
temporary, reworked musical score offered in the
Warner production, Peymann kept faithfully to the
score created for the original production by Paul
Dessau, which is still powerful, but also a bit dated
and perhaps overly familiar and comfortable. The
famous basically empty circular stage was retained,
with four high-up banks of lights, rather suggesting
the illumination of a night-time sporting event,
although Brecht's equally famous signs were gone,
and with nothing to replace them, that element of
the texture of the whole was totally lost. Indeed, the
wagon moved about very little, often remaining in
the same position for a whole series of scenes,
adding to a general feeling of stasis. Despite this,
rather oddly, there was a pause and a darkening of
the stage after almost every scene, which distinctly
added to the slow pace and dissipated any sense of
movement. Frank Hnig created the scenery, Karl-
Ernst Herrmann the lighting. The two striking
departures from the overall sameness of the stage
picture came in the fourth scene, where one side of
the small, rather tacky wagon was opened like a
canvas roof toward the audience to protect the
actors from a brief, but torrential rain from the flies,
and in the scene of Kattrin's drumming, where a
towering, rather precarious perch was erected for
her on the left side of the stage.
Carmen-Maja Antoni manages to hold her
own against the powerful memories of Helene
Weigel. Now in her sixties, she has been a key mem-
ber of the Berliner Ensemble since 1976, and indeed
at the age of eighteen (in 1964) performed Gruscha
in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, earning the praise
of both Weigel and Dessau. Obviously she has none
of the youthful insouciance that Fiona Shaw brings
to the role, but her aura of the tough, ironic survivor
makes on the whole, a richer, deeper, and more
nuanced Courage. On the whole the acting, espe-
cially in the leading roles, is much more impressive
than the rather lackluster staging. Antoni is ably
supported by two other pillars of the theatre, Martin
Seifert (the Chaplain) who has had a major film
career in addition to playing a wide variety of lead-
ing roles at the Berliner Ensemble since he joined
the company in 1978, and Manfred Karge (the
Cook), who has performed in most of the leading
theatres of Germany but who began his profession-
al career at the Berliner Ensemble at the special
invitation of Helene Weigel. His fleshy, cynical
Cook makes an excellent foil both for the softer and
gentler Chaplain of Seifert and for the determinedly
pragmatic Courage of Antoni. Christina Drechsler,
who, like Karge, moved directly from acting school
to the Ensemble, gave a convincing and warmly
moving portrayal of the mute Kattrin. Her two sib-
9
lings, played by other young members of the
Ensemble Winfried Goss (Eilif) and Swiss Cheese
(Michael Rothmann) were adequate, but distinctly
less differentiated or developed than their British
counterparts. Most of the rest of the large company
played in a rather cartoonish exaggerated style
meant, I suppose, to act as political or social satire,
but which reduced most roles to caricature and often
did not really seem a part of the same nuanced and
more realistic approach of the leading characters.
Unquestionably, the richness and interest
of these leading roles made the Berlin production
well worth seeing, quite aside from the interest of
witnessing this play in the "House of Brecht," but on
the whole I felt the Warner production was a more
successful attempt in finding a Mother Courage for
today.
10
Although not so rare as in New York, pro-
ductions of Spanish Golden Age plays are suffi-
ciently uncommon in London to make the October
offering of Caldern's Life is a Dream at the
Donmar Warehouse a rather special event. Designer
Angela Davies, who has worked in a wide range of
major theatres in the United Kingdom, though not
frequently at the Donmar, created a simple but pow-
erful setting in this theatre's intimate but challenging
space, consisting of a large rear wall and a basically
square acting area surrounded on three sides by
shallow seating on the ground and balcony levels.
The massive back way is covered in roughly tex-
tured gold, fading off at the bottom into dark earth
colors, only dimly illuminated. Aside from the royal
throne, in the court scenes there is no onstage
scenery, although over the stage is a large golden
circle reminiscent of the hanging for lamps in many
Spanish cathedrals. In the center of this circle hangs
an elaborately wrought gold lamp of vaguely
Moorish design.
This touch of the Moorish is also felt in the
striking opening of both acts, when out of the dark-
ness comes a wordless chant with an Arabic flavor,
created by a striking figure otherwise not seen in the
production, who appears in dim light, his torso
naked, behind the bars of a cage located in the right
hand side wall of the theatre, next to the rear wall
and elevated above the stage. Ansuman Biswas, the
composer-musician-actor who performs this role,
recently appeared in a performance piece with an
uncanny resemblance to this Calderon work. In The
11
Calderon in the West End
Marvin Carlson
Dominic West in Pedro Caldern de la Barca's Life is a Dream, directed by Jonathan Munby. Photo: Courtesy Donmar Warehouse.
Manchester Hermit he endured solitary confinement
in a Gothic tower for forty days and nights.
Although his solo is the most striking use of music
in this production, composer and sound designer
Dominic Haslam provided effective underscoring
for much of the play, and in certain scenes, most
notably when King Basilio, magisterially interpret-
ed by Malcolm Storry, recounts to the court the
prophecy concerning his ill-fated son. Here the
sound score becomes almost a second voice, power-
fully adding to the sequence.
This is not the first play of this year to be
mounted by director Jonathan Munby. Washington
DC residents will recall his production of The Dog
in the Manger, and his credits also include Golden
Age plays for the RSC and the Watermill, Newbury,
but his range has been broad, including English and
European classics as well as work by Caryl
Churchill and Michael Frayne. His staging of Life is
a Dream is on the whole effective and straightfor-
ward, relying largely upon the considerable acting
skills of his company. There are a few distinct direc-
torial touches, however, and these provide some of
the three most memorable moments of the produc-
tion, indeed raising some desire for more of this sort
of visual elaboration. Most effective is the striking
opening, when after the Moorish chant Rosaura
(Kate Fleetwood) is carried in by three extras, serv-
ing as her horse. In slow motion pantomime she is
thrown from the "horse" and left lying center
stagean almost balletic sequence that leads beau-
tifully into the difficult opening speech. A similar
pantomime sequence opens the second act, which
begins with the comic servant Clarion (Lloyd
Hutchinson) in prison. Director Munby has taken a
section of the nightmare Clarion recounts, hooded
inquisition figures bearing torches and crucifixes
and writhing flagellants, to present a living fresco of
horror against the now blood-red rear wall. The pan-
tomime introduction of the battle that follows is
considerably less effective, suggesting more a musi-
cal chorus line routine than a military engagement,
but these added sequences on the whole are quite
effective.
Caldern de la Barca's Life is A Dream. Photo: Courtesy Donmar Warehouse.
12
Dominic West is extremely successful in
the range of emotional tones required of the tortured
prince Segismundo, from the anguished prisoner in
the tower to the imperious restored monarch, to the
philosophical and repentant ruler of the conclusion.
His adolescent insouciance, hopping up to perch on
the arms of the throne with his feet in its seat, was
particularly effective. Kate Fleetwood's Rosaura
was an excellent match for him in range and con-
viction, and it was a real disappointment when as
part of his maturity, Segismundo represses his love
for her and bestows her on the clearly inferior
Astolfo. Fleetwood's own disappointment at this
turn of events is clear, and provides at least some
consolation to the audience. David Horovitch was
very effective as the trusted councilor Clotaldo, and
the articulation of his own struggles with conflicting
duties and obligations was excellently done. Lloyd
Hutchinson was an engaging and clearly crowd-
pleasing Clarion, whose down-to earth reactions, in
the manner of Falstaff or Sancho Panza, provided an
effective counterpoint to the more refined and
abstract preoccupations of his social superiors.
Rupert Evans as Astolfo and Sharon Small as
Estrella, the nephew and niece of Basilio, looked
elegant enough and moved beautifully in the hand-
some costumes created for them by Angela Davies,
but neither one brought much passion to these
admittedly more subsidiary roles. Estrella in partic-
ular seemed merely a marker in the dramatic action,
and although Calderon clearly bears some responsi-
bility for this, it would be interesting to see a direc-
tor or actress make a bit more of the role.
The elegant and philosophical literary style
Calderon here employs provides a strong challenge
for the translator and Helen Edmundson, who has
often worked with great success with Shared
Experience, has risen well to the challenge, provid-
ing a small and sometimes elegant rendering, with
enough rhythmic passages and internal rhymes to at
least suggest the musicality of the original. In the
most challenging passages, such as the play's most
famous passage on dreams, even greater poetic
power was needed, but on the whole the translation
served cast and author well.
13
Bond directed by Po Shen Lu. Photo: Courtesy Bang Zi Opera Company.
14
In September 2009, the biannual British
Shakespeare Association conference, entitled
"Local/Global Shakespeares," was held in London.
The sponsors were King's College London in con-
junction with Shakespeare's Globe. Keynote speak-
ers included (among others) such diverse and
notable figures as Andrew Gurr, Rustom Bharucha,
Stanley Wells, and Edward Hall. During the confer-
ence, I attended two Shakespearean performances in
London: on Friday, 11 September 2009, I saw Bond,
a Chinese Opera adaptation of The Merchant of
Venice, presented especially for the conference, and
on Saturday, 12 September, I went to see the local
production of Troilus and Cressida at the recon-
structed Shakespeare's Globe. It was my first time
visiting this fascinating and exciting theatre. By jux-
taposing the global production of touring artists
with the local London tourist attraction, I was able
to see two wildly different approaches to what it
means to interpret Shakespeare's problem comedies
for performance.
The Taiwan Bang Zi Opera Company
staged the trial scene from Bond, an adaptation of
The Merchant of Venice by Cheng-Hsi Perng
(Distinguished Professor of Drama and English at
National Taiwan University) and Fang Chen
(Professor of Chinese Theatre at National Taiwan
Normal University) in the Greenwood, a small
proscenium theatre often used for King's College
student productions. The production was directed by
Po Shen Lu, who teaches directing at National
Taiwan University and was trained at London
University Holloway.
The stage, following conventions of
Chinese Opera , was mostly bare. The traditional
saying describing the set for Chinese Opera is "one
table, two chairs." These few properties can be reor-
ganized to serve as a variety of locales. For the Bang
Zi production, to represent a courtroom there were
four chairs and no table; the backdrop was a large
red cloth embroidered with a Chinese dragon. The
production began with a live percussionist beating
on drums as music came from the speakersthe
small touring budget had meant that not all the
musicians were able to come to London.
At the opening, most of the characters in
the scene were already onstage: Master An
(Antonio, played by Ms. Hai-Shan Chu), Master Ba
(Bassanio, played by Ms. Chian-Hua Liu), Gua Nuo
(Gratiano, played by Mr. Chang-Min Hu), and oth-
ers. From their costumes, it was apparent that the
production was set in medieval China: the charac-
ters wore long robes, high shoes, and traditional
hairstyles and headdresses. Not immediately appar-
ent (nor had it been announced to the audience) was
the fact that most of the performers were female:
many of the actors wore fake moustaches or beards,
and the costumes effectively concealed their female
figures. Before the Model Operas of Mao's Cultural
Revolution, traditionally performers in Chinese
Opera were all male. So although the operas today
are usually performed by both men and women, and
although Chinese Opera makeup is not naturalis-
ticthe facial hair is obviously false, and colors on
the lips and above the eyes are exaggeratedI was
surprised when I realized that the central figures
were almost all played by women.
Immediately after the lights came up on the
opening tableau, Xia Luo (Shylockplayed by
master performer Ms. Hai-ling Wang, who has been
performing for over fifty years) entered the stage
with an attendant. Xia was clearly an outsider: while
the dominant colors in the other costumes were
white and gray (Master An had a blue sash and
many of the costumes had small yellow accents in
their costumes), Xia's costume included a crimson
and gold robe, many pieces of jewelry, and a turban.
Wang played Xia's entrance as a moment of ecstatic
joy: Xia danced, juggled an abacus, and sang a joy-
ous aria about An's debts, telling him to "look to his
bond." Throughout the performance, supertitles in
both Chinese and English were displayed so that the
sung text could be understood by the viewers
many lines came directly from Shakespeare, but
others were broadly adapted.
Most notable in the adaptation was the
alteration of the outsider's ethnicity: Xia Luo was
not a Jew; he was referred to as a "Saracen." This
change was central to the project of the creators,
performers, and director of Bond: Shakespeare's
play was adapted so that the text would fit the cul-
tural conventions of Chinese Opera. A Saracen
would serve as a more recognizable boogeyman
than a Jew. Such alterations were visible in many
15
Local and Global Shakespeares: Bond and Troilus and Cressida
in London, 2009
Dan Venning
aspects of the performance. Throughout the scenes,
the action was interrupted for arias. Some were
wholly invented: in the original text, when Shylock
is forced to abandon his religion, he says only "I am
content." But when Xia Luo was defeated by the
logic of Murong, disguised as the legal scholar
Kuang (Portia, played by Ms. Lang-Ying Hsiao),
and forced by Master An to "immediately become a
naturalized Chinese, and never wear outlandish
clothes anymore," his response is to sing a tragic
aria, of how he strove with hard work to attain suc-
cess in business and now must "return a total bank-
rupt to my home." Other arias, however, come more
directly from well-known Shakespearean mono-
logues: instead of speaking, Murong sings to Xia
Luo that "the base of all humanity is mercy / It drop-
peth as the gentle rain from heaven. / Good deeds
are recompensed with good. / As witnessed truthful-
ly in history." Because the arias took up a great deal
of time, the two scenes ran forty-five minutes long.
The Merchant of Venice fits well into the
Chinese Opera "civil drama" genre: such plays often
involve trials or judgments (as opposed to martial
dramas, which often involve acrobatics and scenes
of combat). Another central element of the perform-
ance was the way the characters were adapted to
Chinese Opera role types. In traditional Chinese
Opera, there are four central role types: sheng (male
roles), dan (female roles), chou (clowns or villains),
and jing (painted face or special characters). Within
these four general types there are sub-types (old
men or young lovers, for example). The role types
not only have particular makeup and costuming, but
also individualized singing registers. In Bond, Xia
Luo was conceived as a mixed role type: part chou
(an outlandish, clownish villain) and part sheng (a
sympathetic old man). This choice was highly suc-
cessful: just as The Merchant of Venice troubles the
conventions of comedy by depicting vicious anti-
semitism and making Shylock, a character who
could have been a comic villain, into center of dra-
matic interest, Bond challenged Chinese Opera's
conventional division of role types.
Wang, who usually sings female role types,
was particularly exceptional. As Xia Luo, she pro-
voked laughter in the opening moments, and sym-
pathy later. One aspect that helped evoke sympathy
for the Saracen was the fact that Xia wasn't entirely
Bond. Photo: Courtesy Bang Zi Company.
16
sure he wanted to go through with the bond for a
pound of flesh. When initially granted his bond, Xia
had to be egged on by a Saracen attendant (played
by Chi-ching Yang). Moreover, as played by Chu,
Master An was a clearly despicable merchant. When
Xia Luo was defeated, and An eagerly and venge-
fully demanded his half of Xia Luo's estate, Xia
Luo's final aria was genuinely heartrending.
The Merchant of Venice, because of its
depiction ofor participation inanti-semitism,
can be considered one of Shakespeare's "problem
comedies." This play, along with All's Well that
Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and
Cressida, is nominally a comedy but, in perform-
ance, is often staged in a way that induces discom-
fort or disgust instead of delight and laughter.
Troilus and Cressida, adapted from Chaucer's poem,
is a sort of revised Romeo and Juliet in which young
love dies while the lovers are forced to live on.
The local, Western production of Troilus
and Cressida, directed by Matthew Dunster,
designed by Anna Fleischle, and staged at
Shakespeare's Globe, was far less successful than
Bond in presenting the troubling aspects of a prob-
lem comedy. This was a sexy production which con-
stantly eroticized nearly all of the characters. It was
part of a season entitled "Young Hearts," including
Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Love's
Labour's Lost). Paul Stocker played Troilus as a
bright-eyed golden boy, and Laura Pyper portrayed
Cressida, a sylph with a streak of purple in her
short-cropped, light-brown hair, as a young girl full
of glee at getting to marry the man she loves (or at
least for whom she has a very strong crush). The
two were a pleasure to look at: often costumed in as
little as they could possibly wear without appearing
nude on the Globe stage; Troilus was topless for
nearly the entire show.
All the characters had tattoos, some partic-
ularly large. Most of the male actors were practical-
ly bodybuilders. Hector, played by Christopher
Colquhoun, was a macho, hirsute hero, with sculpt-
ed chest hair. Ajax, played by the gigantic Chinna
Wodu, wore a Mohawk and bore striking similarity
to Mr. T. His rival in the Greek camp, Achilles,
played by Trystan Gravelle, who was smaller and
less muscled, wore black eye-shadow and a
bathrobe, in which he lounged lasciviously, seem-
ingly ever-ready to fling it open and bed Patroclus,
a lithe catamite in nearly see-through, white pants
Bond. Photo: Courtesy Bang Zi Opera Company.
17
by the young actor Beru Tessema. It was clear that
Dunster wanted to emphasize all the erotics present
in the play, including the ever-present homoerotic
themes: Matthew Kelly, as Pandarus, made it very
clear that he wanted to sleep with Troilus by proxy
through his niece Cressida.
Practically the only unsexy warrior
excepting Thersites, Paul Hunter, who was covered
in boils and had a fake eyewas Paris, played by
Ben Bishop. Bishop's Paris was heavy with a pot
belly. He clearly enjoyed drinking, and, unlike many
of the other male actors, who looked like they might
have been waxed immediately before the show, he
had visible back hair. Yet Helen and Paris's scene
was perhaps the most erotic in the show. Helen,
played by Ania Sowinski (who, in pale makeup,
doubled as a frighteningly crazed Cassandra),
danced a near-striptease wearing a diaphanous pur-
ple robe and huge heels. The scene degenerated into
erotic violence as Paris and Helen began to slap,
choke, and nearly have violent sex onstage.
Although in this scene Helen lustfully flirted with
her attendants, we saw that the pair was genuinely in
love. In a sense, by the end of the play theirs was the
only remaining healthy heterosexual relationship.
Even Ulysses and Troilus, men on opposite sides of
the war, came to have a genuinely closer, more
intense homosocial relationship than did the title
characters.
Yet although the show requires the dismal
failure of the love of Troilus and Cressida, the scene
in which Troilus gives up Cressida to the Greeks
was perplexingly played as a scene of tragic loss,
not of unfeeling pragmatism or brutal betrayal. In
the text, it is clear that Troilus is at fault: earlier in
the play, he passionately argues that Troy should
never give Helen back to the Greeksit is a matter
of honor and love. Yet when the Greeks demand
Cressida in exchange for Antenor, who has become
a prisoner of war, Troilus complains, but never sug-
gests that the trade should not be made, despite the
fact that the two have just been married. When
Cressida goes to the Greek camp, she is essentially
coerced into becoming Diomedes' mistress in order
to avoid gang rape by the Greek forces. In Dunster's
production, the death of their young love was played
in a nearly sentimental style. Stocker raged, falling
down on the stage crying, appearing every bit the
deprived lover. There was no suggestion that his
character could have taken another stance. In the
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed by Matthew Dunster. Photo: John Tramper.
18
camp, the threat of rape by Agamemnon (Matthew
Flynn), Menelaus (Richard Hansell), Nestor (John
Stahl), and Ulysses (Jamie Ballard) was down-
played. It seemed as if they were more admirers of
Cressida's beauty than threats to her physical well-
being. Jay Taylor played Diomedes as more of a
suitor to Cressida than a sexual predator. It seemed
to me that Dunster, while happy to emphasize the
erotics (and homoerotics) in Troilus and Cressida,
really wanted to stamp out the emotional rancidity
of Shakespeare's problematic play.
Although I felt the production glossed over
these problematic elements, Dunster and his fight
choreographer Aline David, who created several
brutal, viscerally affecting battle scenes, did justice
to the political aspects of Shakespeare's play.
Particularly effective was the death of Hector when
Achilles and several attendants ambushed the
unarmed Trojan hero. Hector knelt in submission as
Achilles commanded an attendant to slit Hector's
throat. The production also displayed the pointless-
ness of war by suggesting that the two sides were
rather similar. Several actors were double-cast as
members of both sides of the conflict, and both sides
looked similar with their bare skin, leather cos-
tumes, and tattoosalthough Aline David, the
designer, effectively distinguished between the two
factions at all points by costuming the Greeks in
blue.
Troilus and Cressida, as written, is a fes-
tering, diseased play about how love dies, how
humanity and fellow-feeling is squashed out in the
face of necessity, self-love, and war. While this was
handled well in the political and battle scenes, and
Hunter's Thersites could certainly provoke dis-
gustalthough his bodily grotesquerie was usually
played for comic effectlittle else in this produc-
tion achieved an unpleasant or problematic tone.
Even Pandarus' final monologue, delivered by the
skillful Kelly, failed to do this. Pandarus' last
speech, in which, afflicted with syphilis, he
bequeaths his diseases upon the audience, was
almost entirely cut, replaced by an emotional rant in
which the old man lamented how he had lost
Troilus, repeating lines from earlier in the play and
sentimentally reliving the love he had lost. Instead
of the vicious, infecting bite of a dying animal, this
altered final speech was a desperate cry for help, a
Troilus and Cressida. Photo: Matthew Dunster.
19
20
plea for sympathy.
Shakespeare's Globe is a fantastic theatre
building: it allows audience members to see theatre,
and especially Shakespeare, in a way unlike what
they can experience anywhere else. The architecture
not only allows for very direct connection between
the actors and the audience, but also offers an aura
of "authenticity." Because it offers this unique audi-
ence experience, and because it is located in London
near the site of the original Globe, it is an attraction
that is visited by many audience members who are
tourists to London and not necessarily frequent
attendees at Shakespearean productions, or even the
theatre in general. It seems to me that, in this pro-
duction of Troilus and Cressida, the locality of
Shakespeare's Globeits status as a tourist attrac-
tion serving audience members who seek a pleasur-
able experience, not a challenging onewon out,
and the director replaced disgust with sex, grotes-
querie with glamour. Dunster wanted to do a lesser-
known Shakespearean play, a problematic one that
shows how young love can fail, but he didn't want
the audience leaving the house with a bad taste in
their mouths, which is exactly what the play should
do. By smoothing over the problems, Dunster made
his Troilus and Cressida into something of a vapid
plastic tourist trap. There was one thing that left me
disgusted: a well-dressed, pleasant-looking British
woman standing in the pit directly next to me turned
to her husband at the interval and said loudly that
she enjoyed most of the actors, but that Ajax "was
the right build but the wrong color." He grunted,
and, slightly more loudly, she repeated her racist
assessmentone that is apparently not uncommon
among conservative British theatregoers.
Unfortunately, then, this local production of a prob-
lematic play by Shakespeare did leave a bad taste in
my mouth, but for all the wrong reasons.
My trip to London and the BSA
Conference convinced me of the value of both local
and global productions of Shakespeare. Getting to
visit the reconstructed Globe (even if the production
did not live up to my expectations) or ambling
through many of the sites mentioned in the plays
helped me to visualize the plays more completely, to
feel more connected to Shakespeare's own London.
Yet the global Shakespearean production of the
Bang Zi company was far more engaging as a the-
atrical performance. While local Shakespearean
performances such as those at the Globe can look
back to Shakespeare's London of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, global productions
which avoid provincializing Shakespeare or overly
revering his words or his Englishness speak to
today's world, and better serve to maintain the force
of his theatre.
It's lex Rigola's final season at the Teatre
Lliure, and I am very sorry to see him depart. His
innovative programming has seen the Lliure
become a cultural powerhouse and the city's most
exciting venue, hosting a range of European and
Argentine productionsfrom Jan Lauwers to
Daniel Veronesepromoting the work of genuine
theatrical mavericks like Carles Santos and Heiner
Goebbels, and offering a developmental space to
"radicals" like Rodrigo Garca, Roger Bernat, and
Albert Serra. Rigola has led through his own work
as a director with a number of outstanding produc-
tions (including Brecht's St Joan of the Stockyards in
2004 and now Rock'n'Roll by Tom Stoppard). While
the Lliure's associate director Carlota Subirs and
Carme Portaceli (currently directing at the Teatre
Nacional de Catalunya) are spoken of as potential
successors, it is Julio Manrique and Oriol Broggi
who seem to be emerging as more credible figures.
The Lliure needs an artistic director who can lead by
example and, crucially, a figure that knows the
international theatre scene and can ensure that inno-
vative work from beyond Spain is seen and engaged
with in Barcelona.
Rigola's remarkable production of
Rock'n'Roll at the Teatre Lliure leads to a series of
associations that are only possible when the play is
being refracted through a language censored by
Franco in Spain, a country that suffered the restric-
tions of his dictatorship for thirty-seven years. On
one level Rock'n'Roll doesn't appear an obvious
choice for Rigola who has tended to favor an epic
repertoireShakespeare, Brecht, Kolts, and
Mametrather than the more obviously realist
Barcelona Theatre 2010: From Santa Teresa to Naples via Cambridge and
Chicago
Maria M. Delgado
Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, directed by lex Rigola. Photo: Ros Ribas.
21
vocabularies of the urbane Stoppard. What Rigola's
revelatory production shows us is that Stoppard's
play can be read as a purely visceral metaphor: both
a lament for an ideology that perhaps never existed
beyond an ideal (torn, twisted, and warped into
manifestations that passed for communism in the
Eastern bloc in the post World War II era) and a cel-
ebration of the power of rock music to animate,
revive, and inspire.
The play takes place in two cities,
Cambridge and Prague, and across a twenty-two-
year period, from 1968-90. It opens in 1968 in a
lush Cambridge garden that proves the dominant
visual motif for the production. Max Glaenzel
(working with Estel Cristi) offers a traverse lawn
of green decorated with a few worn benches and
other scattered pieces of garden furniture. To one
side, the back wall and door to Marxist academic
Max's comfortable, genteel home, to the other a
graffiti-strewn gray wall. These two spaces confront
each other across the rural pastoral idyll, symbols of
the two worlds that collide across the duration of the
play.
Surtitles guide the audience through the
changes in time and place. Jan (Rigola regular Joan
Carreras), a Czech student in Cambridge, returns to
Prague in 1968 and, despite his best intentions to
keep out of politics, becomes embroiled in the con-
sequences of the Soviet occupation. His Cambridge
supervisor, Max Morrow (Llus Marco), an old
school don, remains inflexibly committed to an out-
dated Marxist idealism despite the evident atrocities
that he hears of in Eastern Europe as the play pro-
gresses. Jan and Max remain in touch as their for-
tunes are repeatedly juxtaposed: Jan loses his record
collection (destroyed by the secret police), his job,
and his freedom but never his faith in and love of
musicembodied in his affiliation with the Czech
band "The Plastic People of the Universe." Max
loses his wife to cancer and his daughter first to a
commune and then to a marriage with an ambitious
journalist, but he also rises above these trials. It is in
the delicate interplay between these ideals that the
play's narrative unfolds. There are romances and
friendshipsJan and Max's daughter Esme, Max
and his wife Eleanor, Max and Czech academic
Lenka, parental conflictsEsme and Eleanor,
Esme and her daughter Alice. There are tested
friendshipsJan and Max, Jan and Ferdinand,
Eleanor and Lenka. And there are ongoing debates
on what democracy, freedom, ideology, and music
mean in two societies tested in different ways by
compromised political agendas. This is, however,
no dry political debate but rather a tale of individu-
als caught up in circumstances they don't quite
understand and of which they are never entirely in
control. There is a sense of some relationship
between Eleanor's fear of what her cancer means
and Jan's friend Ferdinand's worry at what their sup-
posedly harmless affiliation to the music of "The
Plastic People of the Universe" might entail for their
safety. Rosa Renoma dead ringer for Mara
Casarespresents Eleanor as a sharp wit and cen-
tral force in the family, forever organizing, tidying,
and busying herself. Her energy finds a match in
Jan's comings and goings within the confines of a
bedsit whose cramped interior offers a pertinent
metaphor for an ideology closing in on itself.
Renom was named Best actress by the Barcelona
critics for her characterisation of the rasping-voiced
Eleanor. Hers is a fierce, funny performance that
captures the tensions of Eleanor's predicament.
Whereas Trevor Nunn's production at the
Royal Court seemed to cram the action in front of
Robert Jones' busy set, Rigola (through Glaenzel's
long set) gives an expansive garden from which
Jan's cramped Prague bedsit rises up to provide the
sense of worlds operating at different levels of sub-
terfuge. Rigola succeeds in evoking a palpable
sense of fear as Jan's room is turned over by the
secret police. Surveillance is repeatedly evoked as
Jan (Carreras) and his friend Ferdinand (Flix
Pons), are observed from on high by Milan (Oscar
Rabadan) and his lackeys. They are trapped and,
even if they don't yet know it we do, and our com-
plicity is evident in the configuration envisaged by
Rigola and Glaenzel for the design of the piece.
Rigola never reduces Milan and the secret police to
tin pot villains. Max, too, is never derided, never
ridiculed. Llus Marco may not have the sexual aura
of Brian Cox but compassion and generosity domi-
nate in a performance that evidences Max's emo-
tional power and social hold over the Cambridge
world of the play. We may not agree with Max's
opinions but Rigola respects them sufficiently to
ensure that he is not played as a bullying dinosaur.
When Rosa Renom's Eleanor confronts him over the
flirtations with Lenka (Sandra Moncls) across the
length of the garden, Jan's apartment and what it
stands for functions as a schismboth physical and
emotionalbetween them. Joan Carreras's Jan is
sometimes presented as bystander, sometimes
observer, sometimes victim: a more languid pres-
ence than his more overtly political friend
22
Ferdinand. The complicity between Carreras and
Pons lends their relationship a poignant warmth and
camaraderie. Their body language suggests famil-
iarity, bonds, understanding. Rigola provides scenes
of startling beauty, humor, and vulnerability. Snow
falls in the Prague winter of 1976 creating a sense of
a city under a spell as characters come and go with
the elegant rhythm of Tanztheater. Max's playful
granddaughter Alice (a charming but never cloying
Mar Ulldemolins) snatches a snog with her earnest
boyfriend Stephen (Oriol Guinart) as Max walks out
and stumbles on them at play in the garden. Max is
placed discretely in the background as Jan and
Ferdinand survey Jan's destroyed bedsit at the end
of act 1. A glance between Eleanor and Max betrays
a sense of the unknown that awaits both characters
as act 1 comes to an end. The cast assembles on
stage to sing "We'll Meet Again" as the action
moves into the play's final sceneboth a lament for
lost youth and a faith in hope and the future.
There is a greater energy and visceral pulse
in Rigola's production than Nunn achieved in his
Royal Court rendition of the play. Rigola doesn't
have a single actress play Eleanor in act 1 and Esme
in act 2 as Sinead Cusack did in Nunn's production,
but rather opts for two different performers. There
are some drawbacks (as a rather unfortunate wig in
act 1 used to identify the teenage Esme), but the
benefits are far more substantial. Esme is here
shown to be anything but her mother. Chantal
Aime offers an altogether less confident Esme,
caught between the roles of mother and daughter
:and unhappy with what remains of the late 1960s.
Her performance in act 2 is able to capture the frus-
trations and uncertainties of a life defined by moth-
erhood at a time when her twenty-something daugh-
ter no longer needs her. The rediscovery of new pos-
sibilities that the final scenes offer sees her literally
soarit is no coincidence that her final appearance
with Carreras's Jan is on a balcony above the tra-
verse playing area.
On one level, it is possible to see the play as
a soap opera for the middle-classes, set against key
events of the last forty years. Rigola's context stress-
es the shifting encounters between two worldsthe
lush green of Max' and Eleanor's protected and priv-
Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll. Photo: Ros Ribas.
23
ileged Cambridge society and the harsh, gray con-
crete of Jan and Ferdinand's Czech cityscape. The
resonances of the Czech world reverberate loudly in
Spain, a nation where censorship was the order of
the day until 1977 and where any kind of negative
engagement with Franco's regime had strict conse-
quences. Rigola never forces these associations; on
the contrary, he allows them to be made by the audi-
ence. The rich, associative soundtrackdeviating
ever so slightly, but tellingly, from the numbers
specified by Stoppardpushes the play briskly
along. The production is full of wonderful details:
Patricia Bargalls's Candida bears an uncanny
resemblance to Lesley Manville's Marlene in
Stafford-Clark's 1991 production of Top Girls
serving to associate Alice's new stepmother with
Churchill's vision of Thatcherite ambitionAlice's
boyfriend Stephen's suitably 1990 pre-grunge black,
and the awkward rubbing of Milan and his side-
kicks' leather jackets. Rock'n'Roll shows Rigola's
versatility as a directorthe production proffers a
different stage vocabulary from that of his Castorf-
inspired Richard III (2005) or his Tanztheater Julius
Caesar (2002), but the results are no less com-
pelling.
Rigola first staged the play at the opening of
the 2008-09 season; a critical and commercial suc-
cess that won the Barcelona Critics Award for Best
Production in 2009. Its return is part of a revival of
numerous key productions from previous seasons,
including Santos' La pantera imperial (first seen in
1997) and Rigola's adaptation of Roberto Bolao's
1000-page epic 2666 (first seen in 2007). Bolao's
novel, published after his death in 2003, weaves
together five intersecting tales. The first brings
together four academics from Italy, Spain, France,
and England who all work on a reclusive German
novelist called Benno von Archimboldi. Their
shared obsession leads them to attempt to track
Archimboldi down, following a lead that he trav-
elled to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (a
thinly veiled Ciudad Jurez). The second section
picks up on a Chilean-born academic at the
University of Santa Teresabriefly featured in the
opening scenewho had moved to Mexico from
Barcelona after his wife's death, taking his adoles-
cent daughter with him. Here, the subject of the
"killings" emerges: the rape and violent murders of
young women who largely work in the maquillado-
ras (American factories) that litter the town and its
bleak suburbs. The academic's fears for his daughter
converge with the tale of his dead wife. The third
tale is again set in Santa Teresa where a journalist
from Harlem has come to cover a boxing match. In
the fourth section, a catalogue of murders are foren-
sically presented for the reader as policemen,
lawyers, officials, and journalists examine where
responsibility lies. In the final section, the life of
Hans Reiter-cum-Benno von Archimboldi unfolds
as a metaphor of a century blighted by war, fratri-
cide, greed, exile, grief, and genocide, deftly linking
the four previous sections in ways that belie that
Bolao died before completing the novel.
Rigola, working with dramaturg Pablo Ley,
has sensibly kept the novel's five-part structure and
proffers, in the mode of Lepage's Lipsynch, evenly
matched dramatic scenarios that together make up a
five-hour performance. Recollections merge with
metaphysical contemplations, digressions are fre-
quent, biography fuses with detective fiction,
adventure stories, and forensic case studies. And
crucially, the different modes of storytelling that
Bolao deploys are here reconceived through the-
atrical prisms. The production begins, as does the
novel, with "The Part about the Critics: "Four crit-
ics, all single, all rather locked in their own world,
each embodying something of their national stereo-
type. One by one we are introduced to the stylish
French Pelletier (Joan Carreras), the Italian ageing,
wheelchair-bound Morini (Andreu Benito), the
more impulsive, heavy-handed Spanish Espinoza
(Julio Manrique), and the pragmatic Brit Norton
(Chantal Aime). What begins as something of a
conference paper (complete with whiteboard where
the academics spell out key terms, Archimboldi's
works, key concepts in his novels, important loca-
tions in his life) soon evolves into a tale of obses-
sion, a mnage trois, desire, and desperation.
There is a relaxed ease to the performances
that captures the catchy conversational style of the
novel. Four actors are perched on the edge of a rec-
tangular table, chatting innocuously. We are drawn
in to the growing friendship between the four, the
affairs Norton juggles and then customizes with
Pelletier and then Espinoza, and the ongoing relent-
less search for Archimboldi. At times, we move
from narration to direct conversation, moments of
intensity, of revelation, of change, of decision; and
then the return to the effortless narration. It is these
supposedly casual gestures that so shape the pro-
duction: a nod by Carreras's Pelletier, a brief sulk by
Manrique's Espinoza, Benito walking into the
wheelchair to take the role of Morini. Rigola and
Ley have understood that Bolao is an exuberant
24
storyteller, a seductive narrator who weaves entic-
ing tales only to then cut them off and then move
elsewhere. Nothing is forced or labored. Even the
brutal beating of a taxi driver is all the more horrif-
ic in its reporting. Rigola has learnt from the Greeks
that it is often more powerful to tell than to show.
"The Part about Amalfitano" operates in a
Hopper-cum-Lynch landscape. A picket fence clos-
es in Amalfitano's (Andreu Benito) backyard.
Daughter Rosa (Cristina Brondo) appears in black,
bouncing through the garden in ways that defy easy
containment. Her mother's ghost (Alcia Prez)
haunts the landscape, narrating her own tale of way-
ward desire, escape, and an early death from AIDS-
related complications. This is a more menacing
world than that of part one. The officious University
Dean (Manuel Carlos Lillo) and his reptilian son
(David Espinosa)in ominous Tony Manero-like
white suithover around the peripheries of the gar-
den. A climate of palpable menace lingers over the
stage.
The subsequent "Part about Fate" unleashes
the horror as Santa Teresa comes to take on a more
prominent role in the action. Here, Oscar Fate (Julio
Manrique), the African American journalist who
travels down to Santa Teresa to cover the match
between the local boxer and a black brother, is
trapped in a lime green florescent box, a metaphor
for the manic squalor of Santa Teresa and the tawdry
goods it churns out for Western consumption.
Manrique's fate is literally thrown in with an array
of characters from the town's fringes. The fevered
effects do create something of the panic, the sense
of danger closing in on Rosa. There is something
less assured in the stage language here, however.
The decision to play Manrique in black-faceseems
unnecessary and problematic. The filmed conversa-
tion with Black Panther Barry Seaman (Pere
Arquillu) projected above the performative box
never really frames what follows and while Carreras
dances across the landscape as a boxer in motion,
the gestural vocabularies of Fate's companions seem
Roberto Bolao's 2666, directed by lex Rigola. Photo: Ros Ribas.
25
rather limited, fixing them as mere stereotypes. The
aesthetic never really binds to suggest the escalating
sense of danger that is palpable in Bolao's novel.
It's only when Chantal Aime and Manuel Carlos
Lillo enter as a journalist and FBI agent to investi-
gate the murders that the simmering mood of men-
ace and foreboding returns and effectively sets the
stage for the fourth section.
The living and the dead coexist in the stage
world Rigola creates (with the aid of a deceptively
effective design by Max Glaenzel (again working
with Estel Cristi). For "The Part about the Crimes"
we are enclosed in a forensic tent of antiseptic white
where truncated, parched plants pepper the desert
landscape. The sound of flies disturbs the silence
while the bloodied body of a dead woman lies
across the front right of the stage like a gaping
wound. The focus on the discovery of a single body,
Rosita Mndez (Alba Pujol), the goodtime girl of
"The Part about Fate," defines the enacted action.
Misogynistic police come and go with weary indif-
ference as Manrique's impotent policeman, Juan de
Dios Martnez, wanders the stage like a lost ghost,
trying to investigate what might have happened and
why. But the authorities are convinced they have
their man, Klaus Haas (Carreras), a rather awkward
middle-aged German and outsider who convenient-
ly fits the bill of serial killer. Carreras's extended
monologue captures his dysfunctional need for
attention and the dystopia of the authorities that
mold him into a scapegoat. The never ending list of
crimes recounted in the novel is projected onto the
back screen against the amplified screams of the
writhing corpse and the entry of all the cast cover-
ing the stage with crosses. This is a world where
women are just dispensable orifices, objects to be
enjoyed and dispensed with. The deafening screams
are ignored as the stage transforms into a cemetery,
a city of the dead filled with a garden of nameless
crucifixes. A litany of offensive jokestestament to
the nonchalance of the authoritiesfollow in quick
and horrifying succession until the curtain falls.
For the final "Part about Archimboldi," we
are given a running track, a moving belt where
Carreras's Reiter-Archimboldi narrates the tale for
which the academics had been searching. He comes
off to converse with his younger sister (Lotte
Reiter), support his sickly wife (Chantal Aimee),
negotiate with his publisher's wife (Alcia Prez),
and then moves back onto a track that he must
attempt to keep up with and that sweeps him up into
a cocoon away from the public eye. It is an effective
device that renders the accompanying projections
(of cabaret acts, of the Holocaust, of Soviet troops)
superfluous. Reiter-Archimboldi is both running
into the historical events that shape him and running
away from thema highly successful effect.
There is an audacity to 2666, a theatrical
ambition and scope that is all too rare in Spanish
theatre. Rigola and Ley's adaptation offers an under-
standing of Bolao's bitter, warped universe. The
production is part noir, part postmodern flick, part
travelogue, part detective fiction, part biography,
part love story, part diatribe on First and Third
World divide. And while the brilliance of the open-
ing and closing scenes is not matched in parts two
and three, the production never bores. The ensemble
cast (all taking numerous roles) work to create a
memorable array of characters with Joan Carreras
excelling as the suave Pelletier, the incarcerated
Haas, and the elusive Reiter-Archimboldi. In
Castilian, Carreras's voice has a velvety resonance
that contrasts with his more clipped Catalan; it is a
performance that confirms him as one of the most
nuanced actors in Spain. Rigola's decision to present
the piece in Castilian rather than Catalan allows for
Bolao's labyrinthine language (with its jazz riff
qualities) to provide the framework for the visceral
and clinical hell he creates on the stage.
Julio Manrique's trajectory as a director is
now threatening to eclipse his work as an actor. At
the Lliure's studio space, he offers a taut, energetic
thrust stage production of David Mamet's American
Buffalo. Llus Castells (working with Irene
Martnez) offers a cluttered junk shop with every
corner and crevice packed with the discarded detri-
tus of our capitalist world. Mismatched chairs, bird
cages, scattered records, the arm of a doll protruding
ominously from a chair, a pink wig used by Teach to
disguise himself, an array of potential weapons
including golf clubs, a lampshade, and darts all vie
for attention. A box of hats, including the three-cor-
nered hat of the Civil Guard, an expansive som-
brero, and a dainty bullfighter's cap, acknowledge
the fact that this is Chicago refracted through a
Spanish and Catalan imagination. The Indian head-
dress, the cowboy hat, and the soundtrack that filters
through the radiofrom Johnny Cash to Frank
Sinatraalso ensure that the American West and
American Dream function as concrete referents,
effectively debunked by the tawdry memorabilia
that litters the store. Manrique works to make the
audience part of the world of the shop. We enter the
auditorium and are greeted by "Dubrow and Sons"
26
27
stencilled on the door. We are given time to famil-
iarize ourselves with the dynamics of the shop and
the piles of bric--brac both displayed and hidden
from view. Don Dubrow is conceived by Ivan Benet
in the mould of a louche Jeff Bridges who coolly
dispatches orders to the nave, keen-to-please Bob
(the elastic faced Pol Lpez). The nervy, manic
Teach (Marc Rodrguez with something of John
Cazale's Fredo from The Godfather) is a bundle of
destructive energy, smoking edgily, throwing darts
purposely at the dartboard, and punitively destroy-
ing Don's plan to get his own back from the cus-
tomer that he feels cheated him out of the buffalo-
head coin he was chasing.
Rodrguez's Teach is indeed a poison
infecting the stage, weaselling in and out of the dif-
ferent corners of the shop, spawning ironic, para-
noid dialogue that demarcates the gap between what
he is and how he perceives himself. His destruction
of the junkshop in act 2 brings down shelves of
glass and nick-knacks. his bullying and beating of
Bob is a terrifying act of frustration and intimida-
tion.
While Rodrguez's Teach may, in one way,
be the most demonstrative performance, it's Benet's
laidback Don that effectively steals the show.
Whether h is polishing the glass with a bit of spit,
calmly reorganizing the scattered records, extolling
the virtues of yogurt to the eager Bob, or physically
lashing out at Teach in the play's final moments,
Benet succeeds in suggesting that Don's more
relaxed demeanour hides a series of competitive
demons. Manrique presents Teach and Don as
younger than is habitually the case, but this works to
create a sense of rather pugnacious late twenty-
somethings after a quick buck and the respect of
their masculine peers.
Manrique's production is tough, pacy, and
well-served by a Christina Genebat's pulsating
translation. Crucially, Manrique is also not afraid of
David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by Juan Manrique. Photo: Courtesy Teatre Lliure.
allowing the play the time to breathe and switch reg-
ister, as with Don's head falling wearily on the desk
at the end of act 1, or Bob playing catch with his
food. The staging is marked by a quirky and engag-
ing attention to detail, as with the radio playing as
the production opens switching to Catalan to ask us
to ensure our mobile phones are switched off, and
the antlers of the stuffed and displayed animal head
lighting up as a warning danger sign.
Oriol Broggi's compelling minimalist
Hamlet, featuring Manrique in the title role returns
to the Biblioteca de Catalunya this Spring [see WES
21.3, Fall 2009], but first he's presenting the begin-
nings of a two-year project by Eduardo de Filippo
that offers Natale in Casa Cupiello in early 2010
and Questi Fantasmi (in a coproduction with
Madrid's Centro Dramtico Nacional, the Grec
Festival, and the Italian Teatri Uniti) during July and
October of 2010 before embarking on a tour through
Spain and Italy. For Natale Broggi presents a tra-
verse stage (designed by Paula Bosch) that we are
invited to walk through as we grab a glass of white
wine (on the house) before the Christmas festivities
begin. It's a jaunty atmospherewith jovial festival
tunes, a program note in pseudo-Italian, and
reminders to switch off your mobile phone, again
announced in Italian. As with Hamlet, when the
actors appear, they don't pretend it is anything but a
theatre. Pep Cruz's patriarch Luca removes the signs
to the toilet as he wanders on stage and crawls into
the bed, covering his whole face and body with a
sheet before commencing some theatrical snoring.
Son Tommasino (Bruno Oro) is also like a corpse in
the other bed in the room. Luca's wife Concetta
(Marissa Josa) flutters in and out like a clucking hen
clearing up and servicing the childlike needs of her
husband and son. The play draws on the characters
of commedia dell'arte and Broggi consciously
weaves this into his orchestration of the action. The
unhappily married daughter Ninuccia (Mrcia
Cister) marches on stage in a fierce strop only
melting when timid beau Vittorio (Joan Arqu)
appears. Nicola (Carles Martnez) is her upstanding,
cuckolded husband who is the last to know what's
going on. Luca's brother Pasquallino (Ramon Vila)
is the bumbling clown, always the butt of
Tommasino's jokes, and always charging on stage
wanting justice, revenge or some sort of solution to
whatever bother Tommasino's landed him in.
The production is executed with high the-
atricsdaughter Ninuccia breaking crockery as she
tells her mother she wants to leave her husband,
wily Pasquallino charging on stage in search of
Tommasino. There are also welcome lulls
28
Natale in Casa Cupiello, directed by Oriol Broggi. Photo: Bito Cels.
Tommasino playing the piano, Luca working on the
Christmas crib for display over the holiday period.
At its most effective the production acknowledges
its own playful artifice and complicity with this
brings the audience into the festive celebrations.
There is a clearing up of the set at the end of act 1
as the family prepares for the Christmas meal in act
2 and Cruz's Luca chats to the audience. Broggi
himself also appears to help direct the movement of
the furniture and props, and Tommasino excitedly
wants to know if Sophia Loren is in the house.
While Cruz is rather uneasy in the play's
opening scene, he grows in to the larger-than-life
Luca. In act 2, with glasses perched on his nose, he
appears as a chubby, rotund boy with an endearing
childlike infatuation when it comes to unwrapping
the magi for his crib. Marissa Josa wonderfully con-
veys the exhaustion of the pragmatic Concetta, try-
ing to serve Christmas lunch while her daughter dal-
lies away from home with the hapless Vittorio.
Luca, Tommasino, and Pasquallino parade into the
chaos dressed as the Three Kings, all displaying
impeccable comic timing. The demise of Luca in act
3 gives Cruz the opportunity to shine through
expertly executed moans and blessings for his
daughter and her new beau. Broggi's presentation of
a stage hand asking for a cup of coffee as Cruz's pro-
longed death continues its course is a well-timed
recognition of the need to accentuate and interrupt
the more languid pace of the final act. Certainly,
some of the casting decisions seem rather odd
Nol Oliv as Concetta's neighbor and confidant
looks too effortlessly willowy and elegant to con-
vince us that she undertakes the hard labor and prag-
matic chores of a Neapolitan working class house-
wife. Nevertheless, this is a stylish, playful produc-
tion that confirms Broggi as a talent to watch.
An earlier Italian dramatist who also drew
on the prototypes of commedia can be seen further
down the street at the Teatre Romea. El caf, based
on Goldoni's La bottega del caf, runs through 5
April and opts for an altogether more conventional
approach with period costumes, high hats, and big
wigs. Children have had their own morning and
afternoon show at the Romea during January
devised by Comediants. Num3r@lia or "100 Things
To Do With Numbers" offers a take on the seven
stages of man performed by three actors and an
interactive screen. A lean, fifty minutes of story-
telling, dance, and numerical games was warmly
received by a young (if rather small) audience.
While the show is presented in Catalan, the two
non-Catalan-speaking English boys who accompa-
nied me to the performance were gripped by the dif-
ferent production numbers for much of the show,
with evident highlights including the different time
zones presented on a colorful world map, musical
notes, and onscreen xylophones. There is some
Jackanory-type storytelling but it's all blended with
physical energy and a seamless integration with the
large onstage screen. Comediants draw on the tech-
niques developed by La Cubana in Cegada de amor
(Blinded by Love), 1994, as actors burst out from
the screen onto the stage at various key moments.
Directed by Joan Font with Roger Juli, it is a wel-
come reminder of a physical stage language that
engages through short narrative bursts and a con-
ceptual organizing motif.
Josep Maria Pou's Goya theatre has anoth-
er hit on its hands with a stripped-down version of
Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband reworked by Jordi
Sala and Josep Maria Mestres as a contemporary
world of conniving politicians all trying to protect
their careers from the dirty secrets hidden in the
closet. Mestres directs an attractive cast led by Joel
Joan as Arthur Goring who opens the production at
the opera, sat up in the circle among the packed
house as his mobile phone goes off. It is a com-
pelling opening in a production where uneven per-
formancestoo many of the actors perform as if
appearing in different productionswork to prevent
any kind of coherent visual and gestural language
for Wilde's play.
The production evidently speaks to a con-
temporary Catalan audience that responds with
copious applause and loud laughs at the references
that could be construed as criticisms of the avarice
and priorities of twenty-first century politicians.
This is never really followed through consistently
but rather returned to sporadically. Quim Roy's anti-
septic setart deco meets 1970s' minimalism
always looks rather makeshift; new money rather
than inherited wealth. The opening act party at the
Chilterns' house has many comings and goings that
always appear too forced with a slim cast of
seventhere are no butlers, servants, attaches, or
extra guests in the world envisaged by Mestres.
Anna Ycobalzeta's Mabel Chiltern (here
renamed Gina) is conceived as a predatory and
pouting party girl (complete with a riding crop in
the final act) whose sharp retorts appear rather
labored. Carmen Balagu presents Lady Markby as
a sub-Almodvar meddlerpart Chus Lampreve's
mother in What Have I Done to Deserve This?
29
(1984), part Antonia San Juan's Agrado in All About
My Mother (1999). Her role appears rather anachro-
nistic in the refashioning of the play presented by
Sala and Mestres. Abel Folk's Robert Chiltern is
one-dimensionally slick while the Earl of
Caversham (as played by Camilo Garca) is con-
ceived as a bumbling aristocrat. Joel Joan gives a
high-energy performance as Arthur Goring, com-
plete with farcical entries and exits, mobile phone
antics, and a range of elastic facial expressions.
Slvia Bel brings some Hollywood glamour to the
role of Mrs Cheveley: stylish red or black outfits,
dynamic heels, and alluring grooming suggest
femme fatale danger on all metaphorical levels.
There is a real rapport with Joan's modern day
dandy, especially during her visit to his home in act
3 where the disappearing panels, wooden box of a
study, and mobile phone misadventures create an
entertaining scenario of mishaps and mistaken iden-
tities.
While Joan's energy lifts the production,
Merc Pons' Mrs Chiltern grounds it. She under-
stands the rhythms of Wilde's language and conse-
quently makes the rather dry and sometimes puri-
tanical wife of Robert Chiltern a more attractive and
less predictable character. She brings a stillness and
a welcome savouring of the language to the produc-
tion. In her willingness to apparently do less on
stage she creates a discreet aura that serves as a con-
stant reminder as to why her husband remains so
enamoured of her. There are some nice observations
in Mestres's production: the muzak playing at the
party, the conspiratorial glances, the antics in the
study. While the adaptation doesn't quite think
through all the implications of updating to our
times, the production's sell out success testifies to its
resonance with contemporary Catalan audiences.
At the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya
(TNC) Carme Portaceli has joined forces with Pablo
Ley to adapt Santiago Rusiol's emblematic L'auca
del senyor Esteve (The Tale of Mr. Esteve) from its
nineteenth-century setting (the novel was first pub-
lished in 1907, the play presented ten years later) to
the Franco era, beginning more or less with the
entry of Francoist troops to Barcelona in 1939.
Rusiol's comedy is here refashioned (with material
incorporated from the novel) to offer a different take
on what is seen as a Catalan classicthe play inau-
gurated the TNC in 1997 (staged then by Adolfo
Marsillach) and was filmed for television in Pere
Planella's production in 1984. It is a product you
mess with at your peril and the critics have not been
kind to Portaceli's reworking of the piece.
Paco Azorn presents a malleable set incor-
porating both the family haberdasherie, La Puntual,
where much of the action is set, and a walkway that
offers a sense of time passing by. There is something
Brechtian in the aesthetic of the productionwith a
five-piece band providing an effective accompany-
ing score to the action and projected titles for the
many episodic scenes that make up the play. Boris
Ruiz's grandfather functions as a Master of
Ceremonies, introducing the action and hovering
around its fringes as a confessor and mentor to the
young Esteve (David Bags), the Catalan Everyman
of the play. This is a crib-to-coffin story, the life of
an ordinary middle-class guy who would have liked
perhaps to have pursued a different career but
instead falls into the family business as is expected
of him. Azorn's set is inventive: all shifting desks,
disappearing screens, pop-out beds, and deck chairs
floating on to suggest the burgeoning tourism that
was to later explode in the 1960s. Historical shifts
are indicated through a stylish costume register and
imagery projected on a giant screen that wrenches
the action away from Rusiol's modernista world
and into the Franco era, strikes, troops entering the
city, Franco at work and at play, hand in hand with
the Church that buoyed up his regime. In the end,
for the technical wizardry of the set, and the effec-
tive musical score, the production seemed rather too
busy, rather too forced to really allow the relocation
of its own space to breathe. Bags is less convincing
as the child Esteve but captures more of the resigned
weariness of the paterfamilias despairing of his
son's choices and obliged to work with a complici-
tous silence during the Franco era. The earnest
shopkeeper that emerges in the second half of the
production functions more effectively as a symbol
of the mercantile classes who shaped Barcelona's
identity and culture. There are some misjudged 'in
your face' moments (as the customer who removes
her coat to reveal her overt fascist affiliation); and
the walkway too easily allows for the idea of 'time
moving on' with characters walking repeatedly up
and down the length of the stage.
It's admirable to see the TNC grappling
with Catalan classics and moving beyond the tame
historical stagings that have become such a feature
of the company's work. The production comes hot
on the heels of artistic director Sergi Belbel's imag-
inative fusion of theatre and dance in Irene
Nmirovsky's El ball which played in the theatre
over Christmas and early January. This however, is
30
a more flawed experiment, bereft of humor and
rather too earnest in its attempts to move the play
into an era that remains a powerful part of the col-
lective memory of a significant proportion of the
TNC audience. Certainly amplification problems on
the night I saw the production didn't help, and for all
the developments undertaken on the TNC's Sala
Gran, it remains a cold, cavernous space that the
actors have to work to fill. Portaceli rightly recog-
nizes that Barcelona is one of, if not the protagonist
of the play. However, the Barcelona that is here pre-
sented never quite manages to develop a concrete,
tangible identity of its own.
Sasha Waltz's choreography has often
opted for the concrete and the tangible, as evidenced
in her Tanztheater versions of Medea and Dido &
Aeneas. Here using Schubert's Impromptus (from
which the piece takes its title) and four further
Lieder (songs) as the governing musical motif, she
structures a choreography as lyrical as the German
romanticism of the composer, with musical accom-
paniment by pianist Christina Marton and mezzo
Ruth Sandhoff. Waltz's seven dancers move across a
conceptual set by Thomas Schenk marked by a slid-
ing wall at the back of the stage that moves across
as stealthily as a knife. At moments the production
has something of Handke's The Day We Knew
Nothing of Each Other: bodies wandering through a
landscape in almost automated fashion. A duet
between two men negotiates pain, desire, and pleas-
ure, at once evoking a cross, at once the merging of
two into a single fused entity. There's humor here in
abundance. Silence is punctuated by the sound of
wet Wellington boots squelching as the performers
move around playfully in them. Red paint elongates
feet into flippers; patterns adorn the floor as the
paint spills over and across the stage. Stains are
washed away with the water in the gumboots but a
trail of paint remains, like a bleeding wound divid-
ing the stage. A pool of water sees a dancer
immersed like an elongated Winnie in Beckett's
Happy Days. Yet, while Beckett's protagonist only
had her torso exposed, here it's the legs that protrude
like giant scissors cutting through the air.
Ultimately, it's a world as fragile and ephemeral as
the whisper-thin costumes of Christine Birkle. As
the music ends the dancers disperse, each disap-
pearing into the darkness.
At the Villarroel, Carol Lpez, the theatre's
recently appointed artistic director, is back with a
new play which she has also directed. Boulevard is
a homage to the world of Cukor's Philadelphia
Story (1940) and romantic comedies of the 1940s.
As with her earlier VOS (2003), presented as a film
by Cesc Gay in 2009, Lpez displays a meta-the-
atrical world of performers where role and character
become amusingly intertwined. Her previous play,
Germanes, a bittersweet tale of three sisters in the
aftermath of their father's death, proved a runaway
hit in 2008. Boulevard is a less substantial affair but
no less enjoyable. Max (Ernesto Collado) is staging
a version of Philadelphia Story, taking the role of
Dexter from his brother Guille's Gary (Lpez regu-
lar Paul Berrondo). Both brothers are smitten with
the engaging Anna (another Lpez regular, gata
Roca), contracted to take the role of Tracy much to
the disappointment of ageing diva, Rosa Mara
(Amparo Fernndez), who is clearly not pleased at
31
Santiago Rusiol's L'auca del senyor Esteve. Photo: David Ruano.
having to make do with merely being mother of the
bridea role that she uses to upstage Anna at any
possible opportunity. Faced with keeping the actors
and their tantrums in check is producer Nati (Marta
Prez), who is called on to save the day when the
actor playing the family maid pulls out.
This is a piece that plays with all the
clichs in the business: the seductive leading man,
the rival in the wings that the leading lady doesn't
think is dashing enough, a bitter diva peddling old-
fashioned acting tips and tricks, the timid actress
who moves into the terrain of the seductress as the
plot progresses. Lpez moves the action back and
forth, inserting scenes from the finished produc-
tion.alongside the adventures of the bickering actors
preparing the staging. There are some quirky obser-
vations on acting and actors (as Berrondo's Guille's
obsession with having the "right" shoes), on timing
(will Collado's Dexter ever make his entry on
time?), and on casting and typecasting (why can't
Guillem be given the role of a leading man?) Lpez
peppers the production with glorious excesses that
demonstrate her panache for comic timing, for
example, Rosa's appearance complete with large fan
and Jackie O sunglasses and emphatic mannerisms.
The production looks sumptuous
enoughwith a functional chic set that moves
between Tracy's comfortable house and the rehears-
al studio. There is an attempt to think through the
differing performing styles necessitated by the
moves from the present to the 1940s production
ethos. It is all very entertaining with endearing per-
formances from the cast of five and an effortless
swapping between Castilian and Catalan used to
further accentuate the two intersecting worlds.
Ultimately, however, it is so light and so silly that
little remains when the final number has been per-
formed. The showbiz world conjured by Lpez
presents the actors as vain beings, more concerned
with upstaging and role rating than the craft of per-
forming. Boulevard is as light and insubstantial as a
souffl. Pleasurable, yes, but probe too closely and
the whole edifice crumbles before you.
32
Boulevard, directed by Carol Lpez. Photo: David Ruano.
Whether you are a Hispanist theatre scholar,
critic, or translator, you should mark your calendar,
set aside the second week in November, and attend
the annual Muestra de Teatro Espaol de Autores
Contemporneos (Showcase of Spanish Theatre by
Contemporary Dramatists) in Alicante, Spain.
Along with a mild, spring-like climate in late
autumn, this beautiful historic and seaside city
offers a wealth of museums, parks, beaches, palm
tree-lined and marble-tiled promenades, exquisite
food, a breathtaking medieval fortress, and above
all, a dazzling array of theatrical works penned,
directed, and performed by Spain's finest artists.
Fully sponsored and supported by Spain's central,
regional, and local cultural agencies, the Muestra's
accomplishments during seventeen uninterrupted
years of programming are truly impressive. Since
1993 there have been seventeen Muestras that have
showcased a total of 423 plays written by a stagger-
ing number of 368 authors.
Throughout the years, fifteen of Spain's most
illustrious playwrights have been honored at the
Muestra and given special recognition by Alicante's
city officials and the organizers of the event.
Included among the honorees are Antonio Buero
Vallejo, Jos Luis Alonso de Santos, Paloma
Pedrero, Antonio Gala, Jos Mara Rodrguez
Mndez, Fernando Arrabal, Jos Sanchis Sinisterra,
Jos Martn Recuerda, Josep Benet i Jornet,
Francisco Nieva, Fernando Fernn Gmez, Jess
Campus, Jordi Galcern, Jernimo Lpez Mozo,
and this year's Juan Mayorga. In addition, the
Muestra offers specialized theatre workshops given
by prominent authors or directors, roundtables fea-
turing international translators of theatre texts, and
presentations of the latest publications of Spanish
drama texts, translations, or criticism. For nine per-
formance-packed days, every stage in the city is
bustling with activity, theatre posters line the streets,
theatregoers of every preference have something to
choose at the most reasonable ticket prices of the
season, and lively chatter about a recent or upcom-
ing performance can be heard in just about every
downtown caf and restaurant. Even if one inten-
tionally tried to ignore all of the above, it would be
practically impossible to avoid the multitude of
street performers that entertain crowds of evening
strollers in several of the main squares. In other
words, it is a theatre lover's paradise.
It is important to point out that in spite of
Spain's grave economic crisis this year, the organiz-
ers of the Muestra managed to maintain their high
standards without compromising quality nor quanti-
ty and provided a program that included full pro-
ductions of twenty-six plays authored by forty-eight
dramatists. Without question, this feat is a tribute
not only to the nation's commitment to its cultural
legacy but also to the resourceful and organization-
al wizardry of the Muestra's main architect and gen-
eral director, the playwright Guillermo Heras,
whose vision, tenacity, and commitment to Spain's
theatre community is unmatched. Heras is assisted
by Fernando Grande, a renowned bilingual transla-
tor of dramatic texts to French and Spanish in his
own right, and organizer of all the events relevant to
translation.
The Muestra grouped the plays into four cat-
egories: teatro sala (playhouse theatre); teatro
cabaret (cabaret theatre), teatro calle (street the-
atre), and teatro infantil (children's theatre).
Although the majority of the shows pertained to the
first grouping, there was a conscious attempt to dis-
tribute the other three categories as evenly as possi-
ble throughout the nine-day period. Here are some
of this year's teatro sala highlights.
At the top of the list is the Muestra's 2009
honoree, Juan Mayorga, a brilliant representative of
Democratic Spain's first generation of playwrights
[see WES 20.2, Spring 2008]. He is a critically
acclaimed and prolific author of more than two
dozen original stage plays as well as numerous cre-
ative adaptations of Western European drama clas-
sics. Mayorga's intelligent, satirical style wittingly
spars with the ideological and political realities of
our times, and it has captured the imagination and
admiration of theatregoers both in Spain and
abroad. His works have been translated into several
languages, including English, Greek, French,
German, and Italian, and for the past decade no con-
temporary Spanish playwright has enjoyed a more
prominent presence on the marquees of European
theatres.
Mayorga's three-character postmodern
drama, Cartas de amor a Stalin (Love Letters to
Alicante's Seventeenth Showcase of Contemporary Spanish Theatre,
November 6-15, 2009
Iride Lamartina-Lens
33
Stalin), 1999, directed by Helena Pimenta, was one
of the Muestra's most anticipated productions.
Staged at the Teatro Principal, it attracted hundreds
of eager spectators. In stark contrast to the dimly lit,
sparsely decorated set, the lively sound of music
playing, "Those Were the Days" sets the stage for
the spiraling incongruities to follow. When the
music subsides, Bulgakov (Jos Tome) appears sit-
ting at his large desk immersed in his writing. After
his wife, Bulgakova (Celia Prez) enters the room,
she asks him with great expectation if he has begun
writing a new play. Bulgakov responds that he is
writing a letter to Stalin informing him that his work
has been banned throughout the country, and that he
is now requesting either the restoration of his free-
dom as a writer, or the permission to leave the
Soviet Union. The plot centers on the process and
consequences of Stalin's systematic silencing and
political marginalization of one of the Soviet
Union's greatest creative minds, Mikhail Bulgakov.
Physically and metaphorically confined to the
reduced space of his tiny quarters, Bulgakov strug-
gles to uphold artistic dignity and expression in a
society hushed by censorship and the fear of
reprisal. Bulgakov's countless letters to Stalin
remain unanswered. The only brief telephone com-
munication with the dictator is inexplicably broken
up, leaving Bulgakov forever clinging to his obses-
sion with a conversation or a life mysteriously and
randomly interrupted. Thus begins Bulgakov's dis-
quieting descent from the realm of reason to the
darkest corners of madness. Bulgakov starts to have
imaginary encounters with his nemesis and only
possible redeemer, Stalin (Jess Berenguer), as he
begs for his release from the merciless sterility of
silence. Fantasy and reality become indistinguish-
able, and all action pivots around the tortuous
machinations of two minds bound by destiny: one
delusional with power, the other with freedom.
It is not surprising that two of the Muestra's
most compelling plays should deal with the com-
plex issue of immigration, its social and political
impact on the European economy and psyche, and
above all, the human dramas hidden behind the
nameless faces of thousands of desperate people.
Los mares habitados ("The Inhabited Seas"), ties
together three intense and fluid monologues into a
lyrical narration on immigration. Few have told this
story better than Antonio Tabares, Orlando Alonso,
Carlos Alonso Callero, and Irma Correa, a collabo-
rative group of dramatists from the Canary Islands,
all born in the seventies. Their first time presence at
Juan Mayorga's Cartas de amor a Stalin, directed by Helena Pimenta. Photo: Courtesy Muestra Teatro Espaol.
34
the Muestra this year was featured in a panel dedi-
cated to the burgeoning dramatic voices emerging in
this region. It is understandable that these authors
have chosen immigration as the central theme of
their play as they routinely witness, and are touched
by the incoming wave of immigrants from North
Africa and the Middle East who pass through the
Canary Islands as they attempt to enter Europe's
mainland. In a simple set featuring a large, wooden
octagonal box that serves first as a boat, then a cof-
fin, and later as an allegorical wall separating the
world of the living from that of the living-dead, the
director, Carlos Alonso Callero, was able to weave a
brilliant tapestry of human tragedy, resilience, hope,
and desperation. Incorporating the rhythmic flow
and tones of the ocean in haunting melodies and
dances that separate and connect each monologue,
there is a graceful smoothness as we transition from
one character to the next, and from one reality to the
other. All five actors in the cast were exceptional,
especially the woman (Natalia Braceli) of the first
monologue, and two men (Victor Formoso and
Carlos de Len) of the remaining two. Their indi-
vidual stories were rooted in the doleful situations
of sexual abuse, female inequality, and poverty (first
monologue), war and political instability (second
monologue), racial and social discrimination in their
native land (third monologue), and their struggle to
escape all of the above only to meet death, or to find
alienation, degradation, and dehumanization on the
other side of the sea.
The second play on immigration Alguien
silb (y despert a un centenar de pjaros dormidos
(Someone Whistled (and Awoke One Hundred
Sleeping Birds) was both written and directed by
Antonio de Paco from Valencia. This two-character
play featuring Cocodrilo (Jimmy Roca), literally
translated "crocodile," and Hombre or Man (Alex
Amaral), centers on violence and betrayal, and the
sadomasochistic tendencies embedded in power and
Los mares habitados, directed by Carlso Alonso Callero. Photo: Courtesy Muestra Teatro Espaol.
35
36
victimization. Violence, the nine-headed serpent
Hydra, is everywhere and seems to be the cause,
effect, and the ultimate end of this terrifying human
drama that takes place in Mt. Gourogou at the bor-
der between Morocco and Spain. In a thwarted
attempt to sail to Spain, an immigrant man, Hombre,
is washed ashore unconscious. Upon awakening, he
finds himself blindfolded, tied up, and imprisoned
by Cocodrilo. Graphically and uncomfortably simi-
lar to the unforgettable images of torture of the Iraqi
prisoners of war in the Abu Ghraib prison, the psy-
chological and verbal abuse spiral out of control
until it reaches its final and unexpected conse-
quences. De Paco's play provides another disturbing
facet of the illegal immigration issue that has been
ignored and/or swept under the rug for its incrimi-
nating finger pointing toward the developed coun-
tries' exploitation of desperate and poverty-stricken
workers from third-world countries. Hombre and
Cocodrilo, on either side of the imbalance of power,
show what can happen if the roles and the status quo
are reversed. Jimmy Roca gave a captivating per-
formance as the diabolical Cocodrilo that should be
noted as one of the best of the entire Muestra.
On an entirely different note, Corpos
Disidentes (Dissident Bodies), 2006, written by
Xiana Carracelas, Arantza Villar, Nerea Barros, and
Iria Sobrado, and directed by Carlos Neira, all mem-
bers of NUT Teatro from Galicia, presented a mul-
tidisciplinary spectacle of dance, performance, and
audio-visual theatre that provoked and seduced the
spectator. In a postmodern fashion, it constructed,
deconstructed, and then reconstructed the feminine
body repeating the cycle of birth, life, transition, and
rebirth as an uninterrupted but ever-changing con-
tinuum. From the feminine perspective of the
"other," it probed the concept of identity, separate
from its traditional connection to the body. The
expressionistic fluidity of identity was given tangi-
ble representation in many audio-visual forms of
movement, sound, and sights. The most memorable
image was the "birth" of three distinct women,
naked, graceful, and utterly beautiful in three glass
test tubes that transcended science and technology
Alguien silbo'(y desperto' a un centenar de pa'jaros dormidos), written and directed by Antonio de Paco.
Photo: Courtesy Muestra Teatro Espaol.
37
and crossed the threshold of the imagination.
In my opinion, the Muestra's highlight was
the moving and enthralling performance of Los que
ren los ltimos (Those Who Laugh Last), 2006,
presented by the Teatro La Zaranda from Jrez de
La Frontera, written by Eusebio Calonge, and
directed by the company's founder, Paco de La
Zaranda. La Zaranda was part of the independent
theatre movement of the seventies that erupted after
the death of Franco in 1975. What continues to dis-
tinguish La Zaranda from many of its former and
present contemporaries is its desire to salvage and
concentrate on the uneven shards of memory and
legacy of a humanity that is in flux, and in peril of
disappearing. It communicates in a unique poetic
language rooted in the anguished soul of the fla-
menco and framed within the concave lenses of the
esperpento. It is an expressionistic dialogue that
connects gestures, symbols, words, and images to
find that precise pivotal point upon which yesterday,
today and tomorrow hinge. It places its bet not on
technology or new age "isms" but on our common
humanity, our disappointments, our suffering, and
our need to be remembered. It delves into our obses-
sion with time, its devastating effects on our bodies
and spirits, and our existential concerns about eter-
nity. True to La Zaranda's characteristics, this play
uses music with recognizable Spanish flair, and
minimalist sets and lighting. Particularly inventive
on this set was the transformation of an old bathtub
into a tricycle.
The play takes place in a garbage dump, the
metaphorical crossroads of a voyage to nowhere led
by three raggedy, timeworn clowns, the last vestiges
of five generations of famous circus artists. With
jokes and acts as antiquated and worn as their cos-
tumes and props, these three clowns (Gaspar
Campuzano, Enrique Bustos, and Francisco
Snchez) have been discarded and forgotten much
like the piles of rubbish that threaten to block the
view of the sun. But just as they seem ready to suc-
cumb to the unforgiving ravages of time, extreme
poverty, and fatigue, they remember their dead
father's words of encouragement. Thus, they prepare
for their last and finest show in an attempt not so
much to recuperate a distant, glorious past but more
Eusebio Calonge's Los que rien los ultimos, directed by Paco la Zaranda. Photo: Courtesy Muestra Teatro Espaol.
to avoid the meaninglessness of the forgotten. They
begin their journey back from the black hole of
oblivion by retracing faded laughter, illusions,
dreams, and memories. Slowly they begin an exis-
tential cycle of hope that allows them to dream, later
to imagine, and finally to be set free. The perform-
ances of all three actors were sublime and reminded
all the spectators of the magic of live theatre.
There were too many plays in the teatro sala
category to mention in detail in this review but the
readership should know that the list included works
by Jos Luis Alonso de Santos (En el oscuro
corazn del bosque, directed by Ignacio Garca);
Antonio Cremades (Topos, directed by Antonio
Espuch); Roberto Garca (L'art de la fuga, directed
by the author); Eva Hibernia (La America de
Edward Hopper, directed by the author); Sergi
Faustino (Duques de Bergara unplugged, directed
by the author); Miguel Murillo (El ngel de la luz,
directed by Joao Mota); Juli Disla (La rabia que me
das, directed by Jaume Prez); Garbi Losada (Si ves
a Lola, dile que es rica, directed by the author);
Emilio Goyanes (Cabaret lquido, directed by the
author). In addition to these single authored texts,
there were two instances of collaborative efforts:
Laila Ripoll, Rodrigo Garca, Jos Ramn
Fernndez, and Emilio del Valle (Restos, directed by
Emilio del Valle); and Luis Garca Araus, Susana
Snchez, and Javier Yage (Siempre fiesta, directed
by Javier Yage).
True to its mission, this year's Muestra once
again provided a remarkable display of the extraor-
dinary spectrum of theatre presently staged in
Spain. It showcased a mix of established as well as
lesser-known male and female dramatists of differ-
ent generations representing several regions of the
country with works written and performed in some
of the national languages. These works exemplify
the myriad of voices, ideological stances, and stylis-
tic expressions of a theatre that is relevant and inti-
mately connected to its audience.
38
Los mares habitados. Photo: Courtesy Muestra Teatro Espaol.
Smeared make up, messy red hair, she
screams into the audience: "Anyone down there
who says there is a God when none can be seen,
should have his head knocked on the pavement!"
Johanna of Brecht's rarely performed play St. Joan
of the Stockyards had wanted to convert meatmar-
ket-factory-owner-stockmarket-broker Pierpont
Mauler to magnanimityand failed. Her comrade
in arms, underclass widow Luckerniddel, has been
shot dead. The factory workers are poorer and the
speculators are richer than before Johanna joined
the union of black straw hats to improve their lot.
Mauler and his fellow financial sharks celebrate and
Johanna dies in their arms knowing that man is as
bad as his society. The exploitation will continue.
These are the last impressions of Nicolas Stemann's
staging of Johanna's peculiar rise and fall that I had
the opportunity to see at the Deutsches Theater dur-
ing a snowy winter stay in Berlin.
After Schiller and Shaw and in deep dia-
logue with his playwright-predecessors Brecht rein-
vented St. Joan as a response to the stock market
crash that spiraled Germany into a devastating eco-
nomic crisis; at a time when Germany began to give
in to the Nazi machinery of seduction. The play's
premiere in Dortmund in 1933 was cancelled
because of tumultuous protests by the Nazi party
and the Catholic Church. After the war, in 1959 the
play was finally staged by Gustav Grndgens in
Hamburg and received standing ovations by a most-
ly bourgeois audience. If the play failed to provoke
a new middle class after the war in what was then
West Germany, what could the young director
Nicolas Stemann, who is well liked for putting a
postmodern spin on the classics [see "Berlin
Report" WES 21.3, Fall 2009], hope to achieve with
it during the winter holiday season 2009/2010?
The Deutsches Theater traces its fame back
Stemann and the StockyardsBrecht's St. Joan in Berlin
Sascha Just
39
Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards, directed by Nicolas Stemman. Photo: Arno Declair.
to directors like Max Reinhardt. During Berlin's
separation it belonged to the East, but geographical-
ly it is located in the city center. Today it is one of
Germany's most successful theatres. Highly state-
subsidized, it boasts a fresh makeover with marble
floors and plush red seats despite the recent finan-
cial crisis that had hit Berlin hard. It is this econom-
ic disarray that Stemann uses to contextualize his
production and give it contemporary relevance. The
obvious clash between the play's concern with
social equality and the affluent theatrical environ-
ment promises an interesting evening, especially
because it is not a simple endeavor to stage
Johanna's learning process from determined
Salvation Army do-gooder to revolutionary to mar-
tyr for a contemporary Berlin audience whose
expectations are no longer rooted in the stable
worlds of realism and who rarely finds estrange-
ment devices strange.
Stemann frames his production with a the-
atre rehearsal. Three players in shiny white suits,
Felix Goeser, Matthias Neukirch, and Andreas
Dhler, read from the play text (including scene
numbers) and fight over the roles. At first they all
want to play the charismatic butcher Mauleras
long as his business is booming. Stemann probably
begins the production with this lengthy comic bit to
emphasize that the characters are not written for
identification, that Mauler in particular only serves
as a representative of the exploitative capitalist sys-
tem. Rather than creating a successful alienation
effect, however, the repeated changing of roles is
confusing and slows down the action. The produc-
tion only really seems to begin when Matthias
Neukirch finally takes over Mauler's role. Attractive
and conservative looking Neukirch is a good choice.
He has convincing chemistry with Johanna,
although their romantic seduction scene is set up on
a large couch so far in the back of the huge stage
that their little physical interaction is hard to see.
Johanna is fortunately played only by one actress,
the charming yet vocally unsteady Katharina Marie
Schubert, who for no apparent reason, wears
sequined dresses throughout the night.
On her slow downfall Johanna meets a
series of colorful characters, moral bottom feeders
reallyall played by the same three male actors,
for example an opportunistic pastor and a Berlin
slang-speaking thief who illustrate how easily man
is seduced to do wrong if the system permits it.
These encounters are often entertaining but more as
comic clichs than as epic performance commen-
taries as Brecht might have wanted. Only Margit
Bendokat, who grew as an actress at Brecht's theatre
the Berliner Ensemble, is a true highlight. Clasping
an aging supermarket shopping bag, she is the one
to call Brecht on stage, as within split seconds she
brings the audience to tears over her terrible fate
widowed, unemployed, impoverishedonly to
counter her own pathos with dry irony. This type of
breaking of emotional reactions and expectations
creates a sense of ambiguity; and ambiguity, it
seems, runs like a red thread through the production.
Apparently to modernize the play, Stemann
dresses his staging in the aesthetic of music videos:
intermittent loud club music, swirling lighting
effects, and snow; lots and lots of snow. However,
Johanna walking toward the edge of the stage in
slow motion, leaning over its rim, her arms
stretched out wide as if crucified, is so oddly remi-
niscent of Michael Jackson's frequent posture that it
lays an artificial patina over the production. Perhaps
this is more a comment on the fleeting nature of the
new than an attempt to move the play's rather spe-
cific context into the now? A miniature model of
Berlin with photos of mass demonstrations simulta-
neously filmed and projected on a large screen at
first seems to indicate Stemann's belief in the crucial
need to fight for social equality. Yet, the repetitious
projections don't relate clearly to the current finan-
cial crisis and so quickly lose relevanceand the
audience's interest. A ticker projected on the screen
counting how many people die in the course of this
production feels dated. Stemann seems to use such
devices to flirt with the idea of social change, but
rather than committing to it, he forces the play into
a media circus. Literally: During the play's crisis,
when Johanna is protesting alongside the factory
workers on the stockyards, the stage turns while
interviews with Johanna and Frau Luckerniddel,
who has grown from a lost social cause to a coura-
geous fighter, flicker across the screen. Of course,
the revolution is televisedon reality TV. Protesters
on screen and on stage left red flags and party mem-
bership cards flutter in the air. Yet, the potentially
explosive effect is muted, as the sequence ends with
a red Christmas star conspicuously dangling over a
shiny oversized dollar sign mounted on the revolv-
ing stage, directly imported from Las Vegas, it
seems. It is unclear what Stemann exactly ques-
tionsmodern mass media, attempts of the
oppressed to fight for their rights, or Brecht's goal of
motivating the audience to political action. Perhaps
he simply states that nothing, no ideological stance,
40
41
no political gesture has maintained meaning, but are
all empty signs.
The noisy bustle drowns out the play and
as a result the question if Brecht's painfully forced
language can reach a contemporary audience, possi-
bly even mobilize those in need, the numerous
unemployed. Do four greedy businessmen who con-
trol the meat market suffice as a metaphor for our
global financial crisis? More important, at least for
this viewer, the production presents Johanna's final
call to arms, her angry claim that violence needs to
be answered with violence, as an inconsequential
outburst. Brecht made this slogan a central issue of
the play, leaving his audience with the question of
how the oppressed may defend themselves. Once a
provocation, is this question pass, too? Again,
Stemann leaves his position open. "Two souls abide
within my chest," Brecht quotes the old "duke of
poetry" in his final address to the audience, and so,
sad or cynical farewell to political idealism,
Stemann may have hit one key mark with his stag-
ing, because what remains between boos and
applause is ambivalence.
42
Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair.
In 2009 Ulrich Khuon became the new
Intendant (artistic director) of the Deutsches
Theater in Berlin, which had become, under the
leadership of his successor, Bernd Wilms, the gen-
erally acknowledged leading theatre of the city [see
"Report from Berlin," WES, 21.3, Fall 2009]. The
new director immediately imposed his mark on the
theatre, dropping a large portion of the current
repertoire, developing new productions, hiring new
company members and new directors. On two trips
to Berlin the next winter, I was able to take a sam-
pling of the new offerings, seeing a new staging of
Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg by Andreas
Kriegenburg, which opened in September, Brecht's
Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, originating in
Hamburg and opening in October in Berlin, direct-
ed by Michael Thalheimer, an adaptation of Franz
Grillparzer's Das goldene Vlie which premiered at
the Deutsches Theater in October, and finally
Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, directed by Stephan
Kimmig, on its second premiere on February 6,
2010.
Although the Grillparzer remained in the
repertoire only from October through February, I
found it in many ways the most interesting and orig-
inal of these four new offerings, and the work of the
young director David Bsch was very impressive.
Bsch is one of the emerging talents brought to the
Deutsches by Khuon. His first stagings took place in
2004 and since then he has presented works in
Hamburg, Bochum, Bern, and Zurich. He received
the Young Directors award at the Salzburg Festival
in 2006 and was nominated the same year for the
Nestroy Prize for his staging of Much Ado About
Nothing. Since the beginning of his career, Bsch
has worked almost exclusively with scenic designer
Patrick Bannwart, who has created a striking and
memorable setting for the Grillparzer production.
Grillparzer's epic work is in fact a lengthy
trilogy, encompassing the entire scope of the
Medea/Jason story from Colchis to Corinth. In the
manner of much current German production, Bsch
has much reduced and concentrated this story, so
that his production runs only about one hundred
New Productions at the Deutsches Theater
Marvin Carlson
43
Kleist's Prinz von Homburg. Photo: Arno Declair.
minutes, with no intermission. Not surprisingly,
Bsch concentrates on the final part of the trilogy,
the story in Corinth, although the action of the pre-
vious plays is recalled by the chorus-like figure of
Absyrtus (Tino Mewes), Medea's brother, a key fig-
ure in the early plays who commits suicide when he
is taken hostage by Jason. He opens the production
and appears often in its course, blood dripping from
his forehead playing the dark love song, "Is that
Really You?" and recalling the sacrifices Medea
made to give Jason his victory.
The huge space of the Deutsches Theater
stage is basically empty to its sweeping gray cyclo-
rama, though the floor area, stark white, is cluttered
with white plastic and metal detritus of mid-twenti-
eth century suburban affluencechairs, tables,
washing machines, stoves, cabinets, TV sets, wash-
ing machines, ironing boards and drying racks, all
lying about in heaps and often in fragments, the
apparent ruins of the good life in Corinth. Three
life-size Bambi lawn decorations add the only note
of color and the final element of kitsch. I was
reminded of Barbara Frey's Medea, which I saw on
this same stage last spring, which also surrounded
Medea in Corinth with all the trappings of a 1950s
middle-class home, although there, the designer
placed these items in a rather realistic box-like set-
ting [see WES, 21.3, Fall 2009], while here, frag-
mented and scattered like the bones in an elephant
graveyard, the furnishings resembled such a home
after a bomb or tornado had swept it away.
Little of this detritus is immediately visible
as the production begins. What we see instead is a
huge void filled with smoke, the darkness penetrat-
ed only by the faint beams of raw electric lights,
almost like distant stars, hanging here and there in
the gloom. Bsch has spoken of the two essential
spaces of this play, Colchis and Corinth, and the for-
mer is evoked from time to time by this gray, light-
studded void, out of whose mists Medea's dead
brother from time to time appears to remind us of
the antecedent events. The stage is much more fully
illuminated for the Corinth scenes, which reveal the
bourgeois detritus that makes up this world, and, at
the beginning, Medea sitting quietly among this
material far upstage, wrapped in a large grayish
cloak that, we come to realize, represents the fleece.
The son of the new Intendant, Alexander
Khuon, has been a key member of the Deutsches
Theater ensemble since 2004. He reportedly strong-
ly considered leaving the theatre when his father
took over its direction, but finally decided to stay
and continue to contribute to the very strong ensem-
ble built up by Wilms. His portrayal of Jason is an
unusually sympathetic one. The Grillparzer version
shows both Jason and Medea as victims of external
pressures and still very much in love. It was this
quality that Bsch reports attracted him to this ver-
sion, and both Khuon and Katrin Wichmann as
Medea provide moving explorations of this tension.
The scenes in which they try to separate and then
are pulled, almost in spite of themselves, back into
frantic embraces, are almost painful in their intensi-
ty. Their powerful pairing perfectly illustrates the
new Intendant's interest in blending elements of the
highly successful Wilms regime with new talents,
since Wichmann is a newcomer to Berlin, having
built her reputation in Hamburg.
The villain in Grillparzer's version is
Kreon, beautifully played by Sven Lehmann, a
reigning member of the Deutsches Theater ensem-
ble especially associated with the work of Michael
Thalheimer. Lehmann's casual self-assurance, arro-
gance, and assumption of male (and Greek) superi-
ority, are devastatingly captured in the attitudes and
gesture of this petty despot. Only when he feels
called upon to show some sort of affection is he
totally at a loss, and his attempts to embrace Jason
without actually making physical contact with him
are models of comic performance. His daughter
Kreusa is played by another newcomer, Claudia
Eisinger from Dresden, and her tall, gangly, tongue-
tied adolescent interest in Jason is both amusing and
touching. Like her father, she finds physical contact
intensely embarrassing, and so finally has to express
her affection for Jason by good-natured Tom-boyish
punches to his shoulder.
In Grillparzer's final scene, Medea con-
fronts Jason, reveals that she has just killed their
children, and leaves him in despair. Bsch creates a
powerful, but different ending. Medea begs to see
her children for the last time and is left with them
alone on stage to put them to sleep in a portable
igloo-like backyard tent that has been set up stage
center. She takes them into the tent and there is a
long period without silence or movement. Then
Medea reappears, wrapped in the cloak that repre-
sents the fleece. A trace of blood on one foot is the
only indication of what has occurred in the tent. She
leaves the stage and Jason appears with two tiny,
almost toy-like suitcases, obviously for the children.
He sets them down and goes upstage to find and
bring back down two pairs of children's boots. He
then sits on a bench by the tent, clearly preparing to
44
go in, get the children, and take possession of them.
On this image the play ends. I was reminded of
Ostermeier's powerful and unconventional ending
of Hedda Gabler, where the audience is left to antic-
ipate the reactions when Hedda's body is discov-
ered.
The other three directors are much better
known than Bsch. Thalheimer is one of the direc-
tors most often produced under Wilms, and
Kriegenburg now similarly dominates the offerings
under Khuon. Thalheimer is particularly associated
with an intense and minimalist style of production,
with texts cut to reveal their emotional core, much
direct address to the audience, and starkly elegant
settings, often simply walls of wood or metal, nor-
mally the work of designer Henrik Ahr. All of these
features were clearly on display in Thalheimer's
powerful interpretation of Puntila. The rather
sprawling and picaresque plot of the original play
has been stripped away. The three townswomen
Puntila promises to marry (Olivia Grsner, Claudia
Eisinger, and Katrin Klein) remain, but only as a
kind of minor chorus, and the digressive stories of
the original are mostly gone, along with any of the
plot that does not concern Puntila (played by
Norman Hacker), his daughter Eva (Katrin
Wichmann) and his chauffeur Mattei (Andreas
Dhler).
The result was a much more intimate play
and a much more clearly emotional one. The politi-
cal dimension of the original was not lost, but was
developed largely through the tensions caused by
Eva's and Mattei's differerent social and economic
status, with Puntila's treatment of the temporary
workers, a major part of the original, here com-
pletely missing. Still, the master-servant relation-
ship between Puntila and Mattei and the wide gulf
between Mattei and Eva made powerful social
points. One can hardly imagine a better example of
Brecht's gestus than the extended scene where
Mattei demonstrates the social distance between
himself and Eva by forcing her to eat a large and
clearly almost indigestible herring. The hyperactive
Puntila of Hacker and the tall, unflappable Mattei of
Dhler make a theatrically striking pair, with a dis-
tinctly Beckettian edge, especially at the ending,
when the two remain silent on stage, looking out,
and bound together in a manner strongly reminis-
cent of, let us say, Hamm and Clov.
Under the new administration, Andreas
Kriegenburg has replaced Thalheimer as the official
house director, a major acquisition for the new
administration. He has directed in most of the major
theatres in Germany and been several times invited
45
Franz Grillparzer's Das goldene Vlie, directed by David Bsch. Photo: Arno Declair.
46
to the annual Theatertreffen, most recently last May
when his dazzling production of Kafka's The Trial
from Munich was generally considered to be the
outstanding work of the season [see
"Theatertreffen" report in WES, 21.3, Fall 2009]. In
September, he added two new productions to the
Deutsches Theater repertoire, a stage adaptation of
Heart of Darkness, based on Joseph Conrad, and
Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. His new
staging of Hamlet opened at the end of October.
Although I have long been an admirer of
Kriegenburg's work, I found his Prinz somewhat
disappointing, as did most of the German critics.
Kriegenburg himself designed his own setting as he
normally does, and this was admittedly stunning
an empty box with deep red walls, ceiling, and floor,
with a mural of a golden Brandenburg eagle on the
back wall and four tall, high, narrow, and deep set
windows on both side walls. Andreas Schraad
designed matching monochromatic costumes also
all in deep red, long unadorned military coats and
red boots for the men, and simple but elegant ball-
room dresses with red shows for the women. All the
characters began with heavy white makeup and
whitened hair, though this became more streaked
and spotty as the evening progressed. The opening
image of this sea of red, with the Prince downstage
center and the other characters in a row upstage
each holding five-branch candelabra created a mem-
orable visual effect, but on the whole the production
never really surpassed this stunning opening.
I could not help thinking that the new
house director of the Deutsches Theater had sought
to imitate the style of Thalheimer, his most praised
predecessor under Wilms. Prinz Friedrich seemed
to me in many ways much more like a Thalheimer
production than a Kriegenburg one. The text was
severely cut (running only about ninety minutes
without intermission), the set basically an
unadorned box, the actors often lined up far down-
stage and directly addressing the audience, speech-
es often rushed through rapidly or shouted in such
high intensity that they challenged comprehension.
Even in Thalheimer's hands these techniques were
not always effective and for Kriegenburg, who has
normally worked in a very different style, they
seemed often artificial and abstract. One of the
strangest staging choices was to flood the entire
stage with water to a depth of only an inch or two.
Like much of the staging, this had a powerful visu-
al effect, adding striking reflections to each charac-
ter, but seemed of little purpose to the production as
Bertolt Brecht's Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, directed by Michael Thalheimer. Photo: Katrin Ribbe.
a whole. The only time when actual dramatic use
was made of the water was when the Elector (Jrg
Pose) laid out the battle plans by drawing them with
his staff in the water, and although this was an inter-
esting effect, its point remained unclear, as was the
water as a whole. Perhaps we were to see this world
through the distracted, half-dreaming eyes of the
bemused prince (played by the youthful Ole
Lagerpusch) and the water suggested its insubstan-
tiality. Certainly all of the characters were in fre-
quent, though somewhat arbitrary and even som-
nambulistic motion, which would suggest such an
interpretation (one critic suggested they moved like
the red pieces on an unseen chessboard). From time
to time, this movement included a falling into the
water, with resulting disturbance of the chalky
makeup and hair coating, some of which found its
way onto the elegant red costumes. I could not help
pitying the costume clean-up crew after each pro-
duction.
With the entire evening partaking of the
quality of a dream, there was no clear need for a col-
lapse or an awakening at the end. Instead the Prince
takes up the cry against the enemies of Brandenburg
with which Kleist concludes and facing out into the
audience, cries out, repeatedly and rather frantical-
ly, "Brandenburg, Brandenburg, Brandenburg." The
effect is to suggest that he has been brainwashed
into a rabid patriotic enthusiasm, which is admitted-
ly one way to read Kleist's fascinating and troubling
text, but the production leaves no clear message,
only a sense of a rapid sequences of puzzling
actions and loud, often unclear confrontations tak-
ing place in a mysterious setting whose visual beau-
ty is the most attractive element of the evening.
Finally, I attended in October the second
premiere of a new production of Schiller's romantic
classic Kabale und Liebe, directed by Stephan
Kimmig. For the past decade, Kimmig has been one
of Germany's most honored directors, several times
invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, most recently in
2008 with his much honored contemporary reading
of Schiller's Maria Stuart [see WES 20.3, Fall
2009]. This new interpretation of Germany's great-
est dramatist seemed to me considerably less inter-
esting, despite a fascinating and ever-changing set
by Kimming's wife and invariable designer, Katja
Ha. The basis of this set is doors, and the evening
begins with a kind of fire curtain lowered, which is
in fact a wall with half a dozen doors in it, at vari-
47
Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, directed by Stephan Kimmig. Photo: Arno Declair.
Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. Photo: Arno Declair.
48
ous levels and some on their side. A rather frowsy
Miller (Matthias Neukirch) begins the evening by
appearing in several of these doors and addressing
the audience directly. Such direct address is a stan-
dard feature of the evening, a technique which
seems in recent years to have become a standard
house device at this theatre. When the front wall
rises to reveal the set, what is revealed is a large box
set, every surface of whichwalls, ceiling and
flooris similarly covered with doors, eight or ten
of them on each wall, on various levels and some
lying sideways. Each side wall also contains metal
hand-holds, allowing actors to freely climb and
hang from the walls.
This striking setting by no means exhausts
the designer's visual world. The box set can be
moved backward and, since it is built on the
Deutsches Theater's huge permanent turntable, can
be turned around to reveal a more abstract rear pat-
tern of metallic ladders and supporting pieces, and
also can be moved into different configurations by
rotating all or parts of the various walls. The result
is a kind of flexible labyrinthine space, full of doors,
rotating, and pivoting spaces the flexibility of which
nevertheless creates an ominous feeling of entrap-
ment. The doomed young lovers, trapped, like those
in Puntila, by their irreconcilable class differences,
seem like helpless mice in a maze, some of whose
doors open onto blank walls and others offer the
illusion of escape but return them as the stage
revolves, to constant repetitions of the same physi-
cal space.
The overall physical configuration is thus
powerful and striking, but the interpretation is less
so. The cast includes some of the leading talents of
the theatre, with Ole Lagerpusch and Claudia
Eisinger as the doomed lovers Ferdinand and Luise,
Ulrich Matthes as Ferdinand's inflexible father,
Alexander Khuon as his evil assistant, Wurm, and
Lisa Hagmeister as the co-conspirator Lady
Milford. Yet despite this array of talent there is a
curious flatness and lack of emotional depth in the
production. Perhaps the physical demands of the
complex setting had not yet been fully mastered on
this second night by the company, but I am inclined
to think that the director was seeking a cooler and
more abstract style to counteract the somewhat
florid romantic delivery that is traditional in this
youthful Schillerian work. In any case, critics
judged the production less than a triumph, visually
striking but emotionally rather flat, and I had to
agree.
Ricercar was the final production of
Franois Tanguy and the Thtre du Radeau, a high-
ly important and innovative group in the French the-
atre. Ricercar was created in October of 2007, and
after much touring, most notably to the Avignon
Festival and the Autumn Festival in Paris, the
Thtre du Radeau presented Ricercar for the last
time in France on 16, 17, and 18 October 2009,
before departing on tour to Korea.
Ricercar is a magnificent spectacle, built
up out of a series of various images and texts. It rep-
resents a stage in the trajectory of this celebrated
company, each of whose stagings have been differ-
ent, yet each has suggested an evolution in relation
to the one before. Ricercar was presented in an
astonishing site, under a huge tent on the outskirts of
the city of Le Mans where the Thtre du Radeau is
based and where all productions of the company
have been presented since 1995. The spectator must
make a special trip to reach the site. Franois
Tanguy selected this location for several reasons: to
open up new and larger spaces, to escape the con-
figuration of traditional theatres, to be able to wel-
come the public better, and to welcome other com-
panies in La Fonderie, their usual place, while the
Thtre du Radeau is rehearsing or presenting a pro-
duction in the tent. The choice of a very reduced
space for the public (only six rows allowing the
admission of only about 150 spectators) means that
every spectator is very close to the stage and has a
perfect view of the entire space.
From the outset, the arrangement of the
scenic space is surprising. There is no distance, no
separation between the actors and the audience. The
scenic space contains three tables, placed diagonal-
ly in relationship to the audience, and several down-
stage chairs. They create a perspective moving
toward the rear of the stage, but decentred, the van-
ishing point of the orientation of the tables being
rather stage left. This unconventional perspective
forces the spectator to always seek to distinguish
what is essential beyond the closest forms. Several
Art. Ricercar
Manuel Garca Martnez
Translation by Marvin Carlson
49
Ricercar, directed by Franois Tanguy. Photo: Caroline Ablain.
very simple metallic structures, which contain large
panels in their upper parts, the first of which is
located very close to the audience, force the specta-
tor to observe the actors behind these structures.
These, while not covering the entire space, seem to
evoke the structures of the successive settings.
Situated at different heights in relationship to the
front of the stage, and not parallel to each other,
these structures create several levels of depths. They
do not cover the full stage. Further upstage, the
scenery is composed of very simple screens and
structures which enclose the space toward the back.
Some of these are sufficiently light in weight to be
moved by a single actor. The scenery thus suggests
fragile spaces that the spectator sees created and
taken away before his eyes, primarily by the actors.
The upstage space is illuminated.
From the very beginning, a series of images
appears in succession, composed of the same ele-
ments but very different from each other. These ele-
ments and the movements of the actors, which are
never realistic and which obey no causal order,
reject the search for an immediate meaning that nor-
mally guides the spectator's attention. An abstract
character and a metaphorical distance are estab-
lished at once.
At the beginning, two actors, Laurence
Chable and Claudie Douet, in nineteenth-century
costume, enter upstage and move around a table in
silence, before climbing up on it and then sitting in
chairs. The upstage area is often illuminated with
different intensities for different elements, which
creates a sensation of the heterogeneity of the ele-
ments making up each image. In the first image, the
lighting has a yellow-orange cast. Next, three
actors, Frde Bjornstad, Jean Rochereau, and Fosco
Corliano, their faces made up in white and wearing
identical costumes, come down to that area closest
to the public, and sit on chairs next to the tables,
their backs to the audience. The downstage area is in
darkness for the entire evening. This shadowy space
becomes a liminal space for the eye. The upstage
center, where the light draws one's attention, often
seems like an image at the back of a dark room.
Thus the illuminated areas are surrounded by shad-
ows and darkness, which take up most of the stage.
The spectator never clearly sees the faces
of the actors who move downstage. The features of
the characters often remain in shadow, as if their
identity was not to be revealed except momentarily,
in an unexpected slipping between two zones of
darkness. The music which begins when the three
men enter soon changes abruptly to a much more
lively rhythm, although none of the actors move. A
series of movements follows, punctuated by
changes in the lighting and the style of the accom-
panying music. For example, the three men sudden-
ly rise, run toward the women upstage, aid them in
being seated, and then run back to regain their own
chair. One of the women descends. The light is now
more white, suggesting a projection on a screen.
Then the lighting changes again and the entire stage
takes a blue tone. Central panels upstage, illuminat-
ed by different color spotlights, are moved on and
off stage, revealing the upstage area as a new space.
Thus the alteration of a few elements, in this case
the central panel and the lighting, transform the
image. In the next sequence, Laurence Chable
stands isolated on a table, while others (Frde
Bjornstad, Fosco Corliano, Claudie Douet, Katia
Grange, Jean Rochereau, Boris Sirdey) move about
as a compact group, which runs quickly together,
several times, toward the right side, then the left,
without providing the audience any way of guessing
the reason for their urgency. They seem to be look-
ing for something or chasing something, accompa-
nied by a much more rapid musical rhythm. The
actress on the table, Laurence Chable, remains
indifferent to their movements.
Approximately seven minutes pass in the
display of such configurations before the first words
in the performance are spoken. Laurence Chable
delivers the first text by Carlo Emilio Gadda with an
intense, solemn voice and a very marked intonation,
suggesting the tradition of tragic acting. She then
moves directly into the second text, without transi-
tion. This is a poem by Franois Villon on the sor-
rows of love. The stage is weakly illuminated with a
yellow tint, announcing a new scene. When
Laurence Chable finishes delivering this text, the
actors form three rows and exit, all performing the
same dance steps. Thus movements and actions, like
a poetic text, open themselves to multiple interpre-
tations. All elements, all movements, all encounters
on the stage are extremely precise, even though the
heterogeneity of the staging does not make them
seem to be so.
The multiplicity of meaning are augmented
by the separation of the voice and movements with-
in the performance of each actor. Often the voices
are quite astonishing in their exaggeration or
restraint, requiring sustained attention by the spec-
tator to understand their meaning, especially since
the music and sound which accompanies them are
50
constant during almost all of the performance, as if
the words were only one element among others and
not necessarily the most important. Movements are
often interrupted in an unexpected and surprising
manner. Sometimes the actors remain frozen in the
middle of a movement, as when Claudie Douet
adopts a dancer's position which she maintains,
unmoving, arms extended, while two men, three
times, lift her and turn in a circle before placing her
again on the floor and then moving away. The
autonomous movements did not represent easily
identifiable attitudes but rather show, in fragmen-
tary manner, a succession of brief poses and
changes of position. They are always stylized, like
dance movements, giving the impression of con-
stant movement and an inevitable instability, even if
static. Moreover, the movements of the stationary
actors or of those crossing upstage do not have a tra-
ditional relationship (one immediately comprehen-
sible) with the actor who is speaking the text. Their
actions sometimes seem alien to the spoken words.
Impassive, they suggest the characters in a painting
by Magritte, simultaneously present and absent. Yet
at the same time, beyond the immediate meaning of
the movements and the spoken words, they give the
impression of a deep poetic relationship.
Throughout the production, the audience
hears musical fragments selected and arranged by
Marek Havlicek and Franois Tanguy. These frag-
ments are drawn from the works of Scarlatti,
Beethoven, Verdi, Berg, Beria, Sibelius. Their
abrupt and constant variation does not at all serve
the cause of linearity or causality, but challenges our
assumptions about the forms of causality. The frag-
ments of music provide a very clear rhythm in the
progression and often create sensations of opposing
speeds, rapidity, and slowness. The music always
creates an aural context, always in the sense of
emphasizing the poetic nature of the image. Thus
one spectator can perceive a metaphoric relationship
between the words and the movements of the actors,
while another may interpret this differently. Thus,
when the spectator hears the third text, a selection
from Dante which evokes the forgetting of time and
the concentration on the self due to pleasure or sad-
ness, two actors, Jean Rochereau and Frde
51
Ricercar. Photo: Caroline Ablain.
Bjornstad, clasping each other, seem to struggle or
to dance, turning in a circle in semi-darkness. To the
words of Dante in French, Bjornstad responds in
Norwegian. When Jean Rochereau speaks next, it is
a poem by Ezra Pound evoking images perhaps for
a dream, he remains in semi-darkness before an illu-
minated upstage area, suggesting the light of a
dream that exceeds the realm of the character. When
Claudie Douet speaks the fifth text, verses from
Dante on the intensity and the elevation of a soul in
love, she stands in front of a table. Four actors
(Frde Bjornstad, Fosco Corliano, Jean Rochereau,
and Boris Sirdey) climb on the table and slowly
march behind her, stopping with one foot elevated at
each step. All make exactly the same recurrent
movements simultaneously under an intense red
light.
The production utilizes twenty-two texts,
by different authors: Carlo Emilio Gadda, Franois
Villon, Dante Alighieri, Ezra Pound, Dino Campana,
Lucretius, Robert Walser, Luigi Pirandello, Danielle
Collobert, Nadejda Mandelstam, Leopardi, Kafka,
Goethe, Bchner. Some of these texts are delivered
in other languages, in German, in Norwegian, in
Italian, creating a dramatic polyphony. The theatre
distributes a booklet containing all original texts and
French translations. All these texts, being poetic in
nature, open themselves to varied interpretations.
The feeling of love is often associated with suffer-
ing (as in Villon's poem), with the descent or eleva-
tion of the soul or the feeling of ascension (Dante),
with desire (Pirandello), regret for the past
(Pirandello, Danielle Collobert). Other themes
touched upon are the indistinct state of dreaming
(Pound), changes in visual perception resulting
from distance from the object (Lucretius), fluctuat-
ing movement (as in the text from Dino Campana),
the impossibility of solitary combat and the absence
of meaning (Kafka). Successions of images within
the texts reinforces a sensation of complex intercon-
nections.
The space is transformed by the sliding of
the panels making up the setting and by the effects
of lighting. The astonishing images, of great beauty,
follow each other, each momentarily established
before being taken down, dismantled. These panels
52
Ricercar. Photo: Caroline Ablain.
change the distance between the spectator and the
image which is presented. The visual perspective of
the audience is changed by lighting and changes in
the staging. The constant movement of the panels
occurs separated from the speeches, often alongside
them.
Despite moments of immobility, during the
performance which give the impression of an instant
of suspension, of a momentary halt, the succession
of scenes moves rapidly. The sense of the fragility
of the current instant, of its intensity but also its
transience, its imminent and unpreventable disap-
pearance is constant in the performance. Although
the performance as a whole lacks any plot or narra-
tive line, it still presents an evolution in its images
and themes, and offers a general line in which all the
apparently independent texts and images develop in
fact a deep relationship and bring the spectator gen-
tly out of the production when the ending finally
falls carefully into place.
After a series of sequences, an intense
lighting effect, yellow-orange, illuminates most of
the stage just before Frde Bjornstad begins to pres-
ent the last text by Robert Walser. He remains silent,
seated, unmoving, looking out at the audience for
several moments before beginning to speak the text
on the beauty of movement and the necessity of
contemplating nature. This seems to be a commen-
tary on the staging and on theatre in general. At the
end of this text, he waits a long moment, rises and
advances toward the audience, while the other
actors join him on stage to bow to the audience.
There is no break. The production has finished.
The Thtre du Radeau currently performs
under a large tent, but its home and its place of cre-
ation is a space unique in France called La Fonderie.
The Thtre du Radeau began to work there in 1985
and after a long period of sharing the space with
various organizations supported by the
Communaut Urbaine du Mans, they gradually
acquired other parts until by 1994 they occupied the
entire building. This former Renault factory, re-bap-
tised La Fonderie, is an immense space, with a floor
space of more than 4200 square meters, with five
large rehearsal spaces, permanent and independent
spaces which can be fitted out with bleachers for
performances, more than 1700 square meters of
stage spaces properly speaking, along with numer-
Ricercar. Photo: Caroline Ablain.
53
54
ous other spaces which can serve as work areas,
allowing the group to accomodate several compa-
nies at a time. Besides the rehearsal rooms, La
Fonderie possesses a refectory where the people
welcomed at La Fonderie can sit side by side, a
lodging space with sixteen rooms to shelter other
theatre companies, and a workshop for scenery con-
struction. The different parts of La Fonderie have
been conceived and developed according to stage
necessities, with an eye toward economy: a space to
work, another where meals are shared, another for
sleeping. The inclusion of a construction shop indi-
cates a desire to include all the trades of the theatre.
La Fonderie welcomes theatre and dance
companies which come there to rehearse in resi-
dence for varying periods according to their needs,
from one to twelve weeks. Each case, each request
is studied on a case by case basis, as there exists no
given norm. In 2009 La Fonderie has welcomed
twenty-five different companies from throughout
France, some local, some regional. La Fonderie has
welcomed international companies and has a deter-
mination to do so. La Fonderie gives them complete
freedom regarding their work (scheduling and so
on), but requires a responsibility in relation to the
locale. Companies with subventions, companies
with greater resources who wish a residence are
asked to contribute to the expenses of their resi-
dence (electricity, heating, etc.) Many of the more
modest companies pay nothing for their stay, find-
ing there a place for creation and reflection that their
economic situation would not normally allow.
Moreover, La Fonderie co-produces several per-
formances each year. Receiving a ninety-five per-
cent subsidy from the state, the region, the depart-
ment of La Sarthe, and the city of Le Mans, La
Fonderie, an institution characterized by its spirit of
openness, is equally characterized by its sobriety, its
economic prudence, its avoidance of any unneces-
sary waste. There are two separate associations, La
Fonderie properly speaking and the Thtre du
Radeau which is based there. This double structure
is administered by nine permanent members. The
group is marked by the exceptional personality of
the director of the Thtre du Radeau, Franois
Tanguy, and the people who have accompanied him
for many years, such as Laurence Chable. La
Fonderie is a workplace, and a "meeting place," but
one that is exceptionally open to the public, "at any
moment a display window," a place dedicated to
"contributing to a reflexion on the basis and the
form of any artistic effort," according to its statutes.
La Fonderie is far removed from established the-
atres, with its mission of welcoming companies
united "by a certain number of questions which this
era does not pose or does not wish to answer." La
Fonderie has become a place to research and to pre-
pare productions where time is available for the the-
atre within a rigorous economy of means. The
changes in the place are not finished. A new area has
just been organized for dance rehearsals, and a
music laboratory for creators of music, an acousti-
cally isolated space, is soon going to be installed.
55
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).
MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts at Queen Mary University of London and co-edi-
tor 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 vol-
umes for Manchester University Press and two collections of translations for Methuen. Her most recent co-edit-
ed volume, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, is published by Routledge in 2010.
SASCHA JUST is a doctoral student in the theatre program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has published in
Theater Heute, SEEP, Text & Presentation, and Kinokarate. Sascha Just is a film artist. Her films screen at festi-
vals in Europe and the U.S.
IRIDE LAMARTINA-LENS is Spanish Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Pace
University in Manhattan. She has written numerous articles on contemporary Spanish theatre, and co-written with
Candyce Leonard two critical Spanish theatre anthologies: Nuevos Manantiales: Dramaturgas Espaolas en los
Noventa, vols. 1 & 2 (2001); and Testimonios del Teatro Espaol: 1950-2000 (2002). Together with Susan
Berardini she co-edits the English translation series of contemporary Spanish theatre, Estreno Plays, since 2005.
MANUEL GARCA MARTINEZ is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at the University of Santiago de
Compostela. He wrote his Ph.D. in Drama Studies at University Paris 8. His reasearch interests are time and
rhythm in theatrical productions/performances and in dramatic texts, and the French contemporary theatre.
DAN VENNING is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has a BA in English and Theatre from
Yale and an M.Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His dissertation research
is on the popular reception of English Renaissance drama on the German stage in the nineteenth century.
Contributors
martin e. segal theatre center publications
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 first 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 structurally inventive the-
atre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into four-
teen 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 mem-
ber of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical atten-
tion.
Josep M. Benet I Jornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
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 com-
pelling 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 experi-
ments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made
him a major figure in contemporary European theatre.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US$20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
martin e. segal theatre center publications
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 briefly
described including an outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most
entries include electronic contact information and web sites. 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.
Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
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.
Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
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 affiliated with the
international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with pornographic film 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.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
martin e. segal theatre center publications
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 con-
temporary political ends
Pixrcourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixrcourt's 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 Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of
Pixrcourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama,"
and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixrcourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, 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
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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$15.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
marti n e . segal the atre ce nte r publ i cati ons
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
David Savran, editor
Founded in 1989 and edited for fifteen years by Professor Vera Mowry Roberts and
later in collaboration with Professor Jane Bowers, this widely acclaimed journal is
now edited by Professor David Savran. JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative
work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the U.S.past and
present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the her-
itage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature
and the performing arts.
Slavic and East European Performance
Daniel Gerould, editor
Established in 1981, SEEP (formerly called Soviet and East European Performance)
brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and film in Russia
and Eastern Europe. The journal includes features on important new plays in per-
formance, archival documents, innovative productions, significant revivals, emerg-
ing artists, and the latest in film. Outstanding interviews and overviews.
Western European Stages
Marvin Carlson, editor
Established in 1989, WES is an indispensable resource for keeping abreast of the
latest theatre developments in Western Europe. Each issue contains a wealth of
information about recent European festivals and productions, including reviews,
interviews, and reports. Winter issues focus on the theatre in individual countries
or on special themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artis-
tic directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and
directorial interpretations.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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.thesegalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Each journal is published three times a year
Price US$20 per journal per annum domestic/$30 international
For information, visit the website at
www.gc.cuny.edu/theatre
or contact the theatre department at
theatre@gc.cuny.edu
The Graduate Center, CUNY
offers doctoral education in
Theatre
and a Certificate Program in
Film Studies
Recent Seminar Topics:
Middle Eastern Theatre
English Restoration and
18 C. Drama
Sociology of Culture
Contemporary German Theatre
Kurt Weill and His Collaborators
Opera and Theatre: Tangled
Relations
Performing the Renaissance
The Borders of Latino-American
Performance
Eastern European Theatre
Critical Perspectives on the
American Musical Theatre
New York Theatre before 1900
Transculturating Transatlantic
Theatre and Performance
The History of Stage Design
The Current New York Season
Puppets and Performing Objects
on Stage
Classicism, Root and Branch
Melodrama
European Avant-Garde Drama
Theorizing Post
Executive Officer
Jean Graham-Jones
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
telephone 212.817.8870
fax 212.817.1538
Affiliated with the Martin
E. Segal Theatre Center,
Journal of American
Drama and Theatre,
Western European Stages,
Slavic and East European
Performance.
Faculty:
William Boddy
Jane Bowers
Jonathan Buchsbaum
Marvin Carlson
Morris Dickstein
Mira Felner
Daniel Gerould
David Gerstner
Jean Graham-Jones
Alison Griffiths
Heather Hendershot
Frank Hentschker
Jonathan Kalb
Stuart Liebman
Ivone Margulies
Paula Massood
Judith Milhous
Claudia Orenstein
Joyce Rheuban
James Saslow
David Savran
Elisabeth Weis
Maurya Wickstrom
David Willinger
James Wilson