WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 17, Number 2 Spring 2005

Editor Marvin Carlson

Christopher Balme Miriam DAponte Marion P. Holt Glenn Loney Daniele Vianello

Contributing Editors Harry Carlson Maria M. Delgado Rosette Lamont Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff

Jennifer Worth, Managing Editor

Linell Ajello, Editorial Assistant

Derek Jacobi. Photo: Ivan Kyncl

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration Frank Hentschker, Program Director Elisa Legon, Circulation Manager Juan Recondo, Circulation Assistant

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2005 ISSN # 1050-1991

To the Reader
Our Spring 2004 reports cover a variety of theatre events in a wide range of European cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Stratford, Valencia, Hamburg and Hannover, in deals with important premieres, major revivals, and extends to such experimental non-traditional event as Mobile Phone Theatre in Berlin. We also include in this issue our annual index, which has been regularly appearing in our spring issue since our first cumulative ten-year index appearing in volume 11:1. We hope that this annual feature will add to the helpfulness of this journal as a research source befitting its position as the major resource in English for current theatrical production in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 or email 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.

Table of Contents

Volume 17

Number 2

Spring 2005

Paris Theatre: April 2005.............................................................................................................Barry Daniels Report from Dublin..................................................................................................................Marvin Carlson Euripides The Bacchae by Kneehigh Theatre..........................................................................Judith Milhous A Quick May Visit to Stratford and London...........................................................................Elizabeth Swain Shakespeares Henry IV at the National Theatre......................................................................Scott McMillin Fathers and Sons: Don Carlos and Festen in London.............................................................Marvin Carlson Why do Euripides Hecuba?.....................................................................................................Judith Milhous The RSCs Spanish Golden Age Season in London...............................................................Lourdes Orozco And Now Playing in Madrid...Fall 2004..............................................................................Candyce Leonard Madrid Gets Physical: Six Productions in Spains Capital City................................................Simon Breden Theatre in Valencia: looking back and moving forward....................................................Maria M. Delgado Berlin, Hamburg, and Hannover: a Winter Sampling....................................................................Erik Abbott Electronic Environments in Berlin...........................................................................................Marvin Carlson

5 15 19 23 27 33 37 41 47 55 63 69 77

Annual Index...........................................................................................................................................................81

Contributors............................................................................................................................................................95

Philippe Lebas as Dandin and Christine Brcher as Anglique in George Dandin at Thtre Artistic Athvains. Photo: Agence Enguerand

Paris Theatre: April 2005

Barry Daniels Classical Texts Bernard Sobels staging of Troilus and Cressida at the Thtre de Gennevilliers received fairly good reviews, so Im sorry to say I found the production disappointing. At its best the production looked good with costumes and scenery designed by Jacqueline Bosson and Sobel. The set was a series of high, mylar-covered periaktoi which turned to make diverse configurations of the stage space. They were both striking and efficient. The costumes mixed some modern elements with long classical robes, black for the Greeks and beige for the Trojans. The costumes were trimmed with classical motifs which distinguished the two warring groups as well. Thersites wore a modern trench coat and served as a kind of narrator for the evening. Cressida wore an Elizabethan gown. The staging was slow and, with one brief intermission, the performance lasted four hours. Sobels casting was uneven. Jrmie Lippmans Troilus was a boisterous adolescent who threw tantrums when rejected, which were vastly overplayed and genuinely tedious. Chlo Rjons Cressida was dull and colorless (she was a bit more interesting in the brief role of Helen). Laurent Pigeonnot had neither Achilles bluster nor his petulance. The men in general did not find ways to bring their characters to life. The exceptions to this lackluster acting were the work of the clowns. Bernard Ferreira was a suitably cynical Thersites. The most interesting performance was Damien Witeckas Pandarus. His drollery had an edge as he had a sickly cough and eventually spat up blood in his final scene. The play concluded with his body stretched out on the stage floor. I think Sobel was both too cautious and too respectful in dealing with the play. I could not find any theme or idea in his staging. Given the mostly uninteresting work of the actors, this made for an overly long and tiring late afternoon. The Thtre Artistic Athvains revived its successful 2004 production of Molires George Dandin this spring. This is a neighborhood theatre and production values are much less polished than the companies I usually write about. The production, staged by Anne-Marie Lazarini with scenery by Francois Cabanat and costumes by Dominique Bourde, was not as lively as I would have liked. The major scenic element was a two story neoclassical house at one side of the stage that symbolically tilted at the end of each act. This did not in any way enhance the action of the play. Modern wooden garden furniture and a fountain completed the set. Dandin wore full seventeenth

Troilus and Cressida, directed by Bernard Sobel at Thtre de Gennevilliers. Photo: Agence Enguerand

Marivauxs Slave Island, directed by Irina Brook at the Atelier. Photo: Agence Enguerand

century regalia while the rest of the cast wore twentieth century clothing. Neither the costumes nor the scenery were visually coherent or interesting. Philippe Lebas as Dandin and Christine Brcher as Anglique, his wife, gave reasonably good performances. They were hampered by the directors emphasis on the psychological realism of their unhappy marriage. This drained the play of much of its comic effect. Anglique was so unsympathetic that Lebas seemed quite likeable as Dandin. The rest of the cast was simply adequate, but rarely amusing. Irina Brook, Peter Brooks daughter, has been developing as a director over the past few years. I finally caught up with her work at the Atelier Theatre where her production of Marivauxs 1725 comedy, Slave Island, was playing. The play is a charming philosophical comedy set on an island ruled by ex-slaves who revolted and fled Athens to establish a free colony. Marivauxs premise is that when shipwrecks occur the survivors are required to change roles, servants become masters and masters servants. It is a wonderful conceit that allows Marivaux to satirize the vanity and egoism of the upper classes. Brooks production was fast paced and full of vaudeville turns and extended lazzi. The opening scene was a good example of her method. Four clear plastic chairs, suitcases and clothing were

placed on the forestage in front of a red curtain. Four actors entered in modern dress. The servants wore bright colored clothing and had clownlike makeup. They helped their masters finish dressing in elegant evening clothes. During this pantomime the haughty character of the masters was established. A fifth actor, dressed as a steward, arranged the chairs and the actors mimed taking off in an airplane. The lights went out as the sound of the plane crash is heard. The curtain rose to reveal a sand covered stage with a large hill in the center. Here Marivauxs text begins. The ruler of the island entered through a trunk wearing top hat and tails. Brook used songs and music hall choreography and lots of scrambling and sliding on the hill to good comic effect. Although the play doesnt really need all of Brooks shtick, the production was thoroughly entertaining and displayed the multiple talents of her actors. Lubna Azabal and Sidney Wernicke were the lively, oppressed servants, Clanthis and Arlequin. Fabio Zenoni and Stphanie Lagarde were suitably spoiled and haughty as the masters, Iphicrate and Euphrosine. Alex Descas was a wise and warm Trivelin, overseeing the action. Reason comes through the male characters; reconciliation occurs as the good human qualities in Iphicrate and Arlequin shine through. Brook concluded with her company clothed in similar beige garb and celebrat-

ing their new wisdom with a picnic. Noted director Daniel Mesguich has staged his new translation of Kleists The Prince of Homburg at the Thtre de lAthne. Like much of his recent work the production is uneven. It is full of the directors signature devicesalmost clichsmirrors, walls of books, a miniature theatre representing the prison set on stage, a babys crib in the Princess bedroom, a huge globe and hourglass in the Electors palace. Dominique Louis costumes mixed eighteenth century and modern dress. Jean-Franois Goberts sets were simple but effective. I especially liked the opening scene, a bare stage with a low ramp upstage left and backed by a drop representing the planets. The sleepwalking Princes voice was distorted electronically, and when the court exited up the ramp their filmed images receded across the drop. Unfortunately the acting was a hodgepodge of styles. Claude Guillot as the Electress and Thibault Vinon as Homburgs friend and confidant, Heinrich, worked in a realistic manner. Broadly played for comic effect, both the Field Marshall (Jean-Louis Grinfeld) and the Colonel (Philippe Maymat) were exaggerated and unconvincing. William Mesguich, the directors talented son, played the Prince in a heightened, psychologically intense realistic style, but he lacked charm and charisma in the part. Elsa Mollien failed to bring Princess Natalie to life. The most interesting performance was given by Xavier Gallais as the Elector. He was ironic and introspective, an odd

choice for the character in the context of the play, but his scenes held my attention. Patrice Pineaus staging of Peer Gynt was a featured production at the Avignon Festival last summer and was brought to Paris for a month long run. It was a stark production using minimal scenery and props (designed by Sylvie Orcier and Hakim Mouhous) in the vast industrial space of Atheliers Berthier, the temporary home of the Odon, Thtre de lEurope. Brigitte Tribouilloys vaguely nineteenth century costumes were in a mostly restrained palette of black and browns and white. The simplicity of Pineaus staging and its visually muted quality placed emphasis on the text and its poetic qualities were admirably present in Francois Regnaults translation. Although the production was over three hours long, it moved swiftly, except in the fourth act, which covers Peers travels in exotic lands. This act needed more color and a better sense of its satirical points. The use of techno music for the wedding scene early in the play startled, but, in general, Pineau kept the action clear and got fine performances from his 20 actors, most of whom performed multiple roles. At the center of the production, and an important contributor to its success, was Eric Elmosninos performance of the title role. Small and scruffy, he was sprightly and slightly trollish as the young Peer. As the mature Peer he was worldly, then crazed, and finally disillusioned.

Kleists The Prince of Homburg,, directed by Daniel Mesguich. Photo: Agence Enguerand

Modern Texts Thomas Bernhards Heros Square caused a scandal when it premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna, shortly before the authors death in 1988. It is a difficult and sometimes trying work and has been given a fine production at the ComdieFranaise, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel. The play is organized around the response of family and friends to the suicide of Professor Schuster, a Jew who fled Vienna in 1939, and taught at Oxford until after the war. He jumped from the window of his apartment overlooking Heros Square on the eve of his planned return to England. The long play is in three scenes and was performed without intermission. The first scene is essentially an extended monologue for Professor Schusters housekeeper, Madame Zittel, who with Helga, a young maid, is packing the professors clothing. She recalls the fastidious Schusters habits and tastes. We learn that his wife has always hated the apartment in Vienna, and has suffered from delusions of hearing the crowd that gathered there to welcome Hitler in 1939. The second scene takes place in a garden adjacent to the cemetery where Professor Schuster was just buried. His daughters Anna and Olga, both professors, are present and the scene begins much like the first scene as an extended monologue for Olga. The sisters are joined by Professor Schusters brother Robert, who dominates

the rest of the scene with a long diatribe against Austria and the Austrians in a harangue that is both infuriating and mesmerizing. The final scene brings together the family and some friends of the family for a luncheon after the funeral. The trivial chit-chat and mundane concerns of this group illustrate well Roberts point about the banality of the Austrians. Schusters wife returns accompanied by her son Lukas, and the play ends as she collapses hearing the imagined crowd on the square, the sound of which becomes increasingly loud over the final dialogue of the play. The production was imaginatively staged by Nauzyciel. Eric Vigners sets were austere and slightly abstract. The apartment had bare dark grey walls and high windows. The walled garden of the second scene was backed by a grisaille view of Viennese buildings. Jackie Budins costumes were also mostly in grays and black, except for Madame Schuster, who wore white under black lace, and Lukas, who wore a white overcoat. The characters all looked like staid representatives of the Viennese upper middle class. The acting was superb. Christine Fersen (Madame Zittel) was the perfect servant, recalling the tastes and preferences of her much-respected master. Catherine Ferran (Anna) was businesslike and cool, while Claude Mathieu (Olga) was selfeffacing. Franois Chattot was fascinating and hor-

Sylvie Orcier and Hakim Mouhous set for Peer Gynt. Photo: Agence Engeruand.

Act II of Bernhards Heros Square, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel at he Comdie-Franaise. Photo: Agence Enguerand

rifying as the splenetic Robert. Thierry Hancisses brief appearance as the light-hearted Lukas, nicely set off the stuffiness of the rest of the characters. The text is written in free verse, and Nauzyciel successfully highlighted its rhythms and repetitions; it was often like listening to music. Yet, this slightly stylized speaking did not prevent the actors from developing psychologically realistic characters. Although long and difficult and written with the driest of humor, Heros Square, at least in this production, seems like a major twentieth century work. The talented young director Philippe Calvario has staged an excellent production of Botho Strauss Big and Little (1978) at the Bouffes du Nord. The play recounts in ten scenes the isolation and gradual mental decline of a German woman, Lotte, living in the drab environment of Germany in the 1970s. Lotte, who has been abandoned by her husband whom she professes to still love, is an outsider, looking to a world that she barely comprehends and cannot become part of. Her plight is nicely illustrated by the first scene. She sits alone in a caf in the Moroccan hotel where she is on vacation. She watches people passing in the street and listens to the conversation of two men standing in front of the hotel. Subsequently, we see her trying, not very successfully, to make friends

with residents in the building where her new apartment is located. After being chased out of the apartment by her husband who is seeing a woman in the building, she seeks help from an old school friend who refuses to see her. She ends up working as a stenographer for a petty bureaucrat who abuses her. Finally homeless, she seeks refuge in the waiting room of a doctors office until she is chased out when it is clear she doesnt have an appointment. Strauss vision of the brutality of middle class German life made me think of Fassbinder, whose work is contemporary with this play. Calvario chose not to use the postmodern devices that characterized the previous productions of his that Ive seen. His presentation of Big and Little was straight forward and simple. Karin Serres provided him with efficient but spare sets that included walls that changed configurations and a two-story unit used for various apartment buildings. The effect was a kind of nondescript modern, with occasional touches of bright color. Although I think Calvario didnt always capture the plays dark satirical quality, the production was paced well and was always engaging. Almost all the actors performed a number of roles and were quite good in each of them. Lotte is a daunting role, and Anouk Grinbergs performance

Anouk Grinberg and Julien Boisselier in Calvarios production of Strauss Big and Little at the Bouffes du Nord. Photo: Agence Enguerand.

was memorable. She managed to make the character sympathetic and often amusing rather than simply pathetic. She was touching in the plays sad final scenes. Perhaps the best production that I saw this month was the Luciole Companys revival of Copis The Tower at La Dfense (1978) presented at MC93 Bobigny. In many ways Copis counter-culture farce was a response to the kind of brutality and drabness that Strauss portrayed in Big and Little, and, as such, it proved to be the more timely. The play is set on New Years Eve 1977 in a modern apartment complex in the new town of La Dfense just outside of Paris. Jean and Luc, a gay couple, who live in the apartment, are in a relationship that has problemsthey havent had sex in nine months! Their neighbor Daphne arrives after taking a large dose of LSD. Daphne is a chic, drugged waif, married to an American businessman. Micheline, a transvestite friend of the gay couple brings the makings of a party feast and an Arab youth, Ahmed, he picked up in the elevator. This boy is Daphnes lover. Daphne is looking for her daughter whom she claims her husband has abducted and taken to New York, but her daughters corpse is later found in her luggage, and we learn that Daphne has shot her. A serpent is found coming out of the toilet and later replaces the burned lamb as the dinners main course. A seagull, escaping a rare snowstorm in Paris, flies in and is nurtured by Ahmed. The production includes much casual nudity and sex, and towards the end a helicopter crashes

into the office tower across from the apartment which then explodes in flames. Imagine all of this written and performed with the skill and wit of Charles Ludlam. Marcel Di Fonzo Bo, founder of the Lucioles Company and, like Copi, an Argentine, has staged the work crisply. The audience was placed on two sides of the stage which represented the apartments living room on one side with a window looking out on the Paris skyline. In the middle was a kitchen island, and then a wall separating the bedroom and bathroom. Transparent screens covered one side of the set and were down for the opening of the play which was shots of men swimming with credits over them as in a film. The screens were lowered as the play ended and the flames of the burning tower washed across them. The cast was wonderful. Di Fonzo Bo played the petulant, suicidal Jean with just the right amount of self-deprecation. Clment Sibony was sharp-tongued as Jeans frustrated, unhappy partner, Luc. Marina Fos Daphne remined me of the young Miou-Miou, a fragile blond who has seen the world. Mickal Gaspar was amusing as the practical and sexually adaptable Ahmed. Without a pause, he immediately strips when shown the bedroom. Pierre Maillet gave a heart of gold to Micheline, the somewhat desperate queen. Copis absurd sense of humor and offbeat characters are funny, but the play is also oddly touching. They are outsiders, deviants, etc. in the terms of the period, but they form a nurturing alter-

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native family. In a sense, they successfully combat the drabness of their world. The ending is very sweet, when, after all the chaos, Micheline and Ahmed, are alone on stage and form a happy couple. The plays final line is given to Micheline quoting Blanche Dubois: Sometimes God happens so quickly. It is Copis sense of his characters humanity that makes the work seem stronger than Big and Little. I was pleased at how warmly the largely young audience responded to the play. I was reminded of what a friend of mine who was fighting AIDSof which Copi diedonce said to me: Thank god for the queens, we really need them. Contemporary Work The Black Waves Bar is an experimental dance-theatre piece created by Anne Dimitriades with a text by Olivier Rolin taken from his novel of the same name. It was presented in a rehearsal space converted into a 100 seat theatre at the MC93Bobigny. The novel presents the ruminations and reminiscences of a world traveler or sailor, who has an undying passion for barmaids he has met and tried to seduce, some successfully, others not. Dimitriades used one actor, Thomas Blanchard, who played the narrator, and one dancer, Roser Montilo Guberna, who represented the bar-

maids. Rolins language is poetic and reflective, but not terribly dramatic. It was well spoken by Blanchard, but he seemed much too young for the role. Guberna created a more fully realized persona, using stylized, dance-like movement to create the eternal object of the narrators gaze. Dimitriades created dramatic pictures in the large open space of the rehearsal room. Props were minimal: a few chairs, a sink, a door frame. A low platform divided the space in half and served as a street. Windows at the left had the name of the bar painted on them. Projections of photographs of exotic places by Annie Assouline were used to evoke the travels of the narrator. I must say that I started reading the novel and found it both boring and pretentious. Dimitriades production did not succeed in changing my opinion. Sadly to say I had the same response to Bernard Nols Sades Return, produced in the small theatre at the Colline. The play has Saint Teresa dAvila sent to bring Sade back from the dead. He becomes embroiled in the political maneuvering around the Papacy, involving a female Pope, her scheming reader, and an equally scheming Cardinal. As an anti-religious tract the piece is mildly amusing, but Noels philosophical ramblings were mostly tedious.

The Lucioles Companys offbeat The Tower at La Dfense. Photo: Agence Enguerand

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Director Charles Tordjman was generally well-served by his actors. Lna Brban had a suitable, top-model beauty and dullness as the Pope. Her reader, Johnny was played as a suave gigolo by Antoine Mathieu. Francis Frappat was slick and sharp as the Cardinal who triumphs. Agns Sourdillion was an effective Teresa, especially in the long monologue that concludes the play in which she struggles with her faith. Todjman cast a woman, Dominique Valadi as Sade. Using heavy makeup and distorted facial gestures, she made Sade into an exaggerated monster and played him with virtually no variety. It was an odd and unsuccessful casting choice. The distinguished designer Yannis Kokkos provided the elegant costumes and a handsome two level set with a dramatic forced perspective stairway to heaven at the left of the stage. The walls and ceiling were cloth that changed color dramatically under Jol Hourbeigts lights. There was a lot of talent wasted on such a tendentious text. Equally disappointing on the main stage of the Colline was Roland Fichets Animal. The play concerns a family in an unspecific war-torn African country. In the absence of their father, Kalonec, a Frenchman, the family destroys his animals. Upon his return he decides to take them in his truck across the forest to the city so they can escape to France.

The family includes a strong-willed African wife, Fricaine, a lame and dim-witted son, Nils, and a white woman, Iche, who is enamored of Kalonec. Fichet uses a kind of invented language, made up of short, frequently repeated sentence fragments. He also uses a chorus that speaks a more everyday language. Although there is a certain poetic quality to the language, the text is both vague and unspecific and the characters are generalized and uninteresting. The hip abstract aesthetic of Frderic Fishbacs staging only underlined the plays deficiencies. Elric Mamigas set included two gray carpeted rectangles flanking a square rectangle on the stage floor. At the back was a large, rectangular plexiglass container that when filled with fog created beautiful cloudlike effects that did nothing to set or compliment the action. The two actors of the chorus wore silver lam and used microphones which they occasionally loaned to the other actors. Although the actors seemed talented, they really had virtually nothing to work with. I was not surprised when I read that Fichet had originally set the action in his native Brittany. It might have had more specificity and interest had he retained this setting. As part of month long festival called The Ideal Standard, MC93-Bobigny invited the Hungarian Krtakr Company, which I had so much

Agns Sourdillion as St. Teresa, Francis Frappat as the Cardinal, and Dominique Valadi as Sadein Bernard Nols Sades Return. Photo: Agence Enguerand

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liked last spring, to return with two productions. Unhappy with their work on The Seagull, they cancelled this production and performed only Blackland. This collective creation was a kind of political cabaret, addressing both issues in Hungary and in the world at large. It recalled, in some ways, the work of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre in the 1960s. Arpad Schilling staged the production with a slickness that was very different from the poor theatre approach of his staging of Leonce and Lena last year. Actors wore tuxedos and gowns. The set was a huge three-sided cube with ceiling. The dominant color of the walls was pink and there was a childrens nursery motif on a band around the walls. The lower half of the side walls had slits lit from behind and the back wall had thirteen doors for the thirteen actors. The floor was white and there were white stools with the actors names on them. The production was created to commemorate Hungarys entry into the European Union. It reflected the discontent of these young people with political realities in their country and in the world. Topics included voting practices, urine samples of athletes, prison abuse (with a female abuser who looked like Condeleeza Rice), anti-Semitism, etc. Although the company is genuinely talented, I

found the material a bit self-indulgent. Most of the sketches went on longer than necessary. Lars Norn is a well-known Swedish novelist and playwright, whose work I have not seen before. The Comdie-Franaise has produced a very fine production of his play To Embrace the Shadows in its small theatre, the Vieux-Colombier. The play is set in the Marblehead, Massachusetts, home of Eugene ONeill, where the distinguished playwright is celebrating his sixtieth birthday. Suffering from Parkinsons disease, he lives with his second wife, Carlotta, and a Japanese servant. He has stopped writing, and in the course of the play he burns the manuscripts of the uncompleted cycle of plays he had been working on before he became ill. His sons, the drug addicted Shane and the neer-dowell Eugene Jr., join ONeill and Carlotta for lunch. The play recalls, and is as harrowing as, Long Days Journey Into Night. ONeill and Carlotta engage in scenes of bitter struggle that occasionally turn into moments of love and tenderness. The scene between the two sons that opens the second act is both touching and horrifying as it reveals the profound weakness and failures of the two characters. Jol Jouanneau staged the work eloquently. Jacques Gabels set was functional and minimal. Large bare walls with high curtained windows

Fishbacs high-concept production of Roland Fichets Animal at Thtre de la Colline. Photo: Agence Enguerand

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upstage created an uncluttered space with a modern sofa and chair for props. A fireplace was placed down stage left and a stairway was at the right. Eric Gnovse (Eugene, Jr.) and Mathieu Genet (Shane) gave quite remarkable performances as the haunted brothers. Genet was shy and withdrawn until he got his fix, after which he was delirious and finally strung-out. Gnovse nearly danced his role, using extroverted movement and gesture to create a sham faade for his characters self-deception. As ONeill, Andrzej Seweryn was astonishing. He portrayed the wreck of the man that was ONeill, edging in and out of lucidity, stumbling about the stage,

frustrated, passionate and despairing. Although I found the text absorbing and loved the performances of the men, I had one major reservation about the production. Catherine Heigels performance of Carlotta was crude and vulgar. She seemed to be imitating Elizabeth Taylor in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She had neither Carlottas ravaged beauty nor her class. There was little variety or subtlety in her work. It is a testimony to the plays power that Heigels performance did not greatly diminish the effect of the work.

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Report from Dublin

Marvin Carlson In Dublin in early March of 1998, I found less agreeable that Amy Marston is hard put to an impressive selection of new Irish works offered develop a character of much interest. in the citys best-known theatres, the Abbey, the The key moment in the play comes at the Peacock, and the Gate. end of the first act, when word comes that Adam has The Abbey is undergoing a difficult period been found, suffering from loss of memory. He is at present. In the wake of its centennial celebrabrought home and at last meets the suffering parents tions, economic, organizational and physical probwho find he is in fact someone else. This makes a lems all came crashing down upon it, and its future stunning act curtain, but is unhappily the high point course is far from clear. The theatres home, for all of the play. In the second act, the false son (played its historic associations, is quite inadequate physiby Christopher Aldington), who claims not to know cally, but plans to erect a major home in the Dublin who he is nor how he obtained the papers that Docklands have run into problems both financially caused him to be mistaken for Adam, is taken in by and symbolically, since this would mean a move Lia and Nick. Gradually he becomes more unreafrom the center of the city to a district that at least as sonable, more demanding, until at last violence yet has little else in the way of cultural attractions. erupts and he is forced to go. The situation was In the meantime, the Abbey is enjoying successful strongly reminiscent of John Guares Six Degrees of productions on both of its stage, and hoping for the Separation, but with rather less emotional subtlety, best. and at last I found the melodrama of the situation The charming little Peacock theatre, in the undermined both my interest and sympathy. I found basement of the Abbey, closed for most of the past the play most successful, and in the medium scenes, year due to the lack of funding, has reopened with a where it was less directly pushing its agenda. powerful, if somewhat melodramatic new work by I passed a much more enjoyable evening Shelagh Stephenson, whose name will be familiar to the next night upstairs in the Abbey, where the popNew York audiences from productions of her plays ular Irish production company Rough Magic was The Memory of Water and Incident with an Air presenting what was heralded as the first Irish Pump, both presented by the Manhattan Theatre Musical Comedy, Arthur Riordans Improbable Club. The new work, Enlightenment, premiered at Frequency. the Peacock at the beginning of March, 2005. Founded in 1984, Rough Magic presented Enlightenment is a dark and disturbing the Irish premieres of such varied works as Hares work, very much reflecting the fears of contemporary Western culture. Lia (Ingrid Craigie) and Nick (Mark Lambert) are a couple whose son Adam disappeared five months ago in Southeast Asia, and they now live in anguished fear, assuming that he has been captured and probably killed. Lia tells how she awakens at three in the morning thinking they killed him because hes white and Western and they hated him, a familiar white, Western fear in the early twenty-first century. The two people who seek to help are of little comfort. Joyce, a medium, is goodnatured but totally unable to focus and Joanna, a TV documentary producer, is clearly more interested in Adam as a means of boosting her ratings than a human being. Joyce, as portrayed by Jan Carey, is one of the delights of the production, but Joanna,in her Declan Conlon in Improbable Frequency. Photo: Ros Kavanagh calculations and manipulations, is so much

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Fanshen, Churchills Serious Money, Wertenbakers Our Countrys Good, and Fraynes Copenhagen, along with major revivals of works by dramatists from Wycherly to Brecht. For Improbable Frequency Rough Magic teamed up with the British musical group Bell Helicopter, which has provided the music/sound design for productions at the Royal Court, the RSC, and many films, radio and TV shows. The situation of the play is somewhat reminiscent of Stoppards Travesties, bringing together an oddly assorted group of leading literary experimenters and political figures who actually spent part of World War II in a neutral city, here Dublin, which like similarly neutral Zurich was a center of spies and intrigue. The narrator is Tristram Faraday (Peter Hanley), a harmless aficionado of crossword puzzles who on those grounds has been pressed into the British espionage service (as actually happened to some British crossword fans) and sent to Dublin to investigate possible Nazi coded messages appearing on a local radio show run by a certain Meehawl ODromedary (Rory Nolan). At the Red Bank Caf, a Weimar-cabaret style gathering spot for Nazi sympathizers, Faraday must find his way among the intrigues and verbal games of three actual if eccentric historical figures, the poet John Betjeman (also played by Rory Nolan), who may in fact have been a British spy, the experimental novelist Brian

Rory Nolan in Rough Magics Improbable Frequency. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

ONolan (Darragh Kelly), and the visiting Austrian experimental physicist, pioneer in Quantum Mechanics and notorious womanizer, Erwin Schrdinger (Declan Conlon) as well as two mysterious women of the sort ubiquitous in espionage drama: ONolans secretary Philomena OShea (Lisa Lambe) and Agent Green (Cathy White). Although these are the major roles played by these six talented actors, most of them also play a wide variety of other roles in this witty and irreverent send-up of spy stories, vaudeville entertainments, modernist literary experimentation, modern science, and Irish nationalism. Much of the play is written in verse with musical underscoring but the text is also sprinkled with songs, which consciously and delightfully adopt a very wide variety of musical styles, as the published text suggests. For example Im AntiBritish, Its Just My Way is described as a cheery, flag-waving music hall number, Betjemans Me Jaunty Jarveys Car is said to have a stage-Irish, Percy-French feel, while Ready for the Wurst, not surprisingly, has a klezmer feel. The ingenious and highly flexible setting, designed by Alan Farquharson, is dominated by a neoclassic pillared faade suggesting the portico of Dublins General Post Office, rising above a large Victorian mahogany bar around which rise lights on globes that various suggest street lamps or the scientific apparatus of Schrdingers lab. A wide variety of projections, from realistic sky scenes to Piscator-style political images (designed by Tom Burnell) appear behind the columns, while the small orchestra on stage left and caf tables to the right and left on the audience level give the whole an overall cabaret feel. All can be converted to create quite different impressions, however. Massive red banners drop down the walls of the theatre with shamrock-like swastikas giving the whole theatre a Nrenberg Rally feel for the song of the IRA leader Muldoon (Darragh Kelly), whose first chorus goes: With a song and a smile and a Sieg and a Heil, And a tooral-aye-aye for the IRA The Brits are at war so well give them what for While theyre looking the opposite way, boys,

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Nick Dunning and Pat Kinevan in rehearsal for Friels The Home Place. Photo: Tom Lawlor

While theyre looking the opposite way. Even more spectacular is the conversion of the bar into the futuristic Probability Adjustment Tank created by Schrder, with the GPO columns rotating backwards to resemble huge cannons facing the audience and surrounded by flashing lights and pulsating tanks. Whether the work is really, as one review called it the first great Irish musical may be debated, but it is certainly a hugely entertaining and ambitious comic creation by one of Irelands most innovative and talented young companies. Dublins other best-known theatre is the charming Gate, whose elegant neoclassic interior makes any visit there a special occasion. On February 1 it premiered a new work by Brian Friel, who has been a major voice in the Irish theatre now for more than forty years, since his 1964 Philadelphia, Here I Come. His latest work, The Home Place, continues Friels exploration of nineteenth century Irish history, which earlier produced two of his most honored works, Translations in 1980 and Makng History in 1988. While related to those earlier works in its treatment of history, The Home Place even more strikingly recalls Chekhov,

a number of whose works Friel has translated for leading British and Irish stages. In many respects The Home Place might be described as an Irish Cherry Orchard. Like Chekhov, Friel here looks at the final moments of an outmoded, doomed ruling class, dimly aware that the world has spun out of their control but totally unable to respond to this in any effective manner. The Cherry Orchard echoes begin with the first view of the Peter McKintoshs setting, which is a long and shallow representation of a late nineteenth century country house. A fireplace surmounted by a cluster of family pictures, a chair and a set of shelving provides a suggestion of domesticity to the right, but essentially the setting is made up of a long row of sliding, now closed patio-type doors across the rear, in an opening that forms a kind of inner prosceniium, distinctly echoing the extremely wide proscenium of the Gate itself. When the lights go up behind these closed doors (the evocative lighting is the work of Paul Pyant), the housekeeper Margaret ODonnell (Derbhle Crotty) is discovered outside folding clothes amid a Chekovian grove of trees, with the faint sounds of a village chorus singing a Thomas Moore melody in the background. The setting is a big house in Donegal in the late 1870s at the outbreak of the Land War, the popular uprising that marked the beginning of the end for landlordism in Ireland. Christopher Gore, the Madame Ranevskaya of Friels play, is the lovable but feckless owner of this estate, beautifully played by Tom Courtney. He dreams of escape to somewhere abroad, a dream whetted by the recent assassination of one of his neighboring landholders, a fate he fears as well and one which Friel based on an actual such assassination in 1878. In fact the peasants on Gores estate apparently regard him correctly as a well-meaning if not especially sympathetic figure, which is by no means the case with his visiting English cousin, the haughty and arrogant Dr. Richard Gore (Nick Dunning). Richard, an anthropologist, arrives with his garrulous servant Perkins (Pat Kinevane) and a box of instruments to measure the heads and bodies of the primitive dwellers on Christophers estate. When a representative of these dwellers, Con Doherty (Adam Fergus) demands that Richard stop his work and leave, Christopher enrages his cousin by agreeing, a concession that he realizes means the symbolic end of his dominance.

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Although the cast, headed by Courtney, is very strong, the constant Chekovian echoes call attention to plays inferiority to its model. The evil Richard is so melodramatic a villain as to remove all subtlety from his section of the play, and when at the conclusion, Christopher and his ineffectual son David (Hugh OConor) begin painting white cross-

es on the trees that are to be cut down and David accidentally draws a white mark across his fathers chest, the work comes perilously close to parody. Director Adrian Noble does a competent job, but the play as a whole suggests that when it comes to Chekhov, Friel would probably be better advised to stick with the original.

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Euripides The Bacchae by Kneehigh Theatre

Judith Milhous Kneehigh Theatre, an experimental comventured out from behind the stone wall. Paunches, pany out of Truro, Cornwall, roared into the Lyric acne, and bald patches were on display, even flauntHammersmith with their adaptation of Euripides ed. These citizens made a choice to participate in the The Bacchae last fall (I saw the performance on 3 chorus, whereupon the tutus descended, and they November 2004). The trajectory of their version of shed their nondescript modern clothes for female the story remained close to that of the classical play, disguise. The actors were always visible beneath the but the tone is rather different. The texture of the tutus, and they made no attempt to portray women, contemporary script reflects their method. As direcso forgetting that the chorus was in fact male was tor Emma Rice says in the introduction, working impossible. Yet the disguise was always there, unitwith two writers, Carl Grose and Anna Maria ing them and setting them apart from other characMurphy, we created a palette of text, poetry, songs, ters. Performers of the dedicated roles, while better and dialogue inspired by Euripides original. This shaped and considerably more athletic than the choapproach changed the proportions of the play, while rus, were also far from conventionally beautiful. use of the vernacular allowed the words to issue Dionysus was easy to recognize because he was comfortably from the seven men and three women taller than anyone else in the company, though his who played all the parts. hair was not especially long and he was dressed as a When trying to come to grips with Greek man. His feminine aspect was marked only by high tragedy, most present-day productions undercast heels. and try to downplay the chorus. Kneehigh chose The production used the whole theatre, not instead to make the chorus of at least equal value just the stage: Dionysus arrived through the fire exit with the protagonists. Not only was the chorus connear the stage right corner of the proscenium, in a tinuously present, but their stage time really countblaze of spotlights and noisy music. Wine was ed, because they were so active. Dionysus, Pentheus, and Agave (Rbert Lucskay, va Magyar, and Giles King) were dedicated roles, so to speak. Other characters emerged out of the chorus at need. The auditorium of the Lyric Hammersmith, encrusted with Edwardian gingerbread decoration, made a sharp contrast with the production, which would probably have fit better into alley staging than proscenium. However, the company worked to mitigate the isolation of the performers by spilling out into the house on several occasions. (The production also played at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Hall for Cornwall, so they must have anticipated making local adjustments.) When the audience assembled, they saw ballerina-length net tutus, one mauve, the rest white, suspended from the flies above naked light bulbs. The wings of the stage, which were open, were filled with musical instruments and miscellaneous furniture, so that the stage looked more like a rehearsal space than a set. The only finished element was an imposing back wall of stone, which served to mask crosses behind it and turned out to be sturdy enough to climb. The performance began when a group of youngish men of varying ages, sizes, and shapes, most of them not conventionally attractive, Eva Magyar as Agave. Photo: Keith Pattison

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A musical Bacchante. Photo: Keith Pattison

offered to some members of the audience. Later, the Stranger (Dionysus as cult leader, not as god) and then Pentheus as bacchante were pursued through the house. The chorus played modern musical instruments and sang about half the show, in styles varying from rap to musak to jazz to lieder. Often there was a soloistseveral during the evening, not a single singerand the rendering of the songs was both energetic and good. The group also performed as a chorus and at one point even invited the audience to sing along. The Coryphaeus (Craig Johnson) was quite charming, and the other chorus members (Dan Canham, Andy Brodie, Sarah Moody) revealed much talent in the songs. Because they proffered modern and popular music forms rather than pseudo-Greek or pseudo-barbarian compositions, the music seemed much more integral to the performance than Greek choruses usually do. The content was much less rigidly mythological than some of Euripides songs. Where myth was necessary, in establishing the story of Dionysus conception, the concomitant rejection of Semele by her family, and her immolation in Zeus glory, the Coryphaeus drew a diagram on a blackboard, but we were also shown the surviving sister, Agave, as she became enraptured by Dionysus music. She drank, got up on a table and danced, generally behaved in ways unbecoming the dignity of a princess and a mother, and eventually departed Thebes for the mountains. Cadmus and Tiresias (Mike Shepherd and Charlie Barnecut) came out of the chorus. They were, alas, less effective than the characters need to be, in part because their scenes were more immediately intertwined with demonstrations of Pentheus anger, so they got less stage time to themselves than usual. This version of the story made surprisingly little of Tiresias, nor did Cadmus get to display the

canniness that enables him to survive. Pentheus was characterized not as a military man but as a harassed and uptight bureaucrat, complete with terrorized female personal assistant (Leonie Dodd). He appeared angry and rigid from the start, even as he was being described and before he said anything himself. A major achievement of the production was the contrast between him and the chorus: he absolutely refused to indulge in the pleasure of their incidental music. Because they enjoyed themselves so much, and because the audience enjoyed them, we formed a bond with them through the music, and Pentheus rejection of them helped alienate him from us in a visceral way. The interrogation of the Stranger as prisoner was somewhat rushed, but the chorus got a full two pages for the Atrocities Rap, warning that to put a god in jail is not a wise move. The earthquake was staged with noise and flashing lights and things dropped from above, while furniture was being overturned by the chorus. Pentheus sent his personal assistant to spy on the bacchae in the mountains, and she returned with a report wholly negative in words, but revealing at the same time that she found something alluring about them. That worried Pentheus. The recaptured prisoner, instead of insinuating that Pentheus should investigate for himself, taunted him and dared him to go. Their second confrontation was a contest of wills, rather than a mesmerization or enchantment. The dressing scene involved the single mauve tutu left hanging at the back of the stage when the chorus dressed. The design linked him to them, while the color kept him easy to identify in the chaos to come. Unfortunately, Dionysus and Pentheus did not really interact after the latter made his decision to visit the bacchae. Most of the ironic exchanges that seem to comfort the king but in fact presage his destruction disap-

Rbert Lucskay as Dionysus. Photo: Keith Pattison

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peared from this text. Instead, the overdone warnings from the personal assistant did the work of foreshadowing. The subtlety of the exchanges between the beguiled Pentheus and the god were lost. Agave appeared among the bacchae and, confirming the earlier negative report of them, tore apart a sacrifical goat (a childs toy). Then, still wearing her short dress and stiletto heels from the party in Thebes, she climbed the wall at the back of the stage. There she lay in ambush. Once Pentheus was recognized, the chase, which included a segment through the house, appeared pell mell and dangerous (perhaps less so than it looked, but I shrank from it). Pentheus eventually fled up the mountain and, exhausted, was easy prey for Agave to dispatch over the back edge of the wall. This demonstration obviates the need for a messenger speech to report the killing, but at the same time makes it far too concrete. Seeing the kill also blunts the effect of the princesss last (and, originally, only) appearance, making her harder to pity. Agave returned to the city with a footballsized package of bloody newspapers. (I once saw a red balloon blown up onstage to be used for the head, to great effect. This prop, if more mundane, was at least obviously a substitute, not a model of the actors head.) Again, the ironic overtones of the recognition scene were played over. In the Greek text, Cadmus spends several exchanges talking Agave down from her enraptured state. If directing his daughter to look at the sky seems to us a nave means of calming agitation, the gesture at least distracts her from the young lions head she thinks she holds. The dialog is important, not least because Cadmus realizes, long before Agave, the implications of what has happened, both for the family and for the city. His display of humanity helps sober the audience too. Kneehigh condensed and rushed over the father-daughter sequence, so that it lost all possibility of tenderness. The end of the Greek text as we have it is seriously corrupt and may not all be by Euripides. However, the return of Dionysus in glorymanifestly an ironic use of the deus ex machinais clear from the fragments that are widely accepted. The god pronounces the fate of Cadmus (and presumably that of Agave, though that passage is supplied). Cadmus is still strong enough to protest that godly anger should not be so like that of humans, but Dionysus silences him with the information that Zeus determined their fate long ago. Kneehigh

Agave dances on the back of the chorus of The Bacchae. Photo: Keith Pattison.

chose to have Dionysus return, not in the air but through the house, dressed in the floor-length white robes of a whirling dervish, complete with the very tall cylindrical red hat, but still wearing his high heels. He exulted in having vanquished Pentheus and went on to taunt Agave at length, rejecting her sacrifice. Cadmus and Agave quailed but were never actually banished (Cadmus said, You make refugees of us all / you make us exiles / From each other / And each other is all we had.) The humans had proved to be easy targets. Their protests seemed mechanical and unimportant in proportion to the gods celebration, the repeated refrain of which was It might have been better if you had never been born. This sequence was also distanced, because the god and Agave spoke many lines first in Hungarian, then in English. As there had been no formal parodos, so there was no exodos, since the chorus did not need to leave the stage; the curtain simply came down on the revels the god proclaimed. The ending seemed curiously muted. There was no glory, no final dazzling use of the stage space in a way unseen before. This was probably not just the technical limitations of a traveling production but a deliberate choice. I, for one, was not

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inclined to give this Dionysus my endorsement; but, not having been allowed to comprehend the magnitude of Agave and Cadmus ongoing punishment, neither was I devastated for them. I came away more aware of the coercive force of religious organizations than inclined to endorse this god, in whom I could not believe. Because I am hyperaware of Euripides play, I was constantly being pulled back from the experience by the more radical differences in

Kneehighs treatment of the story. On the whole, I felt they did away with all subtlety, but I was still able to enjoy the energy and imagination in what they chose to present. The use of the chorus remains vivid and provocative. And I should report that the younger-than-average audience gave them an extremely enthusiastic reception. Kneehigh will present a version of the Tristan and Isolde story at the National Theatre in spring, 2005. They are clearly a company to watch.

Joe Dixon and Jonathan Slinger in the Stratford Midsummer Nights Dream. Photo: Stewart Hemley

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A Quick May Visit to Stratford and London

Elizabeth Swain Leaving the Stratford Memorial Theatre after A Midsummer Nights Dream, hoards of teenagers were excitedly comparing notes: Did you see,and Wasnt that brilliant when. I cant remember witnessing such youthful exuberance in an audience leaving a Shakespeare play as I did after Gregory Dorans production. Seniors at tea after the matinee were equally thrilled, though one cautioned, I dont usually like things so modern. It was only modern in making the play a production for our time, yet true to the text and to Shakespeares intentions. The most intriguing thing to me is Dorans process. The company has many young actors making their RSC debuts, but the ensemble work is flawless. There is a joy in performance that imbues the whole cast, newcomers and old timers, that can only come from exceptional trust between director and actors, and a free and creative rehearsal process. There are readings I had never thought of or heard before, new bits, new moments, constant surprises and a production of A Midsummer Nights Dream to rush to Stratford to see if tickets are still available. First, Stephen Brimson Lewis set: a simple grey cyc with a large moon suspended above for the opening scene. The forest is backed by a shadowy metallic sculpture of lifes stuff (chairs, bedsteads, a guitar, wires etc.) creating a circular frame for an ever-evolving sky. Sometimes there are stars, then perhaps planets; other times eerie shapes, all mysterious and lit with changing colors. Sometimes the woods seem to be alive with lightning bugs, other times menacingly dark. Titania sleeps in a lacy hammock that rises into the sky. The lighting makes it all work beautifully; it is threatening, thrilling, magical. The fairies costumes add to the strangeness and the mystery, creating creatures that are otherworldly, slightly sinister and darkly appealing. Puck appears for the first time in a tattered raincoat, hiding his head, making complete sense of the first fairy asking if he is who he is, for surely she must have seen him many times before. Caught out in his disguise, he lets it drop. He is something of a slob, slightly pudgy with a shock of brilliant red hair, a misfit, for sure. The humans are in modern dress of no clear time. Lysanders white crumpled suit and unruly hair are particularly striking in the first scene where everyone else is formally attired, especially Demetrius, aiming to impress in a very tailored suit and slicked-back hair. The mechanicals are in suitably character-related working attire. All is very witty, particularly touches like Helenas oversize shoulder bag worn across her chest and hugged like a security blanket. Jonathan Slingers Puck is a constant surprise. This is no cute Puck, full of bouncy mischief, but a feeling creature unwillingly enslaved, and quite moody. He is clearly miserable about Titania and Oberons dispute and not the most eager of messengers. His delivery of Ill put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes has the subtext of How much faster do you expect anyone to be, delivered deadpan. It gets a huge and deserved laugh, followed up by the equally surprising I go, (a deadly glare) I go, swifter than an arrow from the Tartars bow, as he drags himself off, rather slowly. Oberon is a stern, manipulative fellow, and perhaps Joe Dixon overdoes the poetry, but then perhaps it is a choice to explain Pucks attitude and Titanias frustrations. Amanda Harriss Titania is otherworldly and passionate. The first scene with Oberon works well, but the focus is on the human problems and the changeling boy. There is not quite enough sexual undercurrent between the two. The lovers are thoroughly passionate about their plight and their scenes work to full comic effect. Miles Richardsons Theseus is authoritative, thoughtful and quite believable as the mythic conqueror of half of womankind. I like the choice of him clearly manipulating the end of the first scene so that Lysander and Hermia are left alone to figure out what to do. His rendering of The lunatic, the lover and the poet is as good as it gets. And now to the mechanicals: I can honestly say I have never seen better. They arrive munching fish and chips and their enthusiasm for the task at hand is hilarious and touching. Paul Chahidis Peter Quince has a bicycle; a great touch as it features in all of their scenes with a wonderful payoff when he pedals madly away from the transformed Bottom. The Pyramus and Thisbe scene had the audience howling. Having messed up his prologue, Quince goes for broke and decides to give a great over the top physical performance. Hilarious! Bottoms Pyramus is played for every nuance to be found by Malcolm Storry, and Jamie Ballard is a wonderful surprise when he suddenly

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finds himself taken over by the role of Thisbe, to the amazement of his fellow actors and the joy of the audience. To be fair to any one who will see the production I will say no more about the surprises in this scene beyond that the portrayal of the wall is another cause of running mascara. Gregory Doran must be given ultimate credit for the unequivocal success of this production. From the first moment, when the staging gives real meaning to Theseus line to Hyppolita I wooed thee with my sword, we know we are in for surprises. But there is absolute textual integrity. There is no imposition of concepts. All choices spring from or make absolute sense of the text, and that is why they work. The wonderful bits similarly make sense. For example, Hermia takes a lot of luggage with her to the woods; she is, after all, eloping. The fairies, mischievous and inquisitive, steal it and re-appear waving her underwear on hangers. The choices in the play within the play, however outrageous, again make absolute sense. Oberon says I am invisible and remains center stage. The lovers take him for a tree and lean on him. Another choice which contributes to the appeal of the production is that the actors really talk to the audience in their soliloquies, and at points in the scenes. Too few Shakespearean productions commit to this choice, which includes rather than distances the audience. Doran has also chosen to use a cleverly manipulated life-sized puppet to por-

tray the Indian boy, and small puppets manipulated by the fairies when they are with Bottom, suggesting that the fairies are very small in relation to the humans. It has been some decades since this familiar play could so surprise an audience. The House of Bernarda Alba, about a widows tyrannical treatment of her unmarried daughters, sprang from Lorcas observation of a family in a village near Granada. He described to a friend a silent and cold hell in the African sun, a tomb for the living under the harsh rule of a dark jailer. It is being presented at the National Theatre. Vicki Mortimers Moorish-influenced set brilliantly transports the audience to Lorcas world of passions and rules. There is a cloister-like courtyard with pillars, and on one side shuttered and barred windows; on other sides there are multiple doors and stairways to inner rooms, all reinforcing the lure of escape, but also its impossibility. The inner part of the courtyard is open to the relentless scorching sun that adds to the torture of the trapped daughters. Paule Constables lighting perfectly complements this world of fire and darkness, but the acting seems at odds with this world. David Hares new English version and Howard Davies production mine the humor in this gruelling play, but the laughs always come with a strong measure of discomfort at the viciousness of the interactions between jealous sisters, mother and daughters, mistress and servant. Deborah Findlays

Joe Dixon as Oberon, Amanda Harris as Titania in the National Theatre production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. Photo: Stewart Hemley

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Poncia, of all the performances, most successfully finds a layered complexity. Whatever she says, we know there is much unsaid, but thought and felt. Sandy McDade also gives a textured, funny and moving performance as Angustias, the ungainly daughter of Albas first husband and the one free of Albas imposition of an eight-year mourning period. She is the oldest and richest of the daughters, having received two inheriA lighthearted moment in courtyard of The House of Bernarda Alba. Katherine Manners, Deborah tances, and is engaged Findlay, Justine Mitchell, Jo McInnes (foreground), Sandy McDade Photo: Catherine Ashmore to Pepe. After his nightfew. She is a woman universally disliked, as is set ly visits to Angustias window, he is enjoying more up in the first scene, beautifully played by Deborah carnal visits to Adela, the youngest and most vital of Findlay as Albas housekeeper, sometime friend and the daughters. Sally Hawkins understands that the confidante, and Pamela Merrrick as the Servant. We role of Adela needs huge emotions, but she begins quickly join those who dislike and fear her. far too high, leaving herself nowhere to go. Her There is, however, not enough sense of a overwhelming desire to be with Pepe causes her to society deeply different from the English. When we lash out with uncontrolled schoolgirl anger rather hear the men outside singing and Adela says, than finding a deep carnal anguish. Her final exploImagine working, imagine being in the fields, and sion when she believes her mother has shot Pepe is Poncia says, The greatest punishment is being born so overwrought and screamed that the words are a woman, we must sense a world with very differalmost unintelligible and the audience is not fully ent rules from our own, and fully believe in it. transported to the horror of her suicide, as the end of Visually we do, but emotionally we do not. When the play demands. Her most moving moment is Alba says, When a daughter disobeys, she ceases when she hears the fate of a local girl who had had to be a daughter, she becomes an enemy, and I a child out of wedlock. Alba screams, Kill her. Let rule, I rule absolutely until they carry me out, there her pay the price, and Adela crumbles to the floor is too much of the schoolteacher at work. For the holding her belly in fear and pain. Jo McInnes finds play to resonate beyond the private sphere, as I the subtle complexities in Martirio, the crippled sisbelieve it must, Alba must become a force of nature, ter who also lusts after Pepe, and turns in a well arrogant and sure her strictures are right, brooking thought out and modulated performance. no opposition, frighteningly confident, and yet a Penelope Wiltons Alba is an elegant and woman with a history. And the opposition, her forceful woman, cold, cruel and self-assured. But daughters, must have our sympathy. But Adelas no hint of the path to her ruthlessness is there, no screaming and Magdalenas sulking too often alienchinks in her armour, no larger than life force. The ate and Amelia feels too much like a sensible overall effect of the performance, despite its power, English schoolgirl. is that we do not meet a woman who knows only too The play might still work in a post-feminist well the hot-blooded passions driving some of her world that may otherwise have little interest in the daughters. Momentary glimpses of a more human vision of an abusive mother mistreating her divided woman are given, for example when she allows and squabbling brood, but the National Theatres some music to affect her and her body briefly sways production does not find that resonance to a suffias a smile lightens her face, but such moments are

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Showgirls at Tropicana. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

cient degree, perhaps because there is this unremitting Englishness to the performances, rather than a burning Mediterranean passion where the machismo of the outside world threatens and allures. Criticism notwithstanding, there is a fluidity to the production and some truly wonderful moments, particularly in the Act Two scene between Alba and Poncia. Also at the top of Act Two, there is a visual treat as white fabric is hung from lines strung across the stage. The girls sew Angustias trousseau as the sun beats down on their labors. Adela plays with the fabric sensually, others find shelter from the sun and cool off as the fabric is damped in water. The play is finely paced and modulated With only Sally Hawkins excesses excepted, there is wonderful ensemble acting. Indeed, one could say the best of British actingand therein lies the drawback. We need to be in Spain. Under the London Bridge tube station there are a series of stone vaults and an enterprising young collective of ten actors, Shunt, has taken over the space for performances. I went to see Tropicana, their joint production with the National Theatre. First one waits to be admitted to a small storeroom where bottles of disinfectant and spare toilet paper are shelved. A man is doing a jigsaw

puzzle at a messy table and ignores the five of us waiting. Eventually he looks up and says, Oh, are you waiting to go in? We are then ushered through a small door into a panelled room where others are waiting. A circular tape provides useful information: The doors are locked...except to the toilets, which are substandard...your heart is pumping heroically...to understand there must be pain...etc. Beer can be purchased through a small opening in one panel on a door. An elevator journey down into the vaults follows and then we are led in the dark by our hostess to a dim room with a television set where another young woman welcomes us, but is clearly at odds with the first young woman. The television and the discussion seem to be mainly about dogs and policemen and the uncertain relationship between the women. A mannequin on the television then instructs us to find our way in the dark to more vaults where we are told to sit on the walls around the edges. This is where the show proper begins. The space is kept mainly in darkness relieved by occasional flashes of light and eerie shadows, several actors in showgirl costumes, a man suspended in a cage passes through, the dog appears again, a series of high-heeled feet pass through; nothing else can be seen. A woman hides herself in a locker which soon gushes smoke, another rolls by suspended upside down, an ambulance (I think) is pushed by, followed by a hearse. Later, in another vault, three scantily clad girls dance and gyrate on and in the hearse while a sixties type strums his guitar. All this and more, is accompanied by screams and a cacophony of music and noise. The effect is disorienting, chilling, frightening and occasionally funnyan Artaudian assault on the sensesbut for me it didnt really work. The younger members of the audience seemed to be more responsive than the older, perhaps because we remember Brook and Marowitzs Theatre of Cruelty, the environmental experiments, all the theatrical subversions of some decades back. And since little is new, I acknowledge the effort to play with many of the same ideas in a contemporary way. But there must be a driving reason to do so, and that is what I felt lacking.

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Shakespeares Henry IV at the National Theatre

Scott McMillin The major event in the London theatre this spring is the opening of Nicholas Hytners production of Shakespeares Henry IV, both parts together, at the National Theatre. The occasion gains its luster from the casting of Michael Gambon as Falstaff, for Gambon is one of the few English actorsin the generation after Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson whose career can be measured in part by the classical roles he has undertaken. Among the others are Ralph Fiennes, currently occupied with Mark Antony in Julius Caesar at the Barbican, Simon Russell Beale, Cassio in the same production, and Derek Jacobi, just finishing an acclaimed run as King Philip II in Schillers Don Carlos at the Gielgud [see Marvin Carlsons review in this issue]. Gambons most notable performances have been on film and television., so he is best known for contemporary roles, but he is a star and he has played many rogues before. Landing him for the greatest rogue of all is a coup for the National, and the media have been full of celebrity-buzz about Gambon this and Gambon that. There was even a feature article about how hard it is to write feature articles about this actor, who keeps his private life to himself. Hytner is too good a director, and Gambon too good an actor, to let the Henrys become oneman shows. The intelligence of these productions comes from the balance of the casting and the kind of ensemble energy that a subsidized theatre can attain over a long rehearsal period. The balance in question sets a hugely padded Gambon against the gaunt and spectral Henry IV of David Bradley. These two old men are intent on capturing the allegiance of the Prince of Wales, a contest all the more remarkable in that it is never directly waged. Falstaff and the King appear in only one scene together, and they never address each other. Falstaff plays the King in the great tavern scene in Part One, but they never face one another, and their rivalry to shape the Prince of Wales each according to his own interest is waged entirely through the Prince himself. So the Prince becomes the third man in the balance. I would call him Prince Hal, as we have learned to do, but that is Falstaffs name for him. His father calls him Harry, and in this production those who call him Halas in King Hal, my royal Hal, which is how Falstaff chortles to him when the new King first appears in public, are destined to be harassed by a furious royal rebuke and thrown in the Fleet Prison. Harry, then. The balance I am speaking of takes shape across many scenes and through reflections of episodes upon each other. Since two of the three main players have no scene together, the key moments take the form of male duets, especially in the two long reconciliation scenes between the King and the Prince, one in each Part. Gambon does have his highlighted moments, of course. When he is left alone on the stage, eyes the audience, and delivers his monologues on honor or sherris-sack, one does know why the feature articles are about him and not the others. Gambons Falstaff loves an audience for the same reason he loves the Prince, because they might be able to save him, but he has to be funny in order to be saved, and he is desperately good at this. Someone in Shakespeares acting company must have been developing a great comic line just as the series of English history plays was reaching completion. The Henry IV plays bow to his talents in the monologues and the play-acting in the tavern scene, then drop him altogether in the final play of the series, Henry V, presumably because the comic actor had left the company. (Will Kempe may have been the actor, and he did leave the company before Henry V came along.) The three-man struggle pauses from time to time for a Falstaff turn under the influence of this comic, and Gambon seizes the opportunity to win the audience over to the utterly disreputable and cynical characterization he and Hytner have given to the role. Many are saying that Gambon is not the best Falstaff within memory. I think John Woodvine was better, in the Bogdanov English Stage Company of a decade ago, and others favor Robert Stephens in a more recent Royal Shakespeare Company production. Gambon is swallowing some of his lines, perhaps because he does not know them all just yet (I saw Part One in the final preview and Part Two on opening night), and he adds unnecessary touches of grossness to the famous obesity of his charactereating tavern-food from every plate on the table, for instance. (As soon as one calls something excessive, though, one remembers that excess is what Falstaff is all about.) Our favorite Falstaffs may lie elsewhere, but in fact Gambon is riveting. He manages to be nasty and engaging in his solo turns, and he has an instinct for ensemble

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Prince Hal (Matthew Macfadyen) takes the crown from his dying father (David Bradley) in Henry IV, Part 2. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

performance and lets the balance of Shakespeares design take shape. There is no merriment here, no droll version of bygone England. This Falstaff is self-serving and nasty, old and decayed. His saving grace is his honesty with himself. He knows he is all of the bad names I have just called him, and the result of his self-awareness is a touching sense of vulnerability. He is dying and he is shameless. No repentance for himonly the Prince can save him from despair. To win a young mans regard might be the aim of any old reprobate, but when the young man is the Prince and the old reprobate is beyond reform, perhaps the old reprobate can be justifiedif only the young man will love him and make him Lord Chief Justice upon his accession to the throne. Michael Macfadyens Harry is shrewd and cold-blooded, a young man who thinks he has figured everything out a bit too soon. Then he does figure everything out, and a chill comes over the scene. He knows well enough that Falstaff is an antidote to his own severe and critical father, and he refuses to sentimentalize this situation. This Prince does not really like Falstaff very much, and he is self-consciously using the old rogue for purposes of his own. But he isnt right about what those purposes are. His early I know you all soliloquy is a

glib announcement that he has everything under control. By tarnishing his reputation with disreputable behavior now, he will be all the more effective a ruler when he emerges in his true colors as a virtuous monarch. It will be like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, he thinks. When Part One is done by itself, this often seems a valid piece of political thinking, a true prince coldly predicting how he will become a true king. Staging the two parts in tandem, Hytner has six hours of stage time at his disposal, more than five of them following the I know you all soliloquy, ample time for proving that the Prince has a lot to learn. When the coronation parade finally occurs at the end of Part Two, Hytner stages it in black and grey, with the gold crown perched oddly atop the new Kings head. No one lines the streets except Falstaff and his cronies. The procession is stunted and bleak. This is not the sun coming out from behind the clouds. This is the blackshirts getting ready to run the country, and the Princes early reasoning about how to emerge into public favor seems nave in retrospect. The real reason the Prince is practicing the wayward life in Eastcheap, as Macfayden plays him, is to put off the day he has to become like his father, and to make his father pay attention to him. Bradleys King is a masterpiece of guilty self-

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involvement. His love for his son turns constantly into rebuke, as he projects his own failings onto the wastrel son he yearns to correct. The irony is severe. Prince Harry is acting out a disreputable role in the tavern in order to make his father take note of him, while the father takes note of the disreputable son in order to have someone other than himself to blame. Falstaff is simplicity itself compared to the real father. He chides Harry out of self-interest too, but guiltlessly. What has Falstaff to be guilty of? He is a great sham of a knight, of a lover, of a friend, and he presents himself in no other terms than the sham. His boast that he slew Hotspur after fighting an hour by Shrewsbury clock is pure sham. No one believes his lies. He tells them on the promise that no one will believe them. His love for Hal is fullhearted, reckless, self-serving, and vulnerable. He misjudges the Prince just as badly as the real father does, but his misjudgment is as honest as it is corrupt. The old fat man needs the young mans justification. The royal father needs justification too, badly, but doesnt want the Princes regard at all. He wants the Prince as an idealized version of himself, a sinner who can be corrected, a guilt-free King Henry to replace the angry bundle of self-loathing he has become. With a father like this, little wonder the son is drinking in the tavern. MacFayden makes it clear that Harry doesnt like being there. The opportunity to join the robbery at Gadshill he greets with distaste at first. He is not a rapscallion at heart. He is immature, but the robbery is going too far for the image he is designing for his fathers notice, and he joins in primarily because it will discomfit Falstaff. Discomfiting Falstaff is always of interest to this Prince. Falstaffs love for him is bound to prove unusable in the long run, a hindrance, so there is reason to practice ridding himself of it. His I do, I will, in response to Falstaffs plea not to be banished in the play-acting scene in Part One, is not a discovery on the Princes part that he will do this; it is an announcement of a decision long taken and possibly announced before. When the banishment finally comes in Part Two, I know thee not old man, it is full of fury at this tiresome fat man for clinging to his illusions so long and intruding on royal affairs. If this seems cruel on the part of the Prince, what sort of King will he be? If the gloom of his coronation procession tells us he is not like the sun coming out to light the world, what does it tell us

instead? Hytner has designed one answer to those questions, but it is not the answer the press-reviewers have supplied. The reviewers have decided that these productions reach the heart of English history and the heart of English history is good. The pages of history are brought to glorious life, wrote one of the best critics, Victoria Segal, in The Sunday Times. A great national epic, Paul Taylor called it in The Independent, adding what many of the reviewers were quick to celebrate, that this was the National Theatre and therefore the rightful home of the history plays. (This must have been read with interest in the offices of the Royal Shakespeare Company.) Perhaps the access of patriotism resulted from an accident of timing. The plays opened during a particularly sordid run-up to the national election, in which the Prime Ministers reasons for supporting the U. S. invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq were being challenged through personal attacks on his honesty. Busy giddy minds with foreign wars is the dying Kings final advice to his son, but if we believe that this is the nations history being brought to glorious light, ours are among the minds that are giddy. Hytners design is much more pessimistic than the reviewers noticed. The darkness of the new Kings coronation is not just a denial of the Princes early hopes of coming out like the sun. It is a sign of a harsh and repressive regime taking hold. Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet are carted off to prison just after the coronation. Hytner has them dragged across the stage in chains by blackshirts, and the lines about their having killed a man seem like impromptu rationalization. Whores deserve this kind of treatment; it is as simple as that. The Angelo of Measure for Measure seems to be running the country, and one remembered that this Prince Harry has had no contact with a woman during the six hours we have seen of his career so far he is Angelo without an Isabella so far. The women are hauled off in chains, then news comes that Falstaff and his cronies are to be sent to the Fleet. The King had said banishment to a distance of ten miles, but now it is to be prison. The unpredictability of the new regime is its most conspicuous feature, and the goal is to wipe out the dissolute, then to get along with foreign wars. With the English newspapers now reporting threats of imprisoning unruly teenagers under laws designed to ward off terrorism, and with the British involvement in Iraq continuing in the face of widespread belief that the reasons for the invasion were invented, the final

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moments of Hytners staging were disturbing, the more so because it is all in Shakespeare. That is not to say that Hytner uses contemporary references pointedly throughout. Aside from a few nice touches of Tony Blairs mannerisms from the enthusiastic and manipulative Westmoreland of Elliot Levey, this is not meant to be Shakespeare enlivened with contemporary mug-shots. But what is being worked out between father and son as the old King shapes the outlook of the new is a dynasty fraught with violence. The two reconciliation scenes are crucial in this regard. In Part One the reconciliation ends with father and son agreeing that a hundred thousand rebels die in this, after the Prince has declared that he will be more himself by tearing the reckoning he is owed from Harry Percys heart. The surge of hyperbole is in the text, as is the cruelty of the metaphor. This is Shakespeare, and the actors are following him exactly. As father and son draw together, violence is promised. Then it is delivered, at Shrewsbury, where the Prince approximates his forecast by killing the rebel Harry Percy (vividly played by David Harewood) in single combat. No one wants rebellion to succeed, but given the terms of male bonding and violence in which the Princes heroism is couched, one is thankful for Falstaff, lying there on the battlefield, pretending to be dead, then rising up when all is clear, stabbing Percys corpse and claiming it as his own conquest. At least someone can see what this kind of heroism is made of. The father-son reconciliation in Part Two ends with the busy giddy minds with foreign wars advice. The hyperbole of violence promised in Part One comes from the same source as the crafty realism of invading France promised in Part Two. This is how the old King shapes the character of the new, in a father-and-son saga which will entail the deaths of many people, many of them innocent. This final reconciliation is attained through a striking parallel in Hytners staging of the two plays. The Prince leaves both of his father-figures for dead, the comic one when Falstaff pretends to be dead at Shrewsbury in Part One, the royal one when Henry IV falls asleep on his sick-bed and the Prince departs with the crown in Part Two. Twice the Prince is premature in walking away from an old man supposed dead, and twice he must learn that the fathers, whether roguish or royal, have a longer hold on him than he supposes. This is one reason the I know you all speech seems glib in this staging the Prince has a lot to learn about growing free from

the older generation. Hytner draws out the parallel by staging the two apparently dead men downstage left (their actual breathing quite obvious to the audiences on that side) and having Harry depart from them in the opposite direction each time. David Bradley furthers the parallel by managing to sound like Gambon when he wakes up. His angry speech to his son rises to a new voice for the King, nasal, sharp, penetrating, and one realizes that this is really a voice we have been hearing all along, Gambons voice, his characteristic voice as an actor. The huge rogue father and the thin stringent father sound alike for an instant, and the Princes dilemma in freeing himself from the two old men he took as opposite to one another (and so did we) is unmistakable. It is then that Harry chooses once and for all. The King and the Prince draw close to one another, and Falstaff must be dismissed, as he was always meant to be dismissed, a passing dream. What do women matter in all this manly maneuvering? At the end of Part One, Hytner brings grieving women to kneel over the corpses left on the Shrewsbury battlefield. We do not know who they are. Their keening is the other sound of battle, not the sound of men promising violence to one another, but the sound of grief that results when the promise is fulfilled. At the beginning of Part Two, the women are still there, still keening. Then they speak the opening speech of Rumor, the prologue that comments that one can never believe the news that comes from war. These history plays are notorious among actresses for having so little in the way of female roles, but Hytner edges the battlefield with the nameless women, then focuses sharply on the few female characters who do have roles. He does this by the quality of casting possible in a subsidized theatre. One of the upcoming stars of the English theatre, Naomi Frederick (brilliant as Isabella in Simon McBurneys production of Measure for Measure at the National last year), gives a sharp etching to the small role of Lady Percy in both plays. More important to the overall design are the marginalized or powerless women, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, chained and imprisoned at the end. Mistress Quickly is played by a fine experienced actress, Susan Brown. Her precise accounting of the day Falstaff proposed to her, filled with trivial detail and a relentless grasp of the mundane, comes across as a rhapsody of historical accuracy in a play where Rumor rules from the battlefield. Why this substantial and caring woman

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should be hauled away in chains is a question to be asked of the new regime. A relative newcomer, Eve Myles, is assigned two exquisite moments of tenderness and beauty, even though her main role is the tough and sharp-tongued Doll Tearsheet. One of the moments occurs when Doll and Mistress Quickly prove themselves capable of the strangest tenderness for Falstaff, who has behaved outrageously toward them. When Falstaff admits that he is old and worthless toward the end of the long tavern scene in Part Two, Gambon marks this as the truth that has underlain his character all along. Hytner slows the pace here, lingers over the unexpected sentimentality which lets the women lavish their care upon the rogue. I have known thee these twenty-nine years come peasecod-time, but an honester and truer-hearted man Mistress Quickly says of him. I cannot speak. If my heart be ready to burst, says Doll, as Falstaff is summoned to the war. Slight those these roles may be, Part Two would be much less a production without them. Eve Myles other good moment comes in the nice bit of doubling she has been assigned. She is the Welsh Lady Mortimer in Part One, the wife who cannot understand the conversations of these rebels plotting to destroy the regime but who can

change the tone of the scene with her lovely Welsh song. As she ends the song, the men are already leaving to continue their rebellious planning. Myles is left alone on the stage as the lights come up for the interval, looking this way and that, uncertain of what her husband is caught up in, out of place with her lovely music. It is a haunting touch for the interval. Both of these scenes for the women suggest a nation in trouble. This is an England where moments of grace and humanity can occur only on the margins of society, among people who will suffer when the royal men iron out their Oedipal agony and get the nation back on course again. There is nothing glorious about the pages of history that are being brought to life here, nothing save the theatre that can draw these two plays so intelligently together and make them speak to each other. The reviewers are right about the National. It is in peak form under Hytner. In a stroke of masterful casting, he has brought John Wood into the final scenes as Justice Shallow. It would be good to report that this veteran and deeply comic actor refuses to upstage Gambons Falstaff, in the spirit of team play. The truth is that he does upstage Falstaff, and Gambon lets him do it. Team play after all. (Woods You

Michael Gambon (Falstaff), Andrew Westfield (Peto), Susan Brown (Mistress Quickly) and Matthew Macfadyen (Prince Hal) carouse in Henry IV, Part One, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Photo: Catherine Ashemore

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look well to the bedraggled and tattered Falstaff arriving in his orchard draws the biggest laugh of the evening.) A little game of upstaging is going on in the Shallow scenes, for while one of these two master-actors is holding center-stage against the other, they are both liable to be upstaged by a third, the young actor Adrian Scarborough, who had been Poins earlier on and now comes along as a decrepit Justice Silence, surely at the end of his line, ready to keel over, and stealing his final scene several times by breaking into snatches of old tunes a propos of nothing at hand. Gambon and Wood can only look on. It is a wonderful bit of comic acting, and it makes the orchard scenes a masterpiece of interplay among three confident players, who span several generations and who can afford to be upstaged in a company this good, and this well-directed. Hytner is filling the Olivier as it has never been filled before, thanks to a summer policy of low-price tickets subsidized by a foreign-exchange

company, Travelex. Most theatre-goers in London will see these plays, and perhaps many will follow along with the reviewers and regard them as a national epic. England is a land in need of a hero after the election, and Henry V in-the-making has seemed the right hero in troubled times before. That does not seem to me Hytners way of thinking, however. He has already staged HenryV at the National, two years ago, in a production that reflected the Iraq venture quite clearly and quite critically. There is no indication that all three plays about the making and conduct of this king will be staged in tandem, but the evidence of the productions is before us, and it tells us that Hytners National has no time for simple patriotism. I think he is challenging the managers of English culture, and if he can do so with the financial help of a major corporation, filling the theatre into the bargain, at prices ordinary people can pay, more power to him.

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Fathers and Sons: Don Carlos and Festen in London

Marvin Carlson Friedrich Schiller described his great early are well supported, especially by Ian Hogg, whose drama Don Carlos as a family portrait in a royal long-time experience in classic roles gives him a household, and indeed although the troubled relarich stage presence as Carlos enemy, the Duke of tionship between Spain and its restive colony The Alba. Perhaps influenced by the Hamlet parallels, Netherlands provides the major impetus for the he gave the usually dour Duke just a hint of actions of the characters, the play is really driven Polonius-like pomposity which both softened and emotionally by the conflict between the cold, ruthdeepened this somewhat monochromatic character. less, and power-driven Philip and his more humane Roger Swaine as Count Lerma, whose hidden supand idealistic son Don Carlos, a relationship which port of Carlos somewhat balances the antagonism of on the one hand suggests that between Alba, is another highly engaging creation. The only Shakespeares Hamlet and Claudius, and on the major role which seemed to me to lack a comparaother Schillers favorite theme of the struggle ble richness was that of the Priness Eboli, as perbetween freedom (Carlos) and necessity (Philip) as formed by Charlotte Randle. Certainly her emoseen in the confrontation of Mary and Elizabeth in tional upheaval in her thwarted love for Carlos was Mary Stuart. strongly portrayed, but in comparison with the richThe play offers a number of rich and chally nuanced roles of the other major characters, I lenging roles, and Michael Grandages production, found her portrayal less complex and interesting. now at the Gielgud Theatre, presents some of the The new translation by Mike Poulton was most impressive acting to be seen in the current accurate, tight, and theatrically highly effective, London theatre. Dominating the action is Derek bringing Schillers somewhat sprawling text into Jacobi as Philip, in one of the greatest roles of his clear and effective focus. Director Michael career, burning with a coldness that never diminishGrandage stressed the formality of the court, with es in power throughout an evening of remarakble scenes often beginning in the form of processions or intensity. He is surrounded by a cast that brings to pageants, with groups of actors emerging formally the production the sort of ensemble work deeped by out of the darkness to the rear of the setting to the sharply conceived individual characterizations that powerful strains of church choric music, impreshas long been a feature of the best English sively arranged by the sound score designer Adam Shakespearian productions. Cork. The simple but powerful setting, designed by Richard Coyle, in the title role, has a sure grasp of the rapidly shifting emotions of the tormented prince, and the warmth of his emotion provides a powerful contrast to the steely resolve of Philip. Elliott Cowan does an excellent job with the complex Marquis of Posa, who is both the Horatio-like friend of Don Carlos and an almost Jacobean player at political intrigue. Claire Price manages beautifully to portray both the vulnerability of Philips Queen Elizabeth and also the royal assurance of a Valois princess able to stand up even to the cold fury of Richard Coyle as the titular prince of Schillers Don Carlos. Photo: Ivan Kyncl Philip. These central figures

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Christopher Oram (who also designed the costumes) with lighting by Paule Constable consisted of massive, dimly defined walls with lighting for most of the scenes primarily provided by beams of sunlight pouring through high, barred windows on either side of the stage. Occasionally a door or other simple opening would provide the suggestion of an offstage space upstage, but for the most part the actors were defined by pools of light supplemented by strong backlighting, so that they slipped in and out of visibility. This effect was increased by the fact that for the most part their costumes were richly textured black, with hints of golden ornament or metallic sheen, rather as in a Rembrandt painting. So ubiquitous was this effect that the few exceptions to it were thereby given a particular emphasis. The loose, open white shirt Carlos wore in the opening scenes strikingly set him apart both in color and casualness from the dark, stiff, and formal court surrounding him. Elizabeth was always a visual outsider, in flowing gowns of soft greys and beiges. One of the most powerful moments in the play was the entrance of the demonic Grand Inquisitor, played by Peter Eyre, who appears in a stark downlight in an up center doorway, a dark cloth covering his eyes, supporting himself on two canes, and in a voluminous brilliant red gown, the first strong bit of color seen during the evening. For English-speaking audiences, more familiar with Verdis operatic adaptation than with Schillers powerful original, those stirring Verdian

moments are occasionally missed, but Corks surging choruses and the stunning portrayal of Jacobi more than make up for any such loss. Poultons powerful new translation cuts and concentrates Schillers rather sprawling text in a very effective manner. Just a few doors down Shaftesbury Avenue, at the Lyric Theatre, is playing a much more contemporary staging of a father/son conflict, the play Festen, a dramatization by David Eldridge based on the Dogme film and play by Danish artists Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov, and Bo Hr. Hansen. The production originated at the Almeida Theatre in March, 2004 and moved to the Lyric in September. The title, I suppose, is to remind at least some audience members of the Dogme film, otherwise I see little reason not to change the title into the English equivalent, The Celebration (as did the German production of the play I saw a few years ago, called Das Fest). The celebration in question is an elegant family dinner held to honor the 60th birthday of the wealthy patriarch Helge (played by Stephen Moore). As the guests gather, the apparent troublemaker is the crude and violent son Michael, portrayed with fierce enegy by Rory Kinnear, but far more dangerous is his quiet brother Christian (Paul Nichols) seemingly in clinical depression over the recent suicide of his twin sister Linda. At the dinner, however, the real source of Christians suffering is revealed. As the toasts go around he rises and

Derek Jacobi as King Philip confronts his queen (Claire Price). Photo: Ivan Kyncl

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delivers a scathing attack on his father, accusing him of causing Lindas death. At first the company turns against Christian and Helges rather thuggish servants chase him about the house attempting to silence him, but by the crushing conclusion, his revelation of Helges incestuous relationships with all of his children causes the family, even his previously loyal wife Else (Carol Royale) to unite against him and leave him to depart the stage in disgrace. Not that this is a happy ending. The scars that Helge has David Eldridges adaptation of Festen at the Lyric. Photo: Tristam Kenton left on his children remain, and Designer Ian MacNeils decision to use an both family and other dinner guests in fact are essentially bare stage, with subtle lighting by Jean morally not much superior to Helge. The second act Kalman, to suggest the interior of the sumptuous begins with the surprising arrival of a black guest country house that appears on the production logo, Gbatokai (played by Patrick Robinson), the at first seems strange, but as the coldness and emptiboyfriend of surviving daughter Helene (Lisa ness of this familys relationships is gradually Palfrey). Clearly she is using this relationship as her revealed it seems more and more appropriate. brothers use their withdrawal and rage, as her way Moreover the huge table that runs across the width of striking back against the family, and especially of the stage and is its central element, with Helge at the father that has caused her such inner anguish. the center, becomes a kind of metaphor for the Her challenge is quickly taken up, however, as the entire event, as well as a dark parody of family and guests indulge in a shocking range of Michelangelos Last Supper. Not all scenes are racial ephithets and racist songs at the expense of played around this table. It occasionally disappears the quiet and long-suffering Gbatokai. By the time entirely and more often is moved upstage to allow a of the final rejection of Helge, few of the party parbed to rise up for a few more intimate scenes, but it ticipants can claim much more sympathy from the still defines the essential space of the play. audience than the plays central villain. Given the dark tone of the whole, the proThe cast is extremely strong, and powerduction in fact offers a surprising variety of moods. fully directed by Rufus Norris. In addition to those The humor of Poul and the Grandfather has already already mentioned, Morven Christie appears as been mentioned. The ghostly offstage laughter of Michaels long-suffering wife Pia, Andrew Maus the dead Linda adds a note of quiet fantasy, and and Susannah Wise as the dedicated servants Lars most strikingly, the rousing drinking songs and even and Mette who get sucked into this maelstrom, and more the impromptu dances, involving even the Sam Beazley and Sam Cox as members of the most infirm of the cast and attaining an almost keyextended family, Grandfather and Poul, who prostone-cops frenzy, bring some sequences quite into vide a comic edge that the grim story very much the realm of farce. The play operates on a number needs. Coxs change from his complaining of of levels, but it is primarily a complex psychologidepression and eagerness to depart in the first act to cal study of a family held together and simultanehis enthusiastic participation in the singing and ously driven apart by the darkest and most disturbgames as the party continues and he has taken more ing of repressed secrets. than a few drinks, is a particular delight.

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A mournful Redgrave stars as Hecuba. Photo: Manuel Harlan

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Why do Euripides Hecuba?

London has witnessed no fewer than three productions of Euripides Hecuba in recent months. I saw only two, but the contrast between them could hardly have been greater. The first was done at the Donmar Warehouse by Jonathan Kent and starred Clare Higgins. The more recent came from the RSC, performing at the Albery Theatre [CK]; it was directed by Laurence Boswell and starred Vanessa Redgrave. The multitude of points that differentiated them suggests that they approached their projects from widely varied angles. What do we set out to do when reviving an ancient text, or perhaps any older, unfamiliar text? What makes a given production gripping, however old the text, and another impressive only for its failure? Hecuba succeeds in avenging the murder of her last surviving son by a traitorous ally, but at considerable cost to her reputation and, if foreshadowing means anything, to her sanity. Vengeance was not a positive motif for the Greeks. The anti-war message of this play, which makes it popular at the moment, is not a comfortable one. It concerns the dangers of retaliation after war, a subject one production made crystal clear, but the other obscured. I will take up five aspects that demonstrate how different they were: the sound of the text; the space; the chorus; the ghost; and Hecuba herself. But first, a brief reminder of the plot of this less-than-familiar play. As the Greeks prepare to return home with the spoils of Troy, the ghost of Polydorus, the youngest son of Priam, announces his murder by the king of Thrace and predicts doom for his mother. Hecuba is unable to sleep on account of dreams that her last two unattached children will be taken from her. Odysseus comes to claim her daughter Polyxena, who is to be sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. The girl chooses death over slavery. The herald Talthybius reports how she died with dignity, and the awed Greeks summon Hecuba to prepare the body for immolation. However, just then an attendant finds the corpse of Polydorus washed up on the seashore. Her hope gone, Hecuba mourns. Agamemnon comes to hurry her up and is shown the evidence that proves the violation of hospitality by the Thracian king, Polymestor. Hecuba seeks vengeance, asking only that Agamemnon not obstruct her. She summons Polymestor and his young sons, lures them into the slaves tent with promises of hoarded gold, kills the Judith Milhous sons, and blinds Polymestor. When Agamemnon returns, he listens to the Thracian and the Trojan and then judges that Polymestor deserved what happened to him. In pain, the king foresees Hecubas madness and death, and the Greeks prepare to set sail for home, taking the enslaved Trojans with them. The Donmar translation was by the Irish playwright and translator Frank McGuiness. Although called a version rather than a translation, it followed the text very closely in most regards. McGuiness worked to reduce lines to the smallest possible number of words, most of them extremely simple. He restricted his vocabulary. A few colloquialisms entered, but much of the language was neutral. Wherever possible, he dropped place names, proper names of people who did not appear in the play, and mythological references. He included few stage directions, and those were

Clare Higgins in the Donmar producton of Hecuba. Photo: Tristam Kenton

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almost always clearly generated from the Greek. After his blinding, Polymestor entered crawling from the tent, complaining I must crawl like a beast. In this stripped down format, every word counted. He gave maximum scope to the actors to build characterizations from their actions. I doubt that one could have predicted the production from the text, though the text appeared to great advantage in the production. I truly cannot say who decided the main arc of the play, Euripides, McGuiness, or Kent. The RSC made what should have been an excellent choice in commissioning its translation from the very experienced Tony Harrison. However, his text was literally unspeakable. The unsettled rhythms kept listeners off balance. The tone could vary from the extremely elevated and formal to gross colloquialisms within a line or two; and the alliterations drove me mad. Every last bit of local color was present and correct, weighing down the text, especially when an explanatory phrase was added to a name. What works for Aeschylus does not necessarily work for Euripides. Moreover, the

Clare Higgins as Hecuba and Finbar Lynch as Polymestor in Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse. Photo: Tristram Kenton

arc of this production was completely different from that of the previous one. The Donmar setting, by Paul Brown, was backed by a granite wall into which names of people killed in Iraq, native and foreign, had been carved. A Singer sat on a platform elevated high over the stage left side of the confined performance space in this small, two-level black box theatre. A steep hill of sand and shale sloped down to a triangle of dirty water. Walking around was difficult: people entered and pretty much stayed where they had arrived. The tents in which the Trojan women were housed were located behind and below this hillock. This design made the appearances of corpses from below particularly dramatic. Costumes were modern dress of a non-specific period. For the RSC, Es Devlin chose a cover of semicircular walls that rotated apart to reveal an interior playing space of peeling walls with a narrow ledge at chair height that could be used for sitting or standing on. Unfortunately, I had seen a more impressive version of the same device in a production of Suddenly Last Summer in the same theatre some months earlier. The machine had no surprise value, and the spaces it revealed when it turned were fairly neutral. Because the Albery is a proscenium house, the audience was quite cut off from the action, and the design did nothing to alleviate that separation. Costumes consisted of robes, some quite colorful, and uniforms. The solution to the eternal problem of what to do with the chorus can make or break any production of a Greek play. Jonathan Kent chose to use as Chorus a single female, with the Singer already mentioned taking two of the late choral passages more as vocalized laments than as songs. Laurence Boswell staged the full singing female ensemble, performing ersatz Middle Eastern music. They sang nicely and occasionally danced competently, but since the music was artificial and the space was neutral, they did not seem connected to anything. The odes went on forever, slowed down the action, and merely alienated and bored me. The opening narration by the Ghost of Polydorus sets the terms of the story. For the RSC, a man covered with off-white clay and wearing a loincloth appeared through from behind the two hemispheres of the set, walked downstage, spoke his piece to us, and walked off. His harangue was not especially moving, nor was he magical, and he was obviously still alive. The ghost at the Donmar was the best I have ever seen anywhere, bar none.

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Vanessa Redgrave as Hecuba and members of the Chorus in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. Photographer: Manuel Harlan.

When the stage lights came up, he rose slowly out the water at the foot of the stage, clad in thin white linen. Water streamed off him through the whole time he spoke. He showed no wounds and no decay, but he was impossible to disbelieve. When he was done, he sank back into the water and disappeared. He never opened his eyes. These simple means differentiated him from the living, and I never expect to see a more effective ghost. Hecuba must dominate the play, but I question whether, at the end, it is possible to weep for her as an individual. Redgrave played for pity throughout. Unfortunately, this gave her character nowhere to go. The attempt to justify her vengeance on the king who murdered her last son was just so much rhetoric. Within the logic of revenge, she was of course right, but what she had accomplished seemed insignificant compared to her own losses, past and future. At the end, she helped an attendant pull the corpse of Polydorus off toward the pyre where he would be burned with his sister Polyxena: she got on with business. Boswell managed to control most of Redgraves mannerisms, though sometimes at the cost of making the play easy for her: she faced upstage much of the time when anyone

else was speaking, so did not have to show a reaction. I was unmoved, and applause the night I saw the production was no more than polite. In the Donmar production, Clare Higgins traced a development from sorrow to loss of hope to incandescent rage. Anger underlay her entire performance. The ex-queen struggled to regain for just a moment enough power to avenge herself on Polymestor, having learned that she could not order Odysseus to do anything, but guessing that if she controlled her anger and begged, she might convince Agamemnon to let her attempt revenge. Her argument beforehand was moving, but of course she did not specify the means to be used. After the deed, I was stunned by the debasement to which war had reduced her. I could not endorse the action she had takenand yet, like Agamemnon, I felt complicit for having let her proceed. Ideally, someone other than Polymestor should pronounce her fate, but his blinding had, conventionally, given him foresight, and he spoke of her as a mad dog. Whereas Redgrave exited to prepare her dead for the pyre, Higgins remained alone onstage and began clawing at the sand, digging pointlessly, too close to the water, as one sometimes sees a dog seek a buried

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bone. That was Kent, not McGuiness. I did not go home elated, but I did leave admiring Euripides, while also feeling much worse about Iraq and about the human costs of any war.

(For discussion of all three Hecubas, though not much about the productions, see the essay by Peter Stothard, Hit me here, and here, and here, in the 15April 2005 TLS)

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The RSCs Spanish Golden Age Season in London

The Royal Shakespeare Companys Spanish Golden Age Season opened in April 2004 at the Swan Theatre in Stratford, travelling to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (October-November 2004) and ending its tour at the Playhouse Theatre, London a year later. The idea was generated by the RSCs Associate Director Laurence Boswell, who had previously mounted a Spanish Golden Age Season at The Gate Theatre, London (of which he was also Artistic Director between 1991 and 1996), winning the Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in 1993. Boswell explains that the choice of plays was the outcome of a long period of close research with three UK-based academics: Jack Sage, Catherine Boyle and Jonathan Thacker. One hundred plays were then selected and thirty literal translations commissioned. The objective was to produce a well-balanced, diverse and original season in which the quality of the pieces also played an important part. The original conception was of a five-piece season; the RSC wanted to bring a play representing each genre to British audiences. Thus, Pedro Caldern de la Barcas mythological drama Daughter of the Air (La hija del aire), Lope de Vegas drama of honour The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano), Tirso de Molinas biblical epic drama Tamars Revenge (La venganza de Tamara) and the picaresque play by Miguel de Cervantes Pedro, the Great Pretender (Pedro de Urdemalas) were chosen to shape the touring season. However, Calderons superb play was finally rejected by the RSC and only the other four plays were staged in Stratford and Newcastle, where audiences were able to see them head to head with three of Shakespeares tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth). Ultimately not everything worked out quite as planned in this four-piece season, since Tamars Revenge did not make it to the London Playhouse either, a victim perhaps of poor reviews on its Stratford opening. Once Tirso de Molinas tragedy was dropped from the season this became a celebration of Spanish comedy from the Golden Age which emphasised, rather problematically, the happy, cheerful and stereotypically Hispanic manners of both performers and their performances. The Spanish Golden Age Season put together an ensemble of twenty newly appointed actors, who were immersed in Hispanic cultural traditions including Flamenco dancing and singing, Lourdes Orozco joined by three different artistic teams comprising Laurence Boswell, Mike Alfreds and Nancy Meckler as directors for the three pieces. The seasons jewel was, arguably, Lope de Vegas beautifully crafted drama, The Dog in the Manger, in a newly commissioned translation by David Johnston. The piece is one of Lopes best honor plays, written at the height of his career, in which the whole structure of it all ends in a happy marriage is turned on its head. Directed by Boswell, who had already staged the piece in his university days in Manchester, the play was critically acclaimed and its audience treated to a two-hour and forty-five minute game on the tricks and treacheries of the god of love. This briskly paced play tells the story of Countess of Belflor, Diana (Rebecca Johnson), who, rejecting the praise of two gentlemen of her rank Count Federico (Oscar Pearce) and Marquis Ricardo (John Ramm)claims to have fallen in love with her nicely presented and well educated secretary Teodoro (Joseph Millson), who, in turn, is eager to marry the Countess lady in waiting Marcela (Claire Cox). This is an extremely complex storyline aiming to show love playing at will with the human soul. It unfolds through an intricate plot of betrayals, envy and hypocrisies in a courtly environment, where appearances are all-important. While listening to Teodoros sweet words to Marcela, Diana, the Countess, realises that she is in fact in love with her secretary, and only their unequal rank will stop her pursuing her feelings. However, since Diana is unable to count on Teodoros love, although he is happy to drop Marcela at any time to seek a higher prize, she decides to lock her lady-in-waiting in her room while she tries to work out a winning plan. The plots main engine is ultimately Dianas volatility, caused by the constraints that a rigid social structure imposes on her rank. This takes Teodoro, and Marcela and Fabio in turn, back and forth in their attempts to find their suitable other halves. Lope de Vega takes a critical stance on the well-trodden theme of honour by showing that this is mainly a matter of image and self belief, imposed on a societythat of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spainin the process of coming to terms with the loss of its political and economic power. The play tackles the question of honor based in genealo-

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Joseph Millson (Teodoro) and Simon Trinder (Tristan) in Lope de Vegas The Dog in the Manger. Photo:Hugo Glendining

gy as if this was something that one could buy; in fact one could, emptying it, consequently, of any ethical significance. The plays premise seems to be, therefore, a bitter critique of a rigid social structure which makes the characters act against established conventions, unleashing a whole range of unfortunate events. The whole question of unequal rank is resolved by Lope de Vega in a way that highlights the hypocritical nature of a constrictive society, since Count Ludovicos (John Stail) recognition of Teodoro as his son happens to be a well crafted trick on the part of Teodoros servant Tristan (Simon Trinder). Although Teodoros newly acquired rank is only fake it enables the play to finish in a happyever-after mood: Teodoro marrying Diana; Marcela marrying her equal, Dianas servant Fabio (Joseph Chance), despite not being in love with him; and Dorotea (Melanie Machugh) the third of Dianas maidsalso reluctantly marrying Tristan. David Johnstonss lively and contemporary translation, in which a few jovial anachronisms contribute toward the wittiness of the play, works brilliantly on stage, and Lope de Vegas poetic and humorous language is kept at its best, striking a difficult balance between period and contemporary speech. The translators reluctance to write forward the plays hidden eroticism in order to seduce a

twenty-first century British audience results in a subtle and enjoyable piece of theatre in which the tension between the said and the unsaid plays a central part. Consequently, designer Es Devlin has put special emphasis on creating an atmosphere of secrecy and whispers in an enclosed spacewhich worked beautifully in the London Playhouse, although not so well in the much bigger stage of the Newcastles Peoples Theatrein which walls have eyes and curtains ears, reinforcing the distance existing between image and what really goes on behind the walls of the Countess of Belflors house. The sets imaginative polyvalence takes the audience through the rooms of the house and out to the doors of the Catholic Church in which Diana has been praying for her soul (yet another opportunity to perform her role in society). The gold-veneered base and doors which dominate the colour scheme of both the Dog in the Manger and House of Desires not only contribute to a common atmosphere between the two plays but also refer to the golden period in which they were written and first produced. Laurence Boswells production also allows some room for subtlety in this pacey play, so that the audience is encouraged to reflect on the validity of certain social structures that also have significance

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in present-day society. This is due, partly, to the fact that the play has been skilfully crafted by Lope and, in spite of the slightly stereotypical approach to the piece, its refinement remains untouched. Amongst the performances, Rebecca Johnsons playful and yet despotic Diana, Simon Trinders fast-thinking, funny and sly servant, and John Ramms harebrained Marquis Ricardo are to be highlighted. However, there seems to be a hazardous tendency toward hyperbolic performances, which fundamentally affects both Peter Sproules Octavio and Joseph Millsons Teodoro, and, partially, Claire Coxs Marcela. The second of the seasons plays was Nancy Mecklers production of Sor Juana Ins de la Cruzs House of Desires (Los empeos de una casa), which did not achieve the same level of effectiveness or critical praise as Lopes Dog in the Manger. Firstly, this is an altogether less assured piece. Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, who happens to be the most notable representative of Mexican, and arguably, Latin American drama of the seventeenth century, learned her trade under the influence of Spanish playwrights such as the aforementioned Lope de Vega and his successor Pedro Caldern de la Barca, to whom Los empeos de una casa pays homage. There is some interest in the recuperation of the work of Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz for the stage, since the playwright has been somehow forgotten in the Hispanic tradition with her plays rarely being performed. Nonetheless, the reasons behind the piece being chosen for the season seem to stem from the fact that this passionate love story, which owes so much to the periods theatrical conventions, was written by a seventeenth century nun, falling dangerously into the domains of the anecdotic. The translation seems to have had an earlier run at the Battersea Arts Centre a number of years ago and this may have awakened UK interest in her work. House of Desires is a bright and breezy farce that puts the Spanishthis time enforced and reluctantly acceptedcode of honor in the spotlight, and therefore, is no masterpiece discovery but a formulaic repetition of what Lope de Vega mastered to perfection. The play as produced by the RSC is only part of Sor Juanas original text, which is introduced by a short allegorical representation and contains a brief metatheatrical sainete on the quality of the central performance, finishing in a masquerade with music and dance. Nancy Meckler skips the additional parts and focuses on the main plot in which noble siblings Doa Ana (Claire Cox) and Don Pedro (William Buckhurst) are entangled

in the arduous task of finding appropriate partners in Don Carlos (Joseph Millson) and Doa Leonor (Rebecca Johnson). The siblings plot is somehow spoiled since both Carlos and Leonor are passionately in love with each other, thus making it impossible for brother and sister to succeed in their matching ceremony. Mirroring this plot we find the servants similar struggle to find their spouses. Here we see Katherine Kellys Celia, who uses a Mancunian accent somewhat stereotypically to portray Doa Ana and Don Pedros maid, being persistently chased by Don Carloss servant Castao, played by the seasons comic discovery Simon Trinders. One of Mecklers most appealing takes on the play is Sor Juana Ins de la Cruzs appearance writing her own text on stage at the beginning of the production, thus reminding the audience, once again, about the peculiarity of a play written by a seventeenth century intellectual nun and highlighting the metatheatrical resources of the Golden Age texts. Sor Juana not only acts as a witness to her own tight-knit plot but is also introduced as a character within it, since Rebecca Johnsonwho is seen first as Sor Juana Inss look-alikeis then transformed on stage into the virtuous Doa Leonor, providing Sor Juana with a dual identity which may help to qualm any bewilderment regarding the nuns knowledge of affairs of the heart. House of Desires is played at fast speed almost as if Meckler had no confidence in the plays ability to entertain at a more leisurely pace. This is also reinforced by the large number of comic effects, straightforward jokes and stereotypically Hispanic gestures (in which Flamenco dances, bullfighting and mimicking play a good part) that proliferate in the production. Some of the hyperbolic performances seen in The Dog in the Manger are taken here to such a level of exaggeration that the play falls into banal caricature. A lot of emphasis is put on actors dressing and undressing on stage, underlining the high levels of performativity that make up the nobility of the time. In addition, Mecklers production takes pleasure in using gender disguise, a well-trodden comic device, to buy the audiences engagement with the play; a formula that is also perhaps overused in Mike Alfreds take on Miguel de Cervantes Pedro, the Great Pretender. The production offers its fair share of religious content since the set is an abstract composition of Catholic and pagan imagery, illustrating the

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peculiarity of Latin American Catholicism in which African and Caribbean icons and practices have been incorporated, and Catherine Boyles translation keeps religious exclamations in the texts original language. This technique is interesting but it appears to have no clear function, apart from that of contributing to the religiosity of the play and its consequently problematic take on four passionate love stories. It adds an awkwardness to the speech crammed with badly articulated expressions such as Dios mo, Ay, Dios, Cielos and so forth that tilt the play toward the comic excess. These might have been in-jokes for the Spanish speakers in the audience but it was never clear what function they had, beyond crude exclamation, for the rest of the spectators. While attention waned at times, this was, on the whole, a staging appreciatively received in London by an audience who enthusiastically cheered Trinders jokes and frantically applauded the plays farcical happy ending. Mike Alfreds production of Miguel de Cervantess Pedro, the Great Pretender (Pedro de Urdemalas) was even a more unfortunate case of sending up Hispanic culture through well-worn stereotypes. The play has always posed dramatic problems to would be directors, which might explain its checkered stage history. I was certainly left with a suspicion that Cervantess name might yet again have been used to bring some level of stardom to a difficult-to-sell season in the quintcentenary of Don Quixote. Certainly either Cervantes La destruccin de Numancia or the entremeses are far better and more compact examples of the authors ability to produce work for the stage. It is true to say that Pedro de Urdemalas is a curious piece, never performed to date in the UK that has some appealing features, such as Pedros speech about the art of performing comedies, which is yet another proof of Cervantes metaliterary techniques that feed into his works multidimensional structures. However, the piece suffers from an uneven structure, which falls roughly into three acts, and appears to be a succession of episodes picked up only at the end when Cervantess finds a more solid storyline to develop. These episodes are filled with literary topos already explored by the author in his prose, which, paradoxically, turns out to be more theatrical than this very piece. Pedros account of his life story also owes a great deal to the picaresque novel that Cervantes so giftedly tackled in his Novelas Ejemplares, of which La gitanilla is almost mimetically reproduced in the play.

In Pedro, the Great Pretender we find the story, told by the man himself, of the fortunes and misfortunes of a cunning pcaro (picaresque knave) raised to heroic stature thanks to his ability to bring the law on his side. Pedros wanderings throw into his path characters whose stories serve the purpose of unfolding the rascals great ability to trick, lie and play around with the codes that shaped seventeenth century Spanish society. In Pedro, as with Don Quixote, Cervantes created a catalytic character through which the greed, selfishness and hypocrisies that dictate the human soul are revealed and, consequently personified through a series of types across a range of social spectra (peasants, nobles, infidels and devotees). The plays narrative supports itself in Pedros storytelling which, in turn, is driven by the fact that he has not found his place in life. Thus, the experiences that he goes through contribute as much toward the formation of him both as a character and as a human being, and towards the build up of a subversive moralistic story

House of Desires Rebecca Johnson as Dona Leonor and Joseph Millson as Don Carlos. Photo: John Haynes

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which the audience can either learn from or simply enjoy. The problem is that in Mike Alfreds production Pedro develops more into a caricature of the brilliantly depicted types that proliferate in the literature of the period. Pedro takes a Sancho Panza-like approach to life in which drinking, eating and beautiful women play central roles. He turns out to be a good-hearted man whose code of values, although subversive, is essentially well intentioned. As a consequence, the audience is faced with the task of having to disentangle the dual and hypocritical morality that gave form to the society of the time in which Catholic ideologychallenged repeatedly by Pedro and no less by Cervantes himselfplayed such a central role. Such subtleties seem to have been lost in Mike Alfreds production of the play, which is subserviently driven by its primarily aim of inducing audience laughter. Pedro essentially reincarnates all the stereotypes contained in the figure of the pcaro, whose traits have also granted stereotypical dimensions to the idea of Spanishness, reinforced and deeply satirised by Cervantes through the succession of types that appear throughout the story. In his wanderings, Pedro encounters an inept mayor who has lost credibility amongst his people (Julius DSilva); a couple of peasants (Joseph Chance and Oscar Pearce) struggling to make a deal over some hens; the King and Queen, who are victims of seditious criticism in Cervantes ink and portrayed as a couple of spoiled teenagers (Joseph Millson and Rebecca Johnson); a pathologically tight-fisted widow (Melanie Machugh); a troupe of gypsies led by their chief (John Stahl) and his most beautiful girl Belica (the unsuitably blonde Claire Cox); finally contrasted with a brief encounter with a group of shepherds yet again struggling to find their perfect partners within their Arcadia-like atmosphere (William Buckhurst, Simon Trinders, Katherine Kelly and Emma Pallant). In Mike Alfreds production this feels heavily like a mere succession of characters, and the originals lack of cohesiveness emerges as a rather problematic feature, which the production appears to celebrate. The director is utterly loyal to Cervantes text even when this contributes to the blandness of the performance, and doesnt seem ready to challenge any of the stereotypes contained in the piece, as a means of achieving a clearer premise for it. Why was Pedro the Great Pretender chosen as part of the Spanish Golden Age Season?

What was the reason behind bringing this text to the British audiences of the twenty-first century? These are questions that Alfreds production needs to ask itself as it attempts to make sense of a play whose relevance doesnt seem too persuasive in this simplistic staging. The pieces supposedly jovial atmosphere, which contains some truly comic achievements, supported by on-stage music, dance and constant cheering, lacks variety. Performances are, as in House of Desires, hyperbolic with flamenco dancing and singing serving to provide a blanket response to any celebratory moment. There seems to be a certain fear of challenging Cervantes play and acknowledging that the production would have benefited from an altogether tighter structure and a significant cut to its running time. Philip Osments translation is efficient, and Es Devlins designs for both costumes and set do not pose any threat to the established convention of classic performances. Even Ben Ormerods lighting reassures the productions conservative take on the piece, since warm coloring invades the stage in the gypsy dominated episodes and green-blue lighting takes over in the recreation of the pastoral scenes. That said, there are certain elements of the production that are to be commended. Although this is an ensemble piece, John Ramm produces a wellrounded attempt at developing a convincing Pedro, even if the arduous task of carrying an almost threehour performance on his shoulders is, at times, noticeable. Alfreds take on highlighting the metatheatrical features of the play is also to be praised. An audience comprised of the seasons acting ensemble and a group of musicians is placed on stage on various occasions, reinforcing the awareness of the characters as performers, and indeed that of a nation performing itself, which is a recurring motif in Cervantes work. However, I am not sure audiences were at all impressed with the production and the reviews only confirmed what could already be felt in the auditorium: a feeling of utter boredom which was the result of, as one critic put it, too many episodes, too many speeches, too many heavy rhymes and too many words. On the whole, there has been something thoroughly problematic in the RSCs approach to this Spanish Golden Age Seasoninto which the Latin American House of Desires has been slippedwhich suffers repeatedly from the direc-

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tors lack of trust in the texts and the performances ability to entertain. There is a general sense of lack of belief in the texts that in turn affects the productions, which endure a sort of spoon-feeding syndrome towards an audience that is very obviously not trusted to follow them in this theatrical experience. Spains Compaa Nacional de Teatro Clsicos frequent unimaginative attempts to tackle Hispanic classics might not be the answer but neither has this season provided a vision of how the works might be imaginatively approached for the stage. The RSC have replaced the deference of the TNTC with a tilt towards comic excess and the grotesque caricature of a terribly predictable approach to Hispanic culture. There was an interesting remark at the end of The Dog in the Mangers performance brought to my attention by a spectator, for whom the play had been good but not as deep and compelling as Shakespeare. In many ways this statement could be transferred to the whole Spanish Golden Age season. This is indeed the feeling that one is left with after the viewing of this series of plays, whose whole purpose seems to have been the representation of a rather constrictive, and dangerously narrow, image of seventeenth century dramatic production in the Spanish-speaking world. On the whole, one is left to wonder whether there should be more than a mere recreation

of atmospheres in the recuperation of the classics for twenty-first century stages, and whether the translation of ideas should play an essential part in the undertaking of this task. There is also a question as to why Cervantes subversion of dramatic conventions is not tackled in the production of Pedro, and why the authors well-known bitter stance toward seventeenth century Spanish society does not really emerge either. Likewise, why is The Dog in the Manger only presented as a light piece of entertainment when it contains not only a deep analysis of the periods code of honour but also the dramatists concern about the possibility to perform this on stage? Why is a highly political piece, banned in its time for its potentially damaging influence on its audiences, produced as a light comedy on the affairs of the heart? And why is Lopes artistic bravery not translated as well as his language? Why did Calderns La hija del aire, recently staged to brilliant effect by Jorge Lavelli in Madrid, not make it to the RSC stage and remain only as a reading? Was Caldern felt to be too philosophical or theological for its audiences? These are questions that one feels should be addressed when it comes to the difficult task of bringing the classics to the contemporary stage in order to present a more complete approach and deeper readings of the theatrical heritage to which contemporary theatre owes so much.

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And Now Playing in MadridFall 2004

Candyce Leonard Perhaps at least part of the reason that Snowflakes Dying Words, by Juan Mayorga (b. 1963) enjoyed happy audiences and critical reviews during its weekend runs at the renovated Nuevo Teatro Alcal is the solid reputation of its author as well as that of the company Animalario who performed the piece [see WES 15.2 for a discussion of the author and company]. Mayorgas theatre tends toward the non-commercial end of the spectrum so he usually draws audiences that are willing to appreciate his cultural allusions and playful humor. Yet this plays title carries such a popular name, Snowflake, that it opened the piece to a broad range of viewers. The historical Snowflake was the only known living albino gorilla in the world and thus an important attraction and source of revenue for the Barcelona zoo. The gorilla was captured in Africa and brought to the Barcelona zoo in November of 1966 where he spent the remainder of his life until his euthanasia in November of 2003 due to skin cancer. Virtually everyone in Spain knew Snowflake as well as his competitor, Chu Lin, Madrids zoo celebrity. Chu Lin, (died May 1, 1996) was born September 4, 1982 via artificial insemination at Madrids zoo and so was distinguished as the first giant panda born in captivity in Europe. At the age of four, Mayorga heard of the strange competition between the two zoos who were each vying for top honors, so his version of Snowflakes death takes into account the rivalry. The talking gorilla begins his parting words: Never. I have never had anything against Madrids giant panda. But his magnanimous gesture is laced with Mayorgas wit: I heard it said that Barcelonas albino gorilla is more spectacular than Madrids giant panda; Its probably true While some of the humor was verbal, the majority was physical. Staged in the cushy, renovated Nuevo Teatro de Alcal that features a theatre in the round where a large cage served as the set, Snowflake (Pedro Casablanch) and his Keeper (Gonzalo de Castro) entered from the lobby and made their way down an aisle then circled the cage before entering it. Snowflake made various threatening gestures to specific audience members while the Keeper exaggerated the dangers that Snowflake might pose. This physical humor continued throughout the plays one-hour-and-fifteen-minute duration and even though quite comical and pleasing to the audience, it became excessive as a means of stretching what is essentially a one-hour play. Perhaps the

Juan Mayorgas Snowflakes Dying Words. Photo: Claudio de Casas

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most delightful moment was when the black ape, not nearly as fetching as the albino, suddenly spoke toward the end of the play. While Snowflake was philosophizing, with generous quotations from Montaigne on death, the Black Ape, clearly a second rate resident at the zoo, was basically a nuisance to both Snowflake and the Keeper. And when he finally spoke, it was not with the eloquent diction or intellectual vocabulary of Snowflake, but a poor second best. When Snowflake admires the Black Ape for his spontaneity and instinctive behavior, the latter retorted: Thats what you think! Me no like bananas. Every morning, here banana and me grab. People wants gorilla grab banana. Gorilla falls, people laughs. More gorilla falls, more laughs. Me no care about bananas; plastic bananas good too. Not so much a function of his broken grammar, but the laughter he provoked was from the audiences startled reaction that he, too, could talk, rationalize, and give a great show with his playful personality. In the end, however, the Black Ape is significant as one of the several paradoxes that structure the play. Mayorga laughs at the respective cities competition between Snowflake and Chu Lin, or sports teams, or whatever, as an instinctive search for symbols of superiority, but with the Black Ape Mayorga is also referencing illegal immigrants. When the albino gorilla belittles the Black Ape for his differences of inferiority, the Keeper explains: He doesnt have identification papers. He is an illegal alien. He isnt like us. As the other, the immigrant remains in the shadows, always among us yet unnoticed save in the event of some catastrophe. A second paradox lies in the relationship between the Keeper and Snowflake. The white gorilla is superior in both learning and culture. The piles of books in the cage belong to Snowflake, and he narrates that on one occasion, the unfortunate Keeper confused Montaigne with Montesquieu and brought the wrong book. Further, the Keeper is Snowflakes caretaker who cannot allow anything dare happen to the citys precious commodity, but at the same time he is his jailer; Snowflake lives in luxury, better than many Barcelonians as Snowflake himself admonishes his viewers, but he is still a captive. Perhaps Mayorgas most obvious paradox, however, is euthanizing Snowflake to relieve his pain and suffering from cancer even when such mercy is outlawed in Spain for people who are relegated to the Palliative Ward to die slow, agonizing deaths. The large cage worked well in terms of the

threatening noise it made when rattled, for reinforcing the powerful sense of captivity, dangling a banana in its center that the Black Ape must try to retrieve to amuse visitors, offering a gate to dangerously fly open and terrorize zoo visitors/audience members, and for its blatant symbolism of captivity. From Jerusalem to Jericho by Ignacio Amestoy (b. 1947) is one of four celebrated plays written by the author between 2000 and 2003 to form a tetralogy dedicated to womens rights. After a weekend at the Crculo de Bellas Artes in October of 2004 as part of the Muestra de Teatro de las Autonomas, From Jerusalam re-opened at the Teatro Galileo one week later on Oct. 28 for weekend runs through Nov. 14. In an auditorium that accommodates 250 spectators, it felt a bit improvised on the night I attended for its sixty to seventy folding chairs that I dont remember from previous visits to the Galileo. It was opening night at the Galileo, so the crowd was friendly but especially so since the play showcased the directorial debut of the authors daughter, Ainhoa Amestoy DOrs. Due to the authors recent celebration as the 2001 winner of the powerful Lope de Vega Award, and the 2002 recipient of the prestigious National Award for Dramatic Literature for two plays that belong to the same tetralogy as From Jerusalem, everyone in the audience had either read the play or seen it staged at the Bellas Artes a few weeks earlier, thus allowing our attention to focus on the process and performance of the play rather than merely the anecdote. The protagonist is Paula (Garbie Insausti) who sustained a serious brain injury in a car crash at the age of thirteen and now, at the age of twenty eight, her mother has died leaving her the object of a guardianship struggle between her two older siblings. Her sister Isabel (Blanca Herrero) wants Paula to enjoy the best environment she can find while her brother Mateo (Fran Fernndez Asensio) finds in his younger sister a means of swindling a greater share of inheritance from their mothers estate. In a 2003 interview before Amestoy had completed the play [see WES 15.3 for a portion of the interview], he explained to me that Paula would declare her independence and return as a teacher to other special needs individuals at the same institution where she spent fifteen years. Given the intellectual limitations that Amestoys character suffered, such an outcome would be theatrical at best. But during the course of rehearsals in the summer of 2004, the actors spent three weeks at Madrids cen-

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Garbie Insausti as Paula in From Jerusalem to Jericho,by Ignacio Amestoy. Photo: Ainhoa Amestoy D'ors

ter for special needs adults to study the gestures, behavior, and lives of these individuals, and Amestoy learned via a discussion with the director that such an idealistic outcome for Paula was simply too unrealistic and misrepresentative of the population under study. The revised ending is a sweet romance between Paula and Jaime (Borja Corts) safely budding under the watchful eye of Isabel. This ending was as risky as the original given the possibility of a cuddly, adorable ending that would be all too easy to patronize while undermining the strength of the plays thesis of Paulas journey toward self-determination. Cooing and wooing in the fashion of the most earnest pre-teen crush, Paula and Jaime enjoy the simple but thrilling pleasure of holding hands, and to the credit of the actors and directing, they do so with an endearment absent of any caricature or excess. Garbie Insausti created a very credible Paula, even as Blanca Herrero portrayed a loving and thoughtful big sister. Nicoleta-Cristina Tomescu, recently moved to Spain from Poland, completes the triad of women as Lili, Mateos scamp of a girlfriend. Flashy, streetwise, and a social step beneath Isabel and Paula, Lili shows up with Mateo some five months pregnant to justify their need of the money. When the scam falls

through and Lili returns to the apartment minus the bundle under her shirt, her encounter with Paula is powerful and caused me to gravitate toward the scenes with the women. In an intense and pivotal moment, Lili slaps Paula, and Paula strikes back in a declaration of self agency that denies manipulation by anyone, even someone whose worldliness she admires. Mateo is clearly an essential character since the conflict originates from his greed. His scene with Paula is appropriately threatening as he first condescends to her then intimidates her with his violent and physical temper, making the audience fearful for the safety of the young woman. Yet at the same time that the scene and even Mateos physical presence in the performance produces the menace of male domination, Mateo somehow diverts focus away from Amestoys storyline: female independence. Since audience members have known centuries of theatre where male dominationimplicit or explicitis fundamental to the anecdote, I wondered if Mateo might remain sufficiently sinister within the spectators imagination in order to allow the women one hundred percent of the stage time and space. The three women seem more exposed than Mateo, or even Jaime for the few minutes that we see him. Paula, Isabel, and Lili express their frus-

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El Brujo, Rafael lvarez, in The Double-Bass. Photo: courtesy Teatro Infanta Isabel

trations, doubts, and anxieties surrounding their personal struggles as well as Paulas long-term vulnerability. They are the ones that we care about, and it is their individual and collective strengths and fears that Amestoy studies throughout his many plays starring female protagonists. The three female characters, so very different in many ways and so singularly alike in others, reveal an individuality, apprehension, and resilience that display the authors keen exploration of women that are usually on the receiving end of discrimination. What is outstanding in the case of From Jerusalem to Jericho is that Paula has obvious and irreparable intellectual limitations such a scant dramatic protagonists that we see, yet she rebels against typecastingwhether by Lili or by Mateoto assert her autonomy. Rafael lvarez (b. 1950), popularly known as El Brujo, The Wizard, indeed performs magic each time he performs. Of the several times I have seen him perform, the house fills, whether it is the Teatro Espaol that seat 760 or the Teatro Infanta Isabel that seats 600 and is where I saw Sskinds The Double-Bass. Tickets for an El Brujo performance are purchased in advance, lines are long, and audiences adore his work. Monologues are his specialty, and El Brujo uses them for maximum inter-

action with his audiences. For The Double-Bass performance, the proscenium stage was set with what was described as an illuminated bubble, but reminded me of a giant pumpkin with a gauze shell whose front sections slid back on tracks like curtains. The performance was scheduled for 8:00, but at 7:45, El Brujo was already on stage reading in an easy chair whose back faced the audience and big band music filled the auditorium. At 7:50, he put the book down, turned his chair around, and began clapping to the music. By 8:00 he was moving around within the gauze bubble, reacting variously to orchestral musicsometimes lying on his back swinging his feet in the air, or standing waving his arms around, shouting, or drinking from one of the hundreds of beer cans that by the end of the play littered the stage. At 8:10, the play formally began as the front sections of the gauze bubble slid back and El Brujo began working the audience. In addition to the chair on stage, there was a clothes rack with a tuxedo, a side table packed with beer, and the most prominent item on stage, the large double-bass that is the characters love/hate object. During the course of the performance, El Brujos body work remains spontaneous, as though indeed we were spending an evening in his home. As he talks through the monologue, he slowly

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changes into his tuxedo in preparation for the evenings orchestra performance, so spends some time looking around for his socks and other busy work. Once dressed, with his handsome gray hair, black slacks with long-sleeved gray polo shirt, he became another kind of performer in that he was now a professional musician rather than a guy relaxing at home. lvarez milked Sskinds monologue with unmatched talent so that the audience was far more interested in the performer than the play. Once over, after truly a great evening filled with laughter, lavarez took several bows, then returned for what seemed to be an encore of some fifteen or twenty minutes simply chatting with the audience. Having just performed Daro Fos Francis the Holy Jester at the Infanta Isabel prior to The DoubleBass, the following week he announced that would perform Spains anonymous mid-sixteenth century favorite Lazarillo de Tormes the coming week. Far more than promoting his own shows (which he hardly needs to do), the occasion seemed to be the mutual afterglow of an exciting evening at the theatre. A handful of Spring 2004 graduates of Madrids school of performing arts (the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramtico, where the

four-year program is equivalent to a university degree) were in search of more training on their way to launching professional careers. They approached Ral Hernndez Garrido (b. 1964), the 1997 recipient of Spains esteemed Lope de Vega Award, about performing his play, The Remainder: Phaedra, with direction by Carlos Rodrguez [see WES 15.2 for an interview with Rodrguez] and Antonio LpezDvila. The immediate problem was that there were three women and only one Phaedra; the solution lay in revising the text to include three Phaedras. I spoke with Carlos Rodrguez a few days before seeing the play to ask about the decisions they made for this performance. Since the Garca Lorca Auditorium where Phaedra would play is the smaller and plainer of the RESADs two halls, its limitations dictated what could be done. A large square room with a small, fenced-in platform in one corner for the sound and lighting boards, the Garca Lorca has no real stage which, on the one hand, might offer a lot of flexibility, but on the other hand, severe budget constraints became the overriding factor regarding set design. With minimal furniture and the use of lighting to define spaces, the result was a set and atmosphere that actually corresponded perfectly to the altered version of the play which placed Phaedra within three different time periods

Garridos The Remainder: Phaedra, at RESAD, directed by Carlos Rodrguez. Photo: Ernesto Serrano

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of three different wars. The first Phaedra (Carlota Gavio) lives in the 1940s with the backdrop of World War II played out in moving and still images projected against the back wall: film of a bombedout city, the famous mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and brick and mortar crashing down. Jazz music and clothing also point to the 1940s. The unique transition between the periods is the openendedness of Phaedras death; that is, the first scene is complete so that Phaedras death could close the play. But in moving to the second scene there lies the possibility of Phaedras survival, and thus we see her in yet another setting in Scene Two. The second war epoch is Vietnam; the notable photo of the North Viet Cong soldier tightly closing his eyes just before being shot in the head by his enemy was projected onto the back wall, along with film of a crowded and restless Saigon. Sounds shifted from World War II arms to the slightly more sophisticated weaponry and the frightening motor sounds of the U.S. helicopters used in Vietnam. Rather than the skirt worn by the 1940s Phaedra, the 1970s Phaedra sports a smart pants suit, and the music was representative of that period, such as Stephen Stills 1966 For What Its Worth, performed by Buffalo Springfield: Theres something happening here / What it is aint exactly clear / Theres a man with a gun over there / Telling me I got to beware It was surprisingly moving, with Phaedra uselessly fighting against a brutal rape and fearing death at the hands of Hippolytus (Javier Lara), whose gambling has left him deeply in debt to the mafia and forced him to obey their order to murder her. The rape of Scene Two becomes lovemaking in Scene Three as a bare-breasted Phaedra (Marta A. G. Rojas) begs her stepson to remain with her. While scene treats the Phaedra/Hippoytus relationship, the anti-war sentiment of the play is overriding and the third scene is dedicated to the Gulf War, which led to todays conflict in Iraq. In addition to clothing appropriate to the time period, each Phaedra wore identical slips but with respective style changes to reflect Japan, Viet Nam, and Iraq. By beginning with World War II (a war in which Spain did not participate and for which there was broader global participation and propaganda promoting its cause), then moving to Vietnam with the acknowledged failure that the military action turned out to be, Iraq serves a double purpose. First, over 90% of Spaniards have opposed the United States actions in Iraq since the beginning, so we begin questioning the validity of actions World War

II actions: was it really necessary to use the atomic bomb since Japans cities had already been razed by bombing? Second, by associating the tragedy of the Vietnam military action with Iraq, opposition to the war in Iraq is reinforced. Ultimately, however, the issue is not which war, but War: one war after another, after another. The play closed by casting against the back wall the horrifying image of the two World Trade Center towers, half demolished, left to linger in our thoughts. The thirty-five spectators, family and friends, eagerly entered the auditorium, attentively engaged in the play, and applauded with admiration when it ended. I dont doubt that this was a special audience whose encouragement to these young actors means everything. When Carlos Rodrguez said that punishing schedules had prevented the actors from adequate rehearsal and preparation, I was concerned about spending the evening at this play rather than another that might be more promising. However, the energy and commitment of the players were evident, the performance was strong, and the version with three Phaedras was happily innovative and engaging. House of Desires and Pedro, the Great Pretender were the only plays in Madrids Fall Festival that I was able to see and was one of four Spanish pieces presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the Festival [see also Lourdes Orozcos article in this issue]. Because of the Companys renown, the promise of excellent performances and, according to a number of my friends in Spain, the mere prestige of attending plays staged by the RSC, tickets could only be found if purchased in advance. The Teatro Espaol was sold out for each performance and, indeed, the performances were highly anticipated and enthusiastically received. The RSC chose four powerful authors whose prominent plays (Lope de Vegas The Dog in the Manger and Tirso de Molinas Tamars Revenge were the other two plays) are old favorites in Spain so were guaranteed a warm audience. A number of spectators in the packed house were English speakers, so they laughed heartily at the quips, while other audience members were delighted simply by the elaborate costumes and confident boldness of the actors to interact with spectators. But on a screen affixed at the top of proscenium opening crawled a Spanish version of the text; it appeared peculiar and, indeed, those of us who have read the original Spanish texts recognized

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that something was amiss. The Spanish translation was actually taken from the English translation; the anecdote was correct, but the masters language was a bit skewed. This didnt seem to matter a bit. Scheduled to begin at 8, two actors dressed as nuns entered the stage at 7:55 to begin simple tasks: one sat at a table writing, while the other sat on the floor polishing a candle stick. The set was quite simple: a small table with candles, a couple of wooden benches, some baskets for daily work, and a stunning altar suspended against the back wall. It was an elaborate, shiny gold, three-tiered piece that contained a number of items, but mostly established the wealth of the Company and the promise of a polished performance. The Teatro Espaol seats some 760, with three tiers of balconies. Only two aisles are on the main floor, so the use of them by actors entering and exiting was, in this case, an intentional act of engaging the audience. As a seventeenth century romantic farce of love and honor, House of Desires follows a formula of playful intrigue as each character searches for a means of being alone with his or her respective lover, all in the same house: one noble woman in love with another while still pursued by

her former lover; two women in love with the same man, etc. The plot lends itself to secret meetings and yearnings, to constant confusions, and to a predictable denouement. Maybe halfway through the play Simon Trinder, who plays Castao, distinguished himself as a one-man show. Whether in his own garb of a manservant, or a cross-dressed lookalike to confuse a lover, Trinder caught all of the laughs. His physical comedy was enhanced by the capable use of his body to pull off his antics, but he also actively pursued the audience. When changing into female garb, Trinders Castao jumped into the audience to one of the box seats and asked a spectator to put rouge on his face, however messy the result might be. When he fussed about the wrong color purse to match his dress, Trinder ran down the aisle, grabbed the purse of a spectator then returned to the stage to preen. The audience loved it. After returning the purse and continuing his costuming, he posed a question: How shall I deal with this? then moved to the edge of the stage and listened attentively as he pretended to hear a spectator offering advice. He rejected the advice and again charmed his audience, then continued grooming. Sounds, including language play, were

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruzs House of Desires Photo: courtesy Press Department, Office of the Arts, Madrid

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superb. In addition to an actor playing the guitar on stage to Castaos flamenco dancing, sound effects such as the unmistakable sounds of a deadbolt locking the door shut filled the stage with reality. But the pice de rsistance was the language play between English and Spanish. Throughout the play the British actors would occasionally speak Spanish with a decidedly gringo accent: Hola! (Hi!), !Menudo lenguaje! (What language!), and Dios mo (My goodness!), consistently eliciting laughter. But no matter how much laughter it brought, it simply went on too long, mostly to milk the audience. I returned several evenings later to see Pedro,

the Great Pretender. There was no question that the performance, rhythm, completely scrumptious and different costumes than in House of Desires, group instrumental playing and singing, audience/actor interaction were superb, yet I felt that I was watching what I had already seennot because the story wasnt entirely different, but because some of the same actors were performing in much the same way. Whereas the House of Desires was scheduled for 2 hours plus intermission, Pedro, the Great Pretender was slated for three hours plus intermission. I confess that I left at intermission after too much of a good thing.

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Madrid Gets Physical: Six Productions in Spains Capital City

Simon Breden A dramatic pause or even a dramatic gesture has a very definite meaning in theatre: Meyerhold defined every movement as a hieroglyph with its own peculiar meaning. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, the concept becomes less definite when we cross frontiers and encounter cultural differences. Then we see how our certainties begin to falter and shift; a thought that struck me during my last visit to Spains capital, Madrid, where the spring season was in full swing. Of course, the Spanish are less physically self-conscious than the English; for instance, anyone walking in Madrid will likely run into other individuals who have stopped mid-pavement and mid-sentence for no apparent reason. If you observe the latter fairly common phenomena, youll discover that much of the time the offending pedestrian has merely paused for effect, coming to a stand-still in order to dramatically hammer home a point to a companion. Playwright Mayorga makes clear the importance of corporeal expression in Himmelweg, recently presented at the Centro Dramtico Nacionals Teatro Mara Guerrero, in a production by Antonio Simn: La vida no est en las palabras, sino en los gestos con que las decimos (Life is not in the words themselves, but in the gestures with which we express them). Having lived in Madrid and London, Ive been able to appreciate the cultural differences not just on the street (woe betide those who would dare stop in the middle of Oxford Street), but on the stage. Many times I have bemoaned the English theatres underuse of the performers body; the UK loves talking head theatre. However, you can always expect a compelling and above all physical interpretation from Spanish actors, presumably because they are so used to a culture of story-telling and gesture. Even drama schools like RESAD and Institut del Teatre give physical training a primary role in forming their performance students. One may have reservations about Catalan trio El Tricicles lack of depth, but what cannot be denied is their physical clarity and commitment: at the beginning of their most recent show Sit, three cavemen crouch in a corner of the stage. One scratches himself at regular pauses presumably because hes

The Presnyakovs Terrorismo, by La Abada. Photo: Ros Ribas

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A bomb threat, just one scene from Terrorismo. Photo: Ros Ribas

being bothered by a flea. After a couple of repetitions, the slightest movement of his head denotes frustration at his condition, a tiny gesture that the audience recognized as far away as the rear of the circle. That such a simple gesture could carry so far can only be down to the impressive clarity of performers used to communicating exclusively through body-language. Equally committed is the company at La Abada, who have clearly taken physical communication to heart, relying on Meyerholds notion that a theatre which relies on physical elements is at very least assured of clarity. Indeed, the Abada publish their own editions of seminal actor-training works by Lecoq, Chekhov and Grotowski, indicating their interest in methodical physical training. It is worth mentioning that the Abadas founder and Artistic Director, Jos Luis Gmez was both Lecoq trained and a collaborator of Grotowskis. Further proof can be detected in their production of Terrorismo (Terrorism), by Oleg and Vladimir Presnyakov, translated from the English version presented at the Royal Court by Antonio Fernndez Lera. The play presents six seemingly disconnected scenes: a bomb threat at an airport; a man tying his lover to a bed; an office suicide; an old woman planning a murder; and police taking photographs of a gas explosion in a flat. Gradually the plot line becomes clear, as the passenger in the first scene is the cuckold who causes the gas explosion, which

also kills the child the old ladies were chasing meanwhile, it is the lovers wife who has killed herself in the office. The play culminates with the cuckolded husband finally boarding his previously cancelled flight. Effectively, we are presented with a world where people are not just desensitised to violence, but worryingly embrace it instead to suit their purposes: one old lady lightly reveals how she gradually murdered her husband with pills, and encourages her friend to do the same. The Presnyakov brothers appear to be urging audiences to take responsibility for their actions; it is no longer acceptable to act in an immoral way merely because everyone else appears to do so. Where La Abada truly excels is in the exhilarating physical delivery of the text. The already unusual nature of the space (two naves of the reconverted church house separate blocks of audience) is heightened by the airport set-design we are confronted with. As the audience take their seats, we hear the familiar recorded flight departure announcements. The lights are also up on the entire theatre, giving the domed space the air of a sterile airport lounge; actors appear before the start of the play proper asking which gate the flight to Amsterdam departs from. The production itself opens with the choreographed arrival of the passengers, and a stylized representation of an aircraft pilot discovering two suitcases on the runway. The company have also taken great care that this power-

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ful visual opening is not lost once the text takes over, and each transition between scenes is a choreographed movement sequence set to a selection of modern songsmost notably Radioheads Sit Down. Stand Up., where the ill-informed passengers make way for the lovers scene to the jarring rhythms of Radioheads universe of dehumanisation and despotic technology. The ensemble cast of eight, through a composition of dance and stylised motion transform the space between each scene, often reinventing themselves in the process. Luis Moreno is particularly memorable, performing an extremely convincing Fourth Woman in the office scene. This, however, does not feel like a gratuitous comic drag, since the effeminate performance fits well with the humour of the scene. The cast effectively push their characters towards grotesque extremes, matched equally by the design of each scene; either of colourful humor or grey somber tones. However, one never quite escapes the heightened intensity of performance even when the play moves into more serious territory. Ernesto Arias is left with the commanding police officers monologue in which he breaks down whilst delivering a violently impassioned indictment of a laissez-faire culture; a situation that has led to a state of such indifference that fellow policemen take

pictures of dead bodies just for the fun of it. The physical emphasis on grotesques has two main functions. Firstly, the play reflects on an absurd society, and the cast under the direction of Carlos Aladro have done well to find a physicality that matches the thematic terrain of the play. Likewise, this is Brechtian theatre at its most powerful, where grotesque gesture becomes an alienating device. By detaching the audience from the theatrical world, the production appeals to our centres of reasonthe police officers speech invites us to think about the state of society and assume our own responsibility and role within it. This is also the strength of the Presnyakovs play; it does not pander to a lazy, middle-class sense that the worlds ills are someone elses fault, but rather that we all have to make an adjustment to our behavior. After all, when the passenger boards the plane, he may be fleeing his crime, but he cant flee from his conscience. The same Brechtian overtones as well as a marked use of grotesque physicality are also felt in La Cubanas latest show, Mam quiero ser famoso (Mommy I Wanna be Famous), as usual directed and written by Jordi Miln. The chorus line to the final performance of the evening is Hay que pensar (You have to think), a wake up call of sorts to the audience. La Cubana appear to be trying to snap us

La Cubana in Mam quiero ser famoso. Photo: Xavier Pastor

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Jordi Milns Mam quiero ser famoso. Photo: Xavier Pastor

out of an unquestioning culture of lazy television vegetation. The show asks the simple question: why do we complain about such bad television, but then proceed to watch it anyway? Or more importantly, why are we so desperate for our own fifteen minutes of fame? On arrival, the cast slap a sticker on you, and hand you a contract detailing your role for the eveningyou have come to the filming of a fictional English TV program, and will do anything to achieve fame on this pseudo-game-show. In typically anarchic style, members of La Cubana start the show well before the audience is ready, by interviewing arriving people from the outset, and in some cases forcing them to change clothesin my case I arrived wearing a red t-shirt and was instructed to remove it because the seats were also red: Quitate la camiseta, que te confundes con la butaca (Take off that shirt, youre blending into the seat). Meanwhile, the production is realised through a combination of live performance and prerecorded material on the screens at the back of the stage-area. As the audience enter, the screens play old English adverts and a particularly dour 1980s documentary about an old-peoples home just to remind us that we will be transmitting live to Europe. Once the program itself begins, it is a predictably flashy and transparent affair, with a number of grotesque guests and comically banal musical actsincluding electric-guitar playing nuns, and

the so-called Churrera de Espaa, an uncouth woman whose fame is based merely on chasing cameras, gaining an undeserved and inexplicable notoriety. Throughout the all-too predictable television show structure, La Cubana incorporates constant moments of audience participation, as they whittle down their shortlist of audience-members in order to find the evenings winner. On a technical level, the show is tightly choreographed and performed with inexhaustible energy. Like Terrorismo, this is very much an ensemble piece, with the cast of ten playing a tapestry of familiar television figures. With Santi Gell at the head of the cast as presenter Jimmy Taylor, La Cubana creates a constant sense of controlled chaos, just teetering on the edge of disaster. Miln directs his cast to provide a split-focus for the audience, who never quite know where to rest their eyes. This superficial world, which ceases to exist once the ratings fall to 0%, is likewise populated by bizarre characters desperate to realize their fame. As a result, the cast constantly transform themselves into different stereotypes, but more often than not the transformation is only skin deep. Changing wigs from one grotesque physicality to another does nothing to dispel the moral bankruptcy of the world of television, nor the emptiness of those who create it. Nevertheless, La Cubana makes it everyones problem; by literally forcing us to take part in the

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Valle-Inclns Romance de lobos. Photo: Ros Ribas

show, our participation makes us complicit in the superficiality. We can hardly complain if we are content to sit and watch: seguimos apretando el botn del mando a distancia, como si lo tuviramos pegado a la mano (we continue to press the buttons on the remote control, as if it were glued to our hands). Perhaps the only criticism that could be made of the show is its heavy-handed conclusion, where brutal images of people being killed or injured meld into the final dance routine. It seems that this is too moralistic an ending, as if they are blaming the television generation for the terrible images they force us to watch. The most powerful moment has already passed, when the accordion player Mara Pilar and her son are unceremoniously shoved onstage naked to perform their musical number in a cynical attempt to boost ratings. Of all the characters weve been shown, these are the only two who seem to perform out of genuine enjoyment and a desire to entertain, and television evidently robs them of taking pleasure in their craft; artistic pride is the real victim in this show. At first the audience laughs at the visual gag, but as the performers both break down in tears, it is clear that the joke has gone too far, thus rendering the final twist of the knife almost unnecessary. By detaching the tragedy of the show from the audience and putting it on the screens, they make us passive spectators again. The sudden moment of humanity is lost, and

the strength of their message diluted. However, the ending of Mam quiero ser famoso is nowhere near as disappointing as that of the Teatro Espaols production of Romance de lobos (Ballad of Wolves). The opening to ngel Facios direction of Valle-Inclns Comedias brbaras is extraordinary, finding a way of communicating Valles notoriously unstageable stage-directions. The Santa Compaa take the stage in a choreographed crossing of figures, Don Juan Manuel Montenegro surrounded and overwhelmed by the ghostly presences, whose voices are recorded and processed to generate their otherworldliness. This world literally spills out of the stage, as the dry-ice machines propel waves of silent fog over the audience, placing us in that same dismal and phantasmagorical atmosphere. Like the heath of King Learthe plays clearest dramatic influence we are plunged into a moral anomie, where the characters behave in a baser form than animals: between prayers over their dead mothers bed, the avaricious sons are bickering openly over their respective cuts of the inheritance. Paco Azorns spectacular and imposing set fills and converts the space magnificently. Indeed, although the heavily designed space could easily steal focus from the actors, the ensembles mobility counteracts the monolithic heaviness of the set. Despite all these promising elements, at almost two hours and a half of uninterrupted action, this is remarkably heavy

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going. Although it was clear that the audiences attention was wandering towards the end, it seemed the exhausted actors were more in need of an interval; as a result the abrupt frenetically paced anticlimactic ending seemed to go against the dense, ponderous mood so carefully built up. The long scene changes, which at first had seemed so striking with the looming wooden doors emerging from the smoke like an immense tombstone, ended up becoming tedious and merely repetitive. Nevertheless, this did not detract from the intense physical performances, with Manuel de Blas emerging from semi-retirement to head the cast as Montenegro. The subdivision of the cast into smaller ensembles, such as the sailors, the beggars or the villagers allowed the cast to transform themselves through a series of specific physical incarnations. Sergio Macas as Don Farruquio was particularly noteworthy as the corrupted priesthis sharp athletic movements recalled those of a cat burglar rather than a man of God. Indeed, the cast and crew may not have got to the bottom of the play itself, and I would have welcomed a more extreme and InYer-Face approach to the barbaric content of the play, but their physical commitment managed to keep the audience interested for the duration. It also

must be added that this is a far cry from the dearth of challenging material under the previous Espaols direction, Mario Gas project is bringing exciting work to a stage where we had become used to a steady diet of the light and often shallow Poncela and Casona in antiquated productions that looked to the past rather than the future. Romance de lobos, Mam quiero ser famoso and Terrorismo all have in common their emphasis on ensemble physical performances, on grotesques that speak to type. As a result, none of the productions had much room for individuals to really shine, and characterization was conceived in group tableaux rather than through individual protagonists. Sala Cuarta Pared seemed to respond to this challenge by programming an experiment with the monologue form, El Supersustituto (The SuperSubstitute), created by the company Metamorfosis. The premise is simple; we have come to see a variety show including a fakir, operetta singer and trapeze artist, but none of them have shown up. Therefore, the substitute usher (who only works Mondays) is forced to fill in for all the acts. The humor is often predictably simple, and familiar slapstick routines follow each other. However, Jos Antonio Ruizs performance keeps the audience

Teatro Espaols production of Romance de lobos, directed by ngel Facio. Photo: Ros Ribas

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Carmelo Gmez and Josep Mara Flotats in La Cena. Photo: courtesy Teatro Bellas Artes

laughing and suitably impressed. The show includes some very athletic clowning routines, which he executes flawlessly. It may not shake the foundations of contemporary theatre, but it certainly entertains as Ruizs instinctual physical presence holds the flimsy dramatic structure together. A more famous, and more successful example of physical characterisation can be found on the stage of the Bellas Artes, with Josep Mara Flotats and Carmelo Gmez starring in Jean Claude Brisvilles La Cena (The Dinner). In contrast to El Supersustituto, here it is the wealth of detail and nuance that makes the physical performances so compelling. Brisvilles play stages an imagined conversation between Fouch and Talleyrand, deciding the fate of France after Waterloo, as the old order struggles to maintain a foothold in power. The entire political situation, as well as the concerns of the characters, is entirely expressed through nuances of gestures, both are mesmerizing to watch. Flotats, who also directs and designs the production, is impeccable as Talleyrand, back arched at all times, his narrow eyes always pressing down on Fouch. Even his limp seems an extension of the characters affectation. Flotats plays the French Princes movement with a control and elegant grace associated with the upper-echelons of society. Meanwhile, Gmezs Fouch is more grounded, of a lower class, impervious to Talleyrands focus on

the protocol of social behavior. While Talleyrand poses at the table, Fouch sprawls, overusing his hands, and exercising none of the self-control of his dinner companion. Perhaps more sense could have been made of Fouchs virtually inexplicable change of mind after his vehement bluster of a Republican France, he seems to sell his ideals extremely cheaply to Talleyrands restoration of Monarchy. Nevertheless, for a play that functions as an intellectual game presenting what may have happened in this transitional period of French history, both actors held the audiences unwavering attention. However, it was not what the actors were saying that proved so gripping, after all, to a modern Spanish audience the details of nineteenth century French history can only be of passing curiosity. Exactly as Mayorga suggests in Himmelweg, it was how the body-language shaped character and meaning and not the content that intrigued. Unfortunately, Lluis Pasquals third restaging (the first in Castilian Spanish) of Kolts Roberto Zucco lacked either intellectual clarity in production or spellbinding physical performances from a lack-luster cast. Although Ivn Herms in the role of Zucco provided a central pivot of sorts, the rest of the cast never seemed to genuinely fear him. The root of the problem lies in an overly poetic translation, one that had none of the verve or pace

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of Martin Crimps English translation. Here the language was a bad imitation of Lorca, and the text inevitably slowed the entire production down, focusing the audience on character when the play more naturally appeals to the sense of an overarching theatrical world. Unfortunately, aside from Hermes dry but apt muscular presence, none of the cast seemed to understand their place in the world: Celia Bermejo as Zuccos mother, floundered with the language in desperate melodrama. Aida Folch as the Girl was barely noteworthy, giving little expression to the character. Carmen Machi as the girls Sister was too contrived, launching melodramatically into a seemingly interminable and embarrassing series of screeches, and picking on an unfortunate single male audience member for her monologue. Unlike La Cubana, playing off the audience didnt feel clever; it felt contrived, cruel and cynical. The whole cast seemed to have been misdirected towards naturalism, which contradicts both the pretentiously poetic translation and the expressionistic nature of the play. The result of this process is that the cast helplessly overcompensate through melodrama, since the characters on the page offer no logical signs to be understood by. Even the more ensemble sections were clumsily choreographed; the whores and transvestites seemed lifted straight out of the very worst of Almodvars excesses. At only one point did the production seem to take off, as the cast assemble in the aisle in wonder at Zucco holding a Lady and her son hostage. For the first time we understood Zuccos aimless violence, and the general publics equally aimless fascination for car-crash entertainment. His blank expression, coupled with a con-

trasting physical directness, reveals itself as a lack of inner-life, which eventually strangles the characters. The show is certainly at its strongest when Hermes strong physical presence is given space. Early in the play, after killing his mother, he strides purposely down the aisle, a striking moment when we realise a cold amoral killer is on the loose. Likewise, at the end, Hermes clambers athletically up a worryingly precarious looking column as he seeks to escape the walls around him. The production hits its stride when we see a strong physicality batter itself against the metal walls implied in Kolts writing and included in Frederic Amats design, such as Zuccos fruitless battle to climb to the top of a hill of earth only to slide back to the bottom again. However, the production soon returned to intrusive projections and gratuitous pornography, never settling on a theatrical language with which to drive its confused message home. For all the ups and downs of these six productions currently on-stage in Madrid, one thing is clear, physical clarity allows us into the theatrical world of the play, and draws us towards a reading of the significance of the work. Without the intrigue generated by the battling of two minds conveyed in physical terms, La Cena might have turned into an insipid un-theatrical production. Even the flawed Roberto Zucco held much of its symbolic weight in Hermes uncontrolled physical power. It is often claimed that 97% of human communication is in fact non-verbal. Whatever the scientific basis of such a figure, nowhere is it more important to realise the communicative power of the body than in the theatre and Spanish actors do the utmost to exploit this possibility.

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Theatre in Valencia: looking back and moving forward

Maria M. Delgado Valencia is Spains third city, a Mediterranean metropolis 470 kilometers further down the coast from the Catalan capital. While it shares close ties with Cataloniawith Valencian often claimed to be a dialect of Catalanthe capital city of the Comunidad Valenciana has never attracted the visitor numbers of either Barcelona or the Spanish capital Madrid. Certainly the city has not been without conspicuous attractions, but theatre has never been at the forefront of its cultural identity. There is a vibrant performative characteristic to the citys landscape and nowhere is this more evident than in Valencias annual falla festival. Between 1 and 19 March the conurbation is overtaken with parades, concerts, parties and giant paella cooking competitionsthe city is the home of paella and awash with restaurants offering imaginative variations on the national dish. The city becomes a giant stage for a range of events where the fallas, eponymous papier-mch figures propped on giant stilts that offer satirical commentaries on the latest celebrities, fads, or frustrations, vie for attention and dominance before going up in ceremonious flames at the end of the celebrations. Nevertheless, despite its well-preserved old city centrea warren of plazas, winding streets, picturesque churches and charming modernist glass market, the mercado central, the city has played second fiddle to the more baroque Andalusian cities of Granada and Seville or the Guggenheim-invigorated Basque port of Bilbao. That may all be about to change as local architect Santiago Calatrava, responsible for Bilbaos dove-shaped Sondica airport, brings his sculpture-infused structures to the city in the City of Arts and Sciences complex that bind the city centre to the port. The diversion of the citys curving Turia River out of the city to prevent further flooding following the devastation of the 1950s has created a winding path of playgrounds including a giant Gulliver childrens park designed by Ricardo Bofill, architect of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunyasports facilities and gardens that circle the city. As the path meanders its way to the Gulliver park and past the concert hall, the Palau de la Msica, unsuspecting visitors come face to face with a giant configuration of concrete and stainless steel structures that presents a vibrant alternative to the gothic and early modern splendor of the old city. The City of Arts and Sciences houses the already open Hemisfric, a planetarium, laser dome and

The armadillo-like Palais de les Arts Valencia under construction. Photo: Maria M. Delgado

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IMAX cinema whose configuration suggests something of a heavy eyelid bathed in glass and vibrant metal. The Prncipe Felipe Science Museum housed in a pristine concrete structure that evokes a vast ribbed skeletal animal shell presents a busy interactive venue with great appeal to the youngincluding a play center for the over fours. Waves of expansive arches and restful pools of crystal clear water give a sense of tranquility despite the soaring visitor numbers. LUmbracles garden, housed within an arched canopy of intersecting frames, provides a balance to the cathedral-like Science Museum and ingeniously conceals the underground car-park and public transport links. The aquarium and marine park of LOceonogrfic, designed by Felix Candela to fit within Calatravas overall design, presents another mini-metropolis marked by undulating pathways that link the tunnels, igloos, globes and folding tulip configurations that house Europes largest complex of marine life. While there is something of Gaud in the prominent use of tiling fragments, Calatravas training as a civil engineering, evident in the mathematical symmetry of the configurations and their relationship to his sliding-roof Olympic stadium for Athens in 2004, give his designs a character that evokes the bold grandeur of Gehry. The arts venue that will in many ways form the centerpiece of the City of Arts and Sciences, is the Palau de les Arts, bathed in scaffolding, workmen and cranes as it seeks to make its end-of-year completion deadline, has something of the circular smoothness of LHemisfric. The colossal structures giant curved roof has much of the solid grandeur of a oversized cruise-ship, and will house three auditoria that will host opera, theatre, ballet and music concerts offering more variety than the existing theatrical provision spread across the old city. At a time when programmers struggle to find products that will fit into the giantesque moments built to the greater glory of the arts, the productions seen in Valencia did not fill me with hope that there was either an audience to fill such an ambitious venture or an artistic infrastructure in place to support it. Yes, there are local companies and Valencia is a prominent member of the circuit for large- and middle-scale touring ventures but it already has theatres that can comfortably accommodate such ventures. Theres no indigenous recent history of an opera house in the city, nor any local opera performing infrastructure, and the wellregarded Valencia Symphony orchestra is currently

resident in the relatively new Palau de la Msica. It remains to be seen if the two Palaus will be able to operate side by side without splitting the audience. I also wonder about the Palau de les Arts ability to compete with the giant outdoor stage provided by Calatrava in the City of Arts and Sciences. Valencia has certainly had its fair share of theatrical innovators and playersRodolf Sirera, Jos Sanchis Sinisterra and Carles Santos, for example in recent timesbut their most resonant works have often been produced outside the region, playing only in the city as part of a larger tour. The citys largest theatre, the nineteenth-century neo-classical Principal, having recently undergone a major refurbishment, is the main venue for large-scale touring productions. Bieitos King Lear closed its eightmonth tour here in April 2005 and The Price, Millers 1968 work, opening at the Romea in this production before undertaking a major tour, spent 12 days at the venue in late March at early April. The Price negotiates familiar Miller territory: two brothers bound by blood and separated by resentment brought face to face by their parental inheritance. Vctor, a fifty-something policeman approaching the possibility of early retirement is handling the sale of his parents furniture as the family apartment is being emptied to prepare for demolition. The sale brings Vctor in touch with his elder brother Walter, a successful surgeon with whom he has lost touch. As the play progresses we are privy to Vctors anger at the sacrifices he and his wife had to make to take care of his elderly parents, financially wrecked by the depression, while Walter enjoyed an increasingly privileged and distanced life. And the price paid by Vctor to do the right thing by his father is shown to have consequences for all aspects of his life and psyche. The action evolves on a cluttered set that pays serious lip-service to realism while functioning within the realms of the metaphorical. The city landscape of brownstone tenements can be seen through the tall windows. Inside the attic room, piles of heavy wooden furniture hide traces of parents lives in the home. Chairs are piled on top of each other; china crockery is placed precariously across dusty surfaces; tied-up clusters of books lie abandoned in corners and crevices. Into this physical and psychological chaos enters Vctor (Juan Echanove), who has arranged to meet the wily Gregorio (Gregory) Salomon (Juan Jos Otegui), an elderly Jewish furniture dealer who has come to appraise the bulky wares that clutter the room. This

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is a space where the light is dim and dust clusters the atmosphere, no one can see clearly and truth is not so easy to locate. Echanoves Vctor complete with habitual hangdog expression and weary stance conveys well the dilemmas of a man for whom decision-making is never an easy process. While the early section of the production borders on the excessively languid, Echanove does give us the sense of Vctors fragility and misguided sense of selfpreservation. He is an uncomfortable businessman, an awkward negotiator who resists confrontation and breaks into a sweat when pushed or prodded. Rosa Manteigas Esther is an astringent wife torn between loyalty to her husband, the bottlewhich she caresses on numerous occasionsand the wish for a more comfortable life. When fortified by whiskey she confronts her husband, as a lifetime of compliance and sacrifice rise to the surface. Resentment and alcohol fuse to leave a bittersweet taste in the mouth with a palpably tense stage atmosphere as husband and wife spat, despite Vctors attempts to placate the edgy Esther. Helio Pedregals renegade brother, Walter, occupies the terrain of the slimy rather than the suave. While his narration of the plummet into madness doesnt convince, there is a tangible tension in the confrontation

of his brothers sense of martyrdom as he argues for a version of the familys past history that questions his fathers alleged penury. Echanove is able to suggest the possibility that he remained with his father out of a pressing need that he cant articulate with any degree of verbal clarity, and his confrontation of Walter over the latters allegations that he sacrificed his education to awaken a sense of guilt in Walter appear ominously possible. They do physical battle over their fathers armchair, a pertinent reminder of the paterfamilias legacy. There are no reconciliations here, however, and no happy endings; Walter leaves in a fury and Vctor is left to deal with his own complicity in the decisions he made for his wife and son. The production ends with Oteguis Gregorio Soloman, shaking hands on the deal with Echanoves weary Vctor. Oteguis Salomon is a feisty creation; tottering along the stage, walking stick in hand, he presents an answer and anecdote to all of the characters observations and suggestions. Walters aggressive bartering doesnt faze him; Esthers abrupt comments are met with judicious flattery. He lifts the show every time he makes his way precariously across the crowded room to continue the negotiations and his humor, wit and sage

Watched by Vctors wife Esther (here Ana Marzoa, replaced in the Valencia run by Rosa Manteiga), Walter (Helio Pedregal) and Vctor (Juan Echanove) tussle for control of the wily Soloman (Juan Jos Otegui) in Jorge Einess production of Arthur Millers The Price. Photo: courtesy Teatro Romea

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further underline the Ibsenesque symbolism that hovers in Millers play. Music too functions rather too obviously and we are left wishing that Eines might have trusted silence to allow the audience to process what remains unsaid. Having said this, Eines and his cast negotiate the gaps in the play well and there is a veritable sense of mystery to the patchy information provided. We never learn, for example, about how Vctor funded his early years at university or who owned the brownstone block in which the parents apartment is located. The ghostly pallor of the room certainly plays a palpable role in cultivating this sense of ambiguity and Eines balances the different truths put forward by the characters, implicating them all to a greater or lesser degree in the culture of escapism that pervades the piece. At the gloriously art-deco Rialto theatre, Valencian-born writer Jos Sanchis Sinisterra comes home with a play first seen at Barcelonas Sala Beckett, Flechas del angel del olvido (Arrows from the Angel of Forgetfulness). Cultural memory has proved a resonant motif in his work, as his best known plays, Ay, Carmela!, and El cerco de Leningrado (The Leningrad Siege) plainly indicate. Here there are Juan Echanove as Victor Franz in Jorge Einess production of The Price, touring at remnants of his earlier dramas in the Valencias Principal theatre. Photo: courtesy Teatro Romea ways in which four visitors to a hospital attempt to hijack an amnesiac, X wisdom present a veritable antidote to the familys (Marta Poveda), who they each claim belongs to convoluted webs of distrust and suspicion. His eyes them. Each recounts a tale of a shared past with a narrow as he surveys the furniture before him and persuasive attention to detail. Selma (Marta we are left wondering whether it is indeed as Domingo) alleges X is her younger sister who disunfashionable as he claims or whether he is mentalappeared some months back. The machista Efrn ly calculating how much profit it will yield. (Hernn Zavala) calls her his girlfriend Veronica, a Oteguis characterization gives us a figure that rephairdresser that that hes been supporting (and more resents the hold of the past, a symbolic vision of the than possibly abusing) through what seem to be father, a link to a pre-Depression era that seeps into less-than-ethical business deals. The village lad the apartment and bathes the characters in its melanErasmo (Marc Garca Cot), who has headed to the choly memories. city as messenger for an elderly, sick neighbor While the work with Otegui, Manteiga and Juana, proffers that the amnesiac is her beloved Echanove is to be commended, director Jorge Eines granddaughter Margarita. The lesbian over-the-top handles some of the other elements of the mise-enartist Dora (Velilla Valbuena), claims to be mentor scne in a less assured manner. The impending and teacher to the woman she appropriates as Celia. storm marked by claps of thunder only serves to Doras tale of excess and woe is nothing short of the hammer home the sense of looming doom. Its flamboyant exposition Almodvar crafts for his almost as if he doesnt trust the writing and needs to

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wayward protagonists. The narrative she provides of Celias past involves an abandoned childconceived with a former priestvarious colorful expartners and a pinch of decadent romanticism. The clinical set provided by Quim Roy is all transparent screens and long plastic sheets hovering like giant shower curtains to mark out forbidden areas. Stools wrapped in cellophane testify to the sanitized environment where X has found refuge. Shadows of medics and staff can be made out through the frosted glass panels and a forceful nurse (Anna Brias) hovers around the proceedings watching and interrupting the four claimants as they each make their case to the withdrawn X. There is some intrigue to the proceedings as we ponder the possibility that X may have lead four lives simultaneously, but the florid language finally proves the plays undoing. For the game set up by Sinisterra is rather laboriously handled and while X may choose to begin again, the points around controlling and making sense of a past that were never entirely yours are hammered home. Brianss nurse certainly suggests more than meets the eye and an audience are given enough clues to remain deeply suspicious of her supposedly altruistic purposes. While there is something Pinteresque in Sanchis Sinisterras evocation of the sinister within the mundane, the characters language always appears too

self-consciously mannered to truly surprise or menace. As such Garca Cots Erasmo has too much of the comic awkwardness of the hapless rustic to really move beyond the formulaic. Zavalas Efrn too rarely rises above the macho bore and Valbuenas Dora is a problematic pastiche that reinforces tricky stereotypes. Marta Povedas X, does bring an element of enigma to the proceedings as she takes control in Act 2 and Sanchis Sinisterra is able to avoid weighing down her language with the affected literary deference that marks her stage antagonists. Even Povedas lively performance, however, cant lift this play beyond its creaky premise and execution. The sterile setting and ostentatious language reminded me of Buero-Vallejos La Fundacin (The Foundation); indeed both are largely one-idea plays that meander along to predicable endings. There is a mawkishness to Sanchis Sinisterras staging of the final moments that fails to convince. I was left wondering whether Sanchis Sinisterra was the most appropriate director for the piece and whether the play may have profited from a less emphatic approach. The opening-night audience was certainly appreciative but I was far more taken by the gilded dcor of the lush auditoriums arched seats and intimate acoustics. Sanchis Sinisterra clearly has something significant to say about consumerism, cultural memory and the erosion of our sense of self

Jos Sanchis Sinisterras production of Flechas del ngel del olvido at the Teatre Rialto, Valencia. Dora (Velilla Valbuena), Erasmo (Marc Garca Cot), Selma (Marta Domingo), and Efrn (Hernn Zavala) locked in verbal combat for possession of X. Photo: courtesy Sala Beckett

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in Flechas del ngel del olvido, a piece the dramatist has delineated as part one of a proposed trilogy on the human mind. One can only hope that in the second and third partswhich are to deal with

autism and multiple personalities respectivelyhe matches form to ideas in more theatrically vigorous ways.

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Berlin, Hamburg, and Hannover: a Winter Sampling

By Erik Abbott Midwinter travels through Germany allowed me to see a number of current productions, including, in my northern leg, two at Berlins Deutsches Theater Kammerspiele, one at the Berliner Ensemble, one in Hannover, and Michael Thalheimers Theatertreffen-bound Lulu at Hamburgs Thalia. My first stop in Berlin was Tom Khnels production of Kleists Die Hermannschlacht at the Kammerspiele of Berlins Deutsches Theater. Khnel, who with Robert Schuster and Bernd Stegemann, formed the artistic triumvirate at Frankfurts now-defunct Theater am Turm (TAT), worked extensively in Berlin prior to his tenure in Frankfurt and has directed at the Schaubhne am Lehningerplatz, as well as in Basel, since TATs demise last year. Though Die Hermannschlacht is hardly Kleists best-known play, and, truth be told, not my personal favorite, I was nonetheless excited to see this production, which had been strongly recommended. With its frequent exhortations about Germania, this highly nationalistic piece was popular in the Nazi era (for obvious reasons), and was staged in the post-war years as an anti-occupation piece, but is rarely seen today, even though its message has come to be seen more as a symbolic one about the triumph of identity in oppressed peoples than a specific call for German patriotism. Khnels Kammerspiele production is indeed a heavily symbolic one, and the symbolism at first glance seems a bit obtuse. The stage, in a whimsical design by Katrin Hoffman, is set as the lobby of a brightly-lit, pastel hotel lobbya blue-leaning-teal offset by yellow. A stylized red R emblazons the front desk and the elevator. A faux-stone fountain gurgles happily downstage center. A framed photograph of Your Service Team hangs on one wall. These smiling folk, it turns out, are the downtrodden warrior princes of the various Germanic tribes that suffer under the occupation of the Romans (hence the omnipresent R). This group of sad warriors the cleaning crew, the bartender, and their leader, senior front desk clerk, Hermannwear garishly aquamarine corporate logo festooned uniform blazers, with likewise R monogrammed yellow shirts. Atop their heads sit absurd paper visors. The Romans, on the other hand, are seen only in their hotel bathrobes (the superb costumes were designed by Ulrike Gutbrod), as they lounge around and venture to and from the sauna, expecting every whim to be met, sauntering with the absolute arrogance and laziness of the privileged class; Ventidius (Frank Seppeler) dips a foot into the fountain and Hermann (Jrg Gudzuhn) obediently rushes to him with a clean towel to dry and caress his royal foot. When the Germans at last fight back, there are no swords or spears, no conventional weapons of any sort; the hotel employees rather use their bare hands or beat their overlords to death with barstools, rope line posts, etc. It is wonderfully theatrical,

Jrg Gudzuhn as Hermann leads a revolution in Kleists Die Herrmannslacht. Photo: Iko Freese

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chilling, and even funny Who knew a Kleist play about stopping the Romans from crossing the Rhine could be funnyor that perhaps it should be? Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this production (among many) is the text itself. Not that it is Kleists most brilliant piece of writing, clearly it isnt, but rather the astonishing way the lofty nationalistic verse fits this workers vs. corporate masters fantasy Khnel has constructed, for the point is made while leaving the text largely intact. (He does employ some relatively minor cuts and combining of characters with effective choices that smartly streamline this unwieldy play.) With one exception, there are none of the sudden intrusions of extra-textural passages from other sources one so frequently sees in German productions (admittedly, often to great effect); Khnel uses Kleists words only. At first the disconnect between what the audience is seeing and what it is hearing is strangely dissonantthese Howard Johnson-esque figures talking about Germania and fawning over Romans in bathrobes. But, as the tension mounts and the revolution erupts, it becomes oddly appropriate. Germania indeed becomes a symbol of the oppressed, the colonized, the outsourced; Khnels message is not subtle. He is sounding a warning about globalization, about workers rights; in short, about liberation. These oppressed Germans/workers biggest threat comes not from armies, but rather from a figurative Board of Directors from half a world away that demands absolute fealty. There is even an Orwellian loudspeaker that periodically leads the crew in a ritualistic dance/chant/sing-along, ending with We love this company! But in English, not, of course, the language of the actual Germans. The utter mindlessness of this Wal-Mart

tactic to indoctrinate is funny the first time, creepy the second; by the time round three rolls around, the audience shares in the fury of the crew as they silently glare at the damnable device, its metallic voice this time flying solo. Although I have felt on more than one occasion that the corporate oppression metaphor is too easily and too often used as a thematic basis for contemporary German productions, in this instance, Khnel has struck precisely the right chord. The bizarre, seemingly ludicrous, packaging distances the audience from the plays overstated politics in such a interesting way that its message sneaks up on them, delivering finally a powerful punch. There are no specific references or allusions to the Iraq war, but one cannot help but take away lessons about that occupation as well. These people, after all, arent supposed to be a problem. They are supposed to be grateful, or something, and if not, then at least easy to control. And yet they topple the Romans by literally beating their brains out with pieces of furniture. Khnel wisely never draws a direct comparison between the real conflict and Kleists theatrical one, but the historical similarities resonate throughout. The actors are terrific across the board and are led especially well by Gudzuhn. His Hermann seems the very antithesis of a legendary hero. He is on the far side of middle-age, doughy, tired, a seemingly hapless and powerless figure. His comradesin-arms his wife, Thusnelda (Katharina Lindner), Gertrud (Gabriele Heinz), both of whom here are maids in rubber gloves, Eginhardt (Falk Rockstroh), and Marbod (Michael Prelle) appear to offer no less of an unimpressive ability to resist in the face of those oh-so-toned Romans. Yet the simmering rage

A Roman casualty of Hermannschlact. Photo: Iko Freese

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Christine Weiring (Aylin Esener) and her father (Christian Grashof) in Liebelei. Photo: Iko Freese

within them suddenly erupts in startling acts of violence, awakening a passion in the characters and by extension in this play that makes for extremely compelling theatre. Hoffmans hotel lobby set, on a couple of occasions, revolves to reveal the Germans camp in the forest. In the first of these scenes, we meet Hermanns angelic sons, Rinold (Oskar Brauer and Amadeus-Bearrie Wondzinski) and Adelhardt (Anton Elmiger and Leonard Endruweit). These boys, here seen by firelight, portrayed as an ideal of German children, basking in the idyllic surroundings of the wild, are the future for which Hermann and his comrades fight. Later, by the same fire, Hermann and his troops, still clad in their ridiculous teal vests and blazers, plot their oppressors end. By showing the Germans in this, their more natural environs, Khnels staging effectively reminds us of the historical context and elevates the tale to mythic status. Further, it emphasizes the crime of the Romans: they have caged the great primal force of the Germanic tribes and thereby denied them their destiny. Who, after all, wouldnt rather live freely amid the natural beauty of the forest rather than be enslaved in a sterile, artificial, pastel prison? Conquerorsbe they military, as Kleists words indicate, or corporate, as seen heredestroy. Khnels Romans are multinationals, their empire is a conglomerate, but, in this exquisite production, they are no less destructive and therefore no less worthy of the violence against them. Unfortunately, the second Kammerspiele offering I saw was not as successful. Tina Laniks interpretation of Arthur Schnitzlers Liebelei was an interesting attempt to illuminate the clash of desires

at the heart of the play, but one that ultimately fell a little flat. Staged on an essentially empty set designed by Magdalena Guta big fin de sicle room, a vacant backdrop for Schnitzlers characters emotional and erotic games, Lanik focuses intently on the text; her actors often pause, languishing over what has just been said, almost as if this symbolically barren space were some Beckettian landscape. The characters rarely look directly at one another, instead staring off into the distance in an effect that Lanik has stated was an attempt to recreate the static, cold expressions of photographic portraits from the era when a subject would have to remain absolutely still for several minutes to imprint the image on film. This approach does indeed deepen the subtext, but it also has the effect of bringing the action, such as it is, to a screeching halt. Ultimately it plays as self-serving; the piece is already infused more with talk and ruminations about what has happened or might happen than it is with intricacies of plot, and Laniks direction does nothing to infuse it with dramatic fire. Fritz Lobheimer (Robert Gallinowski), a young gentleman, has been wooing Christine Weiring (the excellent Aylin Esener), the daughter of a concert violinist, Hans Weiring (Christian Grashof.) He is also involved in an illicit affair with Katharina Binder (Gabriele Heinz), whose husband (Michael Gerber) learns of the affair and challenges Fritz to duel. Helping Fritz conceal his affair is his morally-blas friend, Theodor (Timo Dierkes), who is himself keeping company with Christines disreputable friend Mitzi (Isabel Schosnig). As with so much of Schnitzlers work, Liebelei is an indictment of the constrained and hypocritical sexual mores of

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The Brothers Moor: Norbert St as Karl and Dirk Ossig as Franz. Photo: Mattias Horn

the Vienna of his time. Yet the potentially searing commentary is muted in Laniks stilted staging. The passion(s) that must simmer beneath the plays faade are never allowed to heat up, much less boil over. Its as if the play had been corseted: an apt metaphor, certainly, but one that does not permit the play to breathe. What is presented instead feels more like an academic discussion of moral responsibilitiesnot uninteresting in and of itself, but not terribly dramatic. This anti-theatrical approach makes intellectual sense, but unfortunately drains the play of its power. Su Sigmonds costumes are appealing, the men dressed in clothes more of the period, subtly suggesting a divide between them and the women; the sexes exist in different spheres, and the women are more current in their thinking, the men lag behind. Again, it is an aptly symbolic touch, but again one whose potential is not fully mined. The cast puts forth a valiant effort,

although they are mostly unable to overcome the constraints placed on them. Dierkes is an amusing Theodor, a cad, but a kind of lovable one. Schosnig strikes a convincing and entertaining note as an independent Mitzi, who remains admirably unperturbed by the gossip that circulates about her. And Esener is terrific, providing the one genuinely moving moment at the plays climax when she learns of Fritz death. Only at this point do we get a glimpse of the potential power lying dormant in this play. Only then is the conflict of emotions allowed free rein, and the effect is mesmerizing. It is a marvelous finish to the evening, but, alas, it comes too late to serve as much more than a nudge to stir us from the torpor of what has come before and to taunt us with what might have been. Nearly a month later, on the occasion of my return to Berlin, I took in Hasko Webers production of Die Ruber at Berliner Ensemble. The former Oberspielleiter at the Staatschauspielhaus Dresden, Weber directs regularly at the Stuttgart Schauspielhaus. His BE Ruber is a spare production trimmed to eight actors and a running time of just over two hours. This pared-down approach is smart and mostly effective, and although Schiller purists might object to the scant attention thus paid to philosophical ruminations, I cant say that I missed them all that much. Indeed, Webers production seems almost profoundly un-philosophical, aiming rather to present the story in as straightforward a manner as possible. On this count, he succeeds, although the ultimate effect perhaps shrinks the play somewhat. Here it looms less as a majestic giant in the German canon than as a reasonably compelling little crime/dysfunctional family drama. As iconic as Die Ruber is, it is of course impossibleand likely undesirablefor every production to be an attempt at the next definitive German production of it, but I confess that at times I found myself wishing that Weber had tried. The opening stage picture is the most visually compelling, gorgeous to look at, even if the dramatic thrust of the scene itself feels perfunctory. Maximilian, the old Moor (Rainer Philippi), stands sternly at a podium/desk, the otherwise empty stage bordered in red, with the family name starkly emblazoned on the back (also red) wall (the costumes and set are by Frank Hnig). Franz (Dirk Ossig), small in stature seems dwarfed both by the cavernous space and his fathers cold demeanor. Ossig is very good as the double-crossing brother. His Franz is a study not just of filial jealousy but

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also of a small man who desperately wants/needs to be noticed/seen/acknowledged/loved. He manages to make Franz almost sympathetic. As his counterpoints, Philippi and Norbert St (the robber Moor, Karl) are also both quite good. Philippi is all starch and honor; his old Moor stiff and unforgiving in his visible dislike of Franz. When Franz exacts his revenge and we see his father broken and despairing, the change is both jarring and moving. St is a towering presence as Karl, and, although the significantly edited text strips much of Karls philosophical underpinnings, St nevertheless brings a nobility to the role, transcending the brutishness that comprises most of what is left of his character. Amalia is the character whose role suffers perhaps the most in this slimmed-down Ruber, but Sonja Grntzig manages very well anyway. The band of robbers is cut to four: Spiegelberg (Alexander Doering), Schweizer (Michael Rothmann), Roller (Henning Hartmann), and Kosinsiky (Ronny Tomiska). Dressed perhaps a little too East Village hip, they are not the most fearsome bunch, but their chemistry is often a welcome change from the unrelenting bleakness of the Moor family. Hartmann and Doering are particularly good opposite each other; they put their vastly different physicalities Hartmann is thin and slight, Rothmann a big bear of a man to very good use, making the contrast both funny and poignant at times. The overall effect, though, is a little perfunctory. The production certainly never sputters, but neither does it soar, although there are moments when it looks as if it may. One of these comes right at the end: Weber cuts most of the final scene, ending with Karls killing of Amalia, followed by his lines that he has slaughtered an angel and that he can no longer be admired. It seems a little abrupt, but it is quite effective, and gives the final moment a sudden theatrical lift. Alas, it is the very last moment. Being somewhat familiar with Igor Bauersima as a playwright, I was eager to see his production/adaptation of Dantons Tod at the Staatstheater-Hannovers Schauspielhaus and was pleased to be able to schedule a stopover to do so. Given the current world politics, Bchners classic play about the French Reign of Terror would seem to have deep resonance and it is this resonance that

Bauersima attempts, with mixed results, to mine with his sometimes insightful, sometimes pedestrian, but mostly overstated, production. The premise held some promise: a group of terrorists has taken over the theatre a l the hostage-taking by Chechnyan separatists and the subsequent tragic siege of a theatre in Moscow in 2002. Bauersimas terrorists, led by D (Denis Burgazliev) and R (Kate Strong), have, we are told, killed some of the actors, and will not let us go until their demands dutifully broadcast to the world by a cameraman (Michael Knig) are met. Just to make sure we know they mean business, an audience member is dragged out to the lobby and shot. R, flanked by two head-to-toe black-robed, gun-toting comrades, who, though only their eyes were visible, could somehow not have looked more European and less Islamic if they had tried, has no interest in the performance of Dantons Tod that was planned, but D, after quizzing surviving members of the cast about it, decides that he wants to see it; its revolutionary theme intrigues him. Of course, the actor playing Danton was shot, so his understudy (Dominique Horwitz) has to step in. The new backstory having been provided (and, presumably, the audience having been sufficiently terrorized),

Dominque Horwitz as Danton at the Staatstheater-Hannover Schauspielhaus. Photo: Thomas Aurin

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Bchners play is at last allowed to proceed, with D sitting onstage, gun in hand, to watch. The stage itself is mostly bare, with the historic tennis court suggested. (Ds playing tennis against the wall with Danton is one of the productions more interesting images.) The proscenium is framed by a narrow red neon light, vaguely suggesting a giant surreal television or perhaps a red-light district prostitutes window. Ursula Renzenbrinks costumes effectively evoke the era, as do the mostly simple setsa table, chandeliers, etc. Bauersima is also credited with the set design, and his efforts are always functional and appropriate. He does have one design/staging moment that is truly stunning, however: the jail cell where Danton and his fellow condemned compatriots await their call to the guillotine. When first revealed, it appears to be a straightforward claustrophobic cell, apparently upstage of a scrim. But when the characters begin moving, we slowly realize that they are actually beneath the stage floor proper and are being viewed in the reflection of a large mirror. As each is called, they reappear, above the mirror, seeming almost to be walking on air. They slowly to center, turn upstage, and ascend a few steps into shadow, each stair step lighting as they walk. After a momentary pause in back silhouette, the victim disappears into the blackness their head being seen last, of course. Silence; then, the guillotine is heard. It is a won-

derfully theatrical ending and a terrific way to handle this always-difficult-to-stage scene. Unfortunately its effect is somewhat lessened, for, although Bchner ends his play there, Bauersima does not. He adds a coda. D, who, in an earlier argument over the purpose of making the actors perform, has been shot by R, dies, and R, after declaring that Robespierre lives! shoots him, too. The real Robespierre, of course, was guillotined three months after Danton, so the historical point is well-taken, but like so much of this imposed second play that Bauersima uses to interrupt the original, it is excessive. The production becomes an uncomfortable and ungainly chimera: half a skillfully, sharply staged revival of the Bchner, half an obvious, clumsy, awkwardly grafted appendage of a play that neither deeply nor insightfully comments on the original. It is a heavy-handed treatment of a piece that is already heavy-handed. The shame is that this new play could perhaps be compelling if not made to stand opposite and beside Danton, for Bauersima is a fine dramatist. But in trying to one-up Bchner he is thematically and poetically overmatched. The result is two fine performances by Strong and Burgazliev that are misplaced, for they eventually become little more than a cloying distraction to the main event. The acting in the original is also quite good. Horwitz is an appealing Danton. His lithe

Dantons Death. Bernd Grawert as Robespierre, with Wolf Bachofner, Sebastian Haase, Christian Erdmann, and Matthias Neukirch. Photo: Thomas Aurin

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build suggests at first a fragility that makes him extremely sympathetic, particularly when he faces the more stoutly-built Bernd Grawert as Robespierre. This fragility, however, is an illusion; we soon see the enormous reserves of strength that Bchner has written into Danton. Horwitz and Grawert are terrific opposite each other; their scenes together crackle with tension. They are backed up with a solid supporting ensemble, although the play has been trimmed a bit (no doubt to allow for the terrorist counter-play), resulting in less of an opportunity for individual players to stand out. Obviously the terrorist siege framing of the play is not intended to be taken literally only four captors are seen and four people would doubtless have a hard time holding a crowd of nine hundred or so, machine guns or no machine guns. The framing is a performed act, meant to shock us into considering the play, now a play-within-a-play-within-astaged-action, in a different light. But this metaoverdose just grows wearying, serving and illuminating neither Bchners work nor Bauersimas. A pity, given the level of performers engaged and the interesting voices involved. Michael Thalheimers production of Lulu was invited this year to Berlins Theatertreffen, his second show to be so honored. Having not previously seen (except on video) anything directed by Thalheimer, I was pleased to be able to arrange a night in Hamburg to take in Lulu. The effort was well worth it, for this breathtaking production was among the best Ive seen in recent years. Set on an empty stage backed only by a large white projection screen (the stark and simple design was by Olaf Altmann), the play opens on Lulu (the absolutely astonishing Fritzi Haberlandt) standing dead center, the bright lights casting two shadows on the screen behind her. This eerie triangle, a reed-thin waif exuding both innocence and carnality and the wispy shadows she casts suggests the fragility of a Christ at Golgotha, a deeply ironic image that Thalheimer wisely does not push, but, the idea now planted, it subtly echos and resonates throughout Lulus tragic journey, and the possibility that some other journey may have been possible were it not for the seemingly endless parade of men who become hapless and helpless when confronted with her sexuality gnaws at her and at us, creating a seething emotional core to the production. Once unleashed Lulus sexual hold over menthe Pandoras box of Wedekinds subtitleravages everything in its/her path, ultimately, most of all,

Fritzi Haberlandt as Wedekinds Lulu. Photo: Hans Jrg Michel

Lulu herself. Wedekind, of course, laid the blame for such destruction fully at the feet of the repressed times in which he livedan era that branded Lulu a scandalous and obscene play. Thalheimer does not amplify the hypocrisy of a society that condemns what it creates; rather he allows his excellent cast and Wedekinds sharp dialogue to carry this message, carefully avoiding the many pitfalls. Never does this crisp production lapse into the obvious or the overstated. Never is it overrun by the maudlin or the pedantic. Each episode in the story is clearly framed and sharply defined. At each step we see Lulus awareness of her power awaken just a little more and we are compelled to watch horrified by what becomes inevitablea fate she herself can never quite see. The actors who play the men who are ensnared by Lulus charms, starting with Norman Hackers sadly foolish Dr. Schning and his equally foolish but (as delightfully rendered by Felix Knopp) very funny son Alwa, and ending with Michael Benthins deliciously creepy Jack, are all

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wonderful. As the only other female presence, the Grfin von Geschwitz, Maren Eggert is a splendid contrast to Haberlandt. But the play of course rests mostly on Lulus shoulders, and Haberlandt is more than up to the task. Her performance is remarkable. Her Lulu is a mercurial woman-child who is fascinated by her own allure one moment and bored by it the next. Her growing realization that her life cannot work out as she has envisioned it, despite her desperate attempts to make it do so are heartbreaking, yet Haberlandt brings to the role surprizing moments of humor. Her Lulu is captivating and infuriating, seductive and repellant, vital and dead, maddeningly simplistic and intriguingly layered. The audience

is no more able to look away from her than the men she leads to destruction, even as we have the advantage of knowing what is happening. Thalheimer ends the peformance with an image projected upstage that at first seems abstract, but which, through a jerky and achingly slow zoom out of is revealed to be Lulu, her face set in an enigmatic expression that, like the character herself, is both alluring and disturbing. This last unsettling moment is the perfect final flourish to this outstanding production. Anchored by Haberlandts extraordinary performance and Thalheimers brilliant direction, this Lulu should prove to be a high point of the Theatertreffen.

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Electronic Environments in Berlin

Marvin Carlson The built environments and the walkthrough site-specific theatres of the 1970s and 1980s provided early models for artists who went on to create walking or riding tours through various spatial configurations, providing instructions by printed guides or recorded commentaries like those familiar in art museums. Among the best known contemporary creators of such Audio-Walks are the Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and Geroges Bures Miller, whose work has been featured in Europe and in America at MOMA and the San Franisco Museum of Modern Art. Their most recent work, Ghost Machine, brings their experimentation for the first time directly to bear on the theatrical experience, and was created for one of Berlins leading homes for experimental theatre work, the Hebbel. The old Hebbel Theatre, dating back to the beginning of the last century, and in recent years the frequent venue for visiting experimental companies, now calls itself Hebbel Eins (one), having incorporated two nearby less conventional spaces as Hebbel Zwei and Drei (two and three). Ghost Machine was created for and could be experienced in Hebbel Eins the second week of May, 2004. Based on the idea of the Audio-Walk, this was a much more total experience, a VideoWalk. Each participant was given a hand-held video monitor and earphones and began the walk by sitting in a chair in the lobby facing the outside doors, a scene replicated on the video monitor he was holding. The participant was instructed to follow instructions on the headphones and to try to keep the picture in the monitor congruent with the actual visible space. A strange double consciousness was at once introduced, with the actual lobby providing one set of visual and aural stimuli and that on the monitor, the same lobby, providing another, especially when people begin flocking into the monitor lobby apparently coming to a performance. A young woman appears among the people on the screen and a voice in the earphones instructs the viewer to follow her. She goes up one of the main staircases into the upper lobby/caf of the theatre, the viewer following, learning to keep the moving image in the handheld monitor congruent with the actual physical space. There is thus always a double image, of the real space through which the spectators body is moving, and the video space, which is populated by the ghosts of the antecedent filming. One has the peculiar sensation of focussing ones vision on the ghosts, while ones peripheral vision partly reinforces and partly contradicts this. The tour takes the spectator all through the theatre, into the boxes and auditorium, out onto balconies overlooking the street, out onto the stage, through the labyrinthine corridors behind the scenes. Everywhere there are strange overlays of the ghosted visual material and ones actual physical experience. Even so simple a process as opening a door as it opens on video or climbing a winding staircase and seeing the video images of the walls unfold become strangely doubled experiences. The earphones created the same doubleness for sound as for sight. So, for example, when one is standing on the balcony overlooking the street in front of the theatre the noises of passing traffic and a distant siren blend so that one is quite unable to tell what one is hearPhoto: Marvin Carlson ing directly and what is coming

The HebbelTheatres House Eins, site of Ghost Machine.

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Calcutta performers for Call Cutta. Photo: Dinamix

from the earphones. Similarly in a dim, unfinished room backstage where someone seems to have set up temporary living quarters mysterious steps and creaking noises are heard overhead, so distinctly that I felt compelled to remove the headphones to discover whether they were coming from my own world or that of the walk. Among the most interesting parts of the walk were those that took place in the heart of the theatre, in the auditorium and on stage. In the first of several contacts with that space, the viewer enters an upper loge and sees a solitary singer performing on stage (within the video, although other real figures sometimes appear on the stage as well). Later, when the walk takes the viewer out onto the stage, the singer is heard again, and can now be seen out in the auditorium, standing and singing in the middle of the audience. The spectator now leaves the stage and goes out into the audience to the spot where the singer was standing, reaching there by moving among the ghost spectators seen on the video that people the actually empty auditorium. One then turns back to the stage, which is now empty on the video but in reality has a figure standing center stage who is in fact the next participant in the ghost walk, beginning this sequence. From time to time one is aware of these other ghosts, ones fellow walkers, who drift in and out of some spaces along with the video figures and other theatre personnel, adding another kind of temporal dimension to the experience. We recognize that they are involved in a sequence we experienced earlier or have yet to encounter. As we stand in the auditorium, the video audience around us rises and applauds the performance, and the tumult in our earphones gives us the uncanny sensation that we are actually standing in the midst of an applauding crowd. The applause

dies down and we make our way with the departing ghosts out of the auditorium. As we come to the lobby our ghostly companions disappear, and as if emerging from a dream we find ourselves again in the real space we began, haunted now by a host of new memories. A few days later I participated in a very different sort of guided walk at the Hebbel Zwei, the former Schaubhne am Halleschen Ufer. This was Call Cutta, created by one of Germanys most innovative young experimental group, Rimini Protokoll, which during the past four years has created a wide variety of theatricalized interventions in the world outside the theatre. Their Call Cutta, billed as an example of mobile phone theatre intervened, as did Ghost Machine, in the participants sense of both space and time, but its guided walk created a totally different sort of temporal and spatial vectors. Here a participant arriving at the theatres caf was provided not with a hand-held video but with a mobile phone, which rang to begin the performance. The caller at the other end identified himself as one of several performers who work in one of the glass call towers in Calcutta, India, world communication centers where young academics, like these callers, receive calls primarily from the U.S., Australian and Great Britain and provide the callers with computer or telemarketing service around the clock. The particular orientation point of Call Cutta is the Infinity Tower in the Salt Lake City section of Calcutta. The calling agent introduces him or herself with the English-sounded name used for identification on the job (my Sammys real name, he informed me, was Sagnik) and then begins a conversation with the Berlin participant which consists of three different sorts of material. First, the Berlin

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listener receives detailed instructions for a 90 minute walk through the largely lower-class district of West Kreuzberg which lies between the Hebbel and Berlins ultramodern commercial heart, the Potsdamer Platz, where the guided walk ends. This complex path, through ultramodern office buildings, grim tenements, and almost abandoned wooded areas, is described almost step by step over the phone by the Indian guide, who has himself never visited Berlin, but is working from detailed instructions that presumably cover a wide variety of eventualities involving the Berlin walker. This is, however, only the ground level of the communication. From the outset of the walk, the Indian caller works at developing a personal relationship with the walker, encouraging the sharing of experiences about love and work, politics and values. Thus an odd, partly anonymous and partly intimate connection is built up between speakers half a world apart, sharing a walk which one does not experience and the other does not choose. In addition to that second, personal level, there is a third, historical one. Aside from a constant mention of physical markerssigns, trees, buildings, fencesthe Indian caller gives almost no information, as a real tour guide might, about the history or the social significance of the areas being passed through. The ongoing narrative is either personal, as already noted, or historical, but dealing in that case exclusively with a detailed history of the

leading Indian poltical leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who spent the years 1941-43 in Berlin attempting to make common cause with the National Socialists in Indias struggle against Great Britain. This story is given particular relevance not only by the India/Berlin connection that is now being electronically reproduced, but by specific physical connections between the walk and the events of sixty years before. At several locations the Berlin spectator is led to partially hidden period photographs of Bose in Germany, and even more effective, to several locations which have particular associations with Boses time in Berlin. Most moving is one of the few sequences where a particular space is historically contextualized. This is a secluded, largely abandoned area on the site of the Anhalter Bahnhof, largely destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. The guide leads the spectator to a wooded area where scattered stones are all that remain of a railway platform. Attention is called to certain trees growing there whose bark marking suggest weeping eyes. These platforms, the guide explains, are where Bose arrived in Berlin on his ill-fated visit in 1941. Later the same platforms saw the departure of Berlin Jews for the death camps. As the Indian guide, half a world away, mimics the sounds of a departing train, evoking a world of ghosts for a spectator standing amid weeping trees and tumbled stones, spectator and guide alike sharing the cultural memory of

Weeping trees on the former platforms of the Anhalter Bahnhof. Photo: Marvin Carlson

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A 1940s photograph of Subhas Chandra Bose mounted in a window on the Call Cutta walk. Photo: Marvin Carlson

physical and spatial experiences far removed from the actual world of either, the layers of reference and representation become almost overwhelming. Theatre has always been centrally concerned with the tension between presence and absence. The experience of these two electronic

extensions of performance suggested how much more complex this tension becomes when performer and receiver can be significantly separated in either space or time, and yet still brought together by these technical means.

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Index to Western European Stages, Volume 16

Aarhus, theatre in..................................16:3,131-33 Aaron, Nicholas............................................16:1,73 Abbey Theatre, Dublin.......16:2,13-14;16:3,118-21 Acat, Lionel..................................................16:2,27 Ackerman, Georgina...................................16:3,118 Adam, Marie.................................................16:3,60 Affolter, Therese...........................................16:1,44 Aguas, Teatro de las, Madrid........................16:2,43 Aime, Chantal.............................................16:3,71 Ajdarpasic, Rifael.........................................16:3,76 Alain, Vronique..........................................16:2,27 Albers, Peter.................................................16:3,32 Alden, David...........................................16:3,25-26 Alexander, Chris and Hille Darjes Shakespeare in Trouble......................16:3,43-44 Allen, Roger................................................16:2,4-6 Alonso, Jos Luis.........................................16:2,54 Altmann, Olaf..........................................16:1,19-20 Al-Saadi, Rami...........................................16:3,132 Alvarez, Marcelo..........................................16:3,29 Andral, Christophe.......................................16:3,62 Andreu, Carlos..............................................16:3,98 Anouilh, Jean Antigone................................................6:2,22-23 Anozie, Nonso..............................................16:2,28 Anton, George....................................16:1,72-73,75 Aquarium, Thtre de l..........................16:2,26-27 Araujo, Maria...............................................16:3,75 Archambault, Hortense.................................16:3,45 Arias, Alfredo...............................................16:2,27 Arbillot, Pascale...........................................16:1,62 Ardent, Fanny...............................................16:2,20 Arrabal, Fernando Carta de amor.........................................16:2,46 Arredondo, Patricia.......................................16:3,83 Arteche, Juan Jos Sueos de un seductor.............................16:2,58 Artime, Nacho..............................................16:2,53 Au, Michael von...........................................16:3,32 Audat, Vincent..............................................16:3,98 Avignon Festival.....................................16:3,45-64 Azizi, Iman.................................................16:3,132 Baasanjov, Angalan....................................16:3,128 Badiu, Liviu..................................................16:3,94 Baker, Allan..................................................16:3,71 Balibar, Jeanne.............................................16:1,50 Ballets C de la B, Ghent Foi...........................................................16:3,37 Banacola, Jordi.............................................16:3,84 Banki, Gergely..............................................16:2,29 Barajas, Len................................................16:2,44 Barbin, Jean-Damien....................................16:3,93 Barbuscia, Serge...........................................16:3,57 Barcelona, theatre in. 16:2,37,49-58; 16:3,40,71-84 Barea, Ramn...............................................16:2,47 Barnes, Ben.................................................16:3,120 Barois, Corinne.............................................16:3,62 Basel, theatre in............................................16:1,27 Bassas, Angels..............................................16:3,76 Baudriller, Vincent........................................16:3,45 Bausch, Pina Fr die Kinder.........................................16:3,73 Beck, Johannes.............................................16:3,31 Becker, Merit Fragiles....................................................16:2,37 Beckett, Samuel Endgame..................................................16:3,32 Krapps Last Tape...................................16:3,32 Waiting for Godot............16:2,63-66;16:2,60-64 Beethoven, Ludwig von Fidelio.....................................................16:3,85 Belbel, Sergi Forasters.......................................16:3,73,82-84 Belgium, theatre in.....16:1,79-84;16:3,49-50,56-57 Belkleba, Fadila............................................16:2,25 Belln, Fernando Jornada de reflexin...............................16:2,43 Belton, Cathy..............................................16:3,121 Bendokat, Margit........................................16:3,125 Bengel, Volker...............................................16:3,31 Benito, Andreu..............................................16:3,76 Bennent, David.............................................16:1,44 Bennett, Albert............................................16:3,121 Benedetti, Christian..............16:1,59-60;16:2,39-41 Berg, Alban Lulu.....................................................16:3,25-26 Berg, Christine..............................................16:3,61 Berger, Vincent.............................................16:2,27 Berlin, theatre in.........16:1,4-46;16:3,14-44,122-30 Berliner Ensemble.........16:1,35-36,38,43-45; 16:3, 65-66,123-25 Berlioz, Hector The Damnation of Faust....................16:3,35-36 Berenfeld, Mlodie.......................................16:3,57 Berman, Marc...............................................16:3,90 Bernard, Yves................................................16:3,89 Bernhard, Thomas Der Theatermacher.................................16:3,32 Berstein, Leonard West Side Story..........................................6:3,85 Benne, Daniel The Directors.....................................16:2,64-65

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Besson, Benno.........................................16:3,57-58 Bialas, Esther.....................................16:1,8;16:3,15 Bianchi, Renato............................................16:1,51 Bickel, Modele..............................................16:2,32 Biaud-Mauduit, Nicolas................................16:2,31 Bieito, Calixto...........................16:1,71-78; 16:2,58 16:3, 40,61,76-78 Billington, Michael.....................................16:3,113 Birtwistle, Sir Harrison The Io Passion....................................16:3,85,88 Bitan, Bernard and Laurent Bentata Le Sel et le Miel.................................16:2,19-20 Bjork, Anita..................................................16:3,80 Blairet, Bruno...............................................16:2,37 Blanc, Catherine...........................................16:3,90 Blanchon, Valrie.........................................16:2,37 Blane, Nicholas...........................................16:2,4-5 Blakemore, Michael....................................16:2,4-6 Blakely, Claudia............................................16:2,12 Blanc, Dominique.......................................16:3,105 Blanchard, Thomas.......................................16:3,89 Blasi, Angela-Maria......................................16:3,29 Boada, Xavier...............................................16:2,57 Boadella, Albert............................................16:2,54 Bobigny theatre, Paris........................16:2,28-29,37 Bochum, theatre in..................................16:2,63-74 Bock, Rainer................................................16:3,7-8 Boder, Michael.............................................16:3,26 Boesch, Florian.............................................16:3,31 Bogdanov, Malachi Shakespeares Italian Job........................16:3,44 Bohm, Uwe................................................16:3,6,65 Bolton, Ivor..............................................16:3,29-30 Bond, Edward Les Enfants..............................................16:2,40 Have I None.......................................16:1,49-50 Bondy, Luc.......................................16:3,42,113-18 Bonfanti, Eve and Yves Hunstad Au bord de leau......................................16:3,56 Bonnard, Irne..............................................16:3,97 Bonnett, Audrey...............................16:1,48;16:2,35 Borchert, Wolfgang Draussen von der Tr.............................16:3,54 Bork, Robert.................................................16:2,52 Borries, Christian von Global Relaunch.....................................16:3,39 Bostridge, Ian...............................................16:3:30 Bouamari, Fettouma.....................................16:2,26 Boucris, Luc................................................16:3,103 Bourgeois, Anne...........................................16:3,57 Bourgeyx, Claude.........................................16:3,63 Bourne, Matthew.....................................16:1,69-70

Boyd, Michael................................................16:2,7 Brack, Katrin..................................................16:3,9 Brade, Helmut...............................................16:3,68 Branagh, Kenneth...........................................16:2,7 Brazil, theatre in...........................................16:3,40 Brecht, Bertolt..............................................16:2,61 Mutter Courage.......................................16:3,32 Next Please!............................................16:3,85 Threepenny Opera...................................16:3,40 Bregenz Festival......................................16:3,85-88 Breitman, Zabou...........................................16:3,94 Bremer Shakespeare Company..............16:3, 43-44 Brianon, Nicolas.........................................16:2,22 Brieger, Nicolas............................................16:3,87 Bright, John..................................................16:3,29 Britten, Benjamin Peter Grimes......................................16:2,50-52 Rape of Lucretia.................................16:3,29-30 Broughton, Paul...........................................16:2,4-5 Brook, Peter.......................................16:3, 34,78-79 Brckner, Jele...............................................16:2,71 Bruniere, Remy.............................................16:3,63 Brzyski, Bogdan...........................................16:1,57 Bchner, Georg...............................................16:3,5 Dantons Death............................................16:3,5 Leonce und Lena.....16:1,35-36,38;16:2,28-30,37 Woyzeck......................................16:1,35-38,45-46 Bueno, Antonia.............................................16:2,43 Buero-Vallejo, Antonio Historia de una escalera.........................16:2,46 Buchholz, Petra.............................................16:2,60 Bulgakov, Mikhail The Master and Margarita..............16:1,23,57-58 Bullock, Susan..............................................16:3,30 Bussire, Catherine.......................................16:2,34 Cabal, Fermn and Amanda Rodriguez Maldita cocina!..................................16:2,47-48 Cacciapuoti, Tommaso...............................16:3,127 Cadle, Giles.......................................16:2,9;16:3,26 Caffarel, Sophie............................................16:3,95 Calaferte, Louis La Souris grise........................................16:3,62 Un Riche, Trois Pauvres....................16:3,62-63 Calderon, Pedro The Great Theatre of the World.........16:2,34-35 Life Is a Dream.............................16:1,71,74-75 Separation of Soul and Body.............16:2,35-36 Calv, Marta Camacho, Vicente.........................................16:2,44 Cmara, Javier..............................................16:2,58 Cambreling, Sylvain................................16:3,22,36 Cami, Roser....................................16:2,58; 16:3,76

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Campbell, Kelly............................................16:2,14 Campos, Rafael.......................................16:2,43-44 Camus, Alfred Caligula...................................................16:3,73 Canut, Carles....................................16:2,5816:3,78 Caparrs, Carles...........................................16:3,72 Caravaca, Erec..............................................16:2,37 Carette, Didier Satyricon.................................................16:3,90 Caris, Marie................................................16:3,96 Carp, Stefanie...............................................16:3,48 Carrascal, Gabriel.........................................16:2,47 Carr, Isabelle..............................................16:3,94 Carsen, Robert.........................................16:2,21-22 Casals, Pau....................................................16:3,72 Casona, Alejandro La casa de los siete balcone...................16:2,44 Castorf, Frank..........16:1,5,23-25;16:2,37;16:3, 33, 37-43,45,73 Forever Young....................................16:3,40-41 Gier nach Gold..................................16:3,37-38 Catanescu, Doru............................................16:1,60 Cazare, John..................................................16:3,75 Cedrick, Spinassou.......................................16:3,63 Cenouga, Chad.............................................16:2,26 Chaillot, Thtre National de, Paris........16:1,49-50 Charbaut, Nathalie........................................16:3,57 Cheek by Jowl.........................................16:2,27-28 Chekhov, Anton..............................................16:3,5 Ivanov.............................................16:2,26,37-38 Platonov...................................................16:1,51 The Seagull................................................16:1,16 Three Sisters.................................16:1,8,19,21-22 Uncle Vanya.............................................16:3,7-8 Chreau, Patrice......................................16:3:105-6 Cherkaoui, Sidi Larbi...................................16:3,37 Chitty, Alison................................................16:3,88 Cho, Youngou...............................................16:2,34 Chubb, William.............................................16:1,65 Cirque de Soleil Wolf....................................................16:3,21-23 Claudel, Paul The Satin Slipper......................................16:1,50 Clifford, John................................................16:3,66 Cloarec, Christian.........................................16:2,35 Clolus, Emmanuel...................................16:3,95-96 Cochin, Antony.............................................16:3,95 Cocteau, Jean Livre blanc.........................................16:3,59-60 Cohen, Albert..............................................16:3,107 Collard, Julien...............................................16:3,56 Collet, Yves.............................................16:3,104-5

Colline, Thtre de la, Paris..............16:1,49-50,54; 16:2,26,37-38 Cologne, theatre in........................16:2,59-62,75-80 Comdie Franaise, Paris..................16:1,47-49,51, 16:2,16-18,25-26 Conners, Kevin.............................................16:3,26 Connolly, Sarah............................................16:3,30 Conway, Craig.........................................16:3,71,73 Cooley, Thomas............................................16:3,31 Cooper, Dominic.......................................16:2,9-10 Cordier, Robert.............................................16:3,57 Cornu, Jean-Pierre........................................16:3,12 Corpataux, Jacqueline...................................16:2,33 Corsetti, Barberio Metamorphoses.......................................16:1,55 Costigan, George.....................................16:1,72,77 Coy, Jonathan..............................................16:2,4-5 Crimp, Martin Cruel and Tender...................16:3,41-42,113-18 Cristi, Estel..................................................16:3,83 Cruz, Pep......................................................16:3,78 Curry, Michael................................................16:2,9 Cusak, Niamh.................................................16:2,8 Dagerman, Stig LOmbre de Marat.............................16:2,26-27 Dalling, Annabelle........................................16:1,69 Damm, Hamster..............................................16:1,7 Dannemann, Thomas....................................16:1,29 DArcier, Faivre............................................16:3,53 Darn, Ricardo..............................................16:2,58 Darjes, Hille............................................16:3,43-44 Darrieux, Danielle...................................16:2,23-24 Davey, Gideon..............................................16:3,27 Daymond, Karl.............................................16:1,72 Dazak, John..................................................16:3,25 De Arellano, Margarita.................................16:3,26 Debussy, Claude Pellas et Mlisande.........................16:3, 67-68 Decoufle, Philippe Iris...........................................................16:3,73 Delaunoy, Michael..........................16:1,81;16:3,57 Delbono, Pippo.............................................16:3,48 Il Silenzio...........................................16:3,92-93 Urlo....................................................16:3,50-51 Demarcy, Richard.......................................16:3,105 Dembel, Habib............................................16:3,71 Denmark, theatre in...............................16:3,131-33 Densch, Judi...............................................16:2,7,11 Dprats, Jean-Michel....................................16:1,47 Desbordes, Olivier........................................16:1,52 Deschamps, Maurice....................................16:3,98 Deshors, Erick..............................................16:1,62

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Deutsches Theater, Berlin..........16:1,4,11-22,45-46 Didwiszus, Rufus..........................................16:1,29 Diependaele, Pierre.......................................16:3,63 Dietrich, Stephan........................................16:3,127 Dijon, theatre in............................................16:1,50 Di Marco, Benoit..........................................16:2,33 Diot, Andr....................................16:1,54;16:3,105 Dixon, Joe.....................................................16:3,42 Dobay, Kinga................................................16:3,86 DOlce, Laurent............................................16:1,48 Donizetti, Gaetano Roberto Devereux...............................16:3,27-28 DOcn, Mara Fernanda..............................16:2,44 Donnelan, Declan....................................16:2,27-28 Dorn, Dieter..................................................16:3,31 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Erniedrigte und Beleidigte........................16:1,23 The Eternal Husband...............................16:3,55 The Idiot....................................................16:1,24 Douchet, Marjolaine.....................................16:3,58 Douglas, Matthew.........................................16:1,73 Drechsler, Christina...............................16:3,123-24 Dubillard, Ariane..........................................16:3,62 Dubillard, Roland Comme un Bouchon................................16:3,62 Dublin, theatre in...................................16:3,119-21 Duesco, Manel..............................................16:2,58 Drrenmatt, Friedrich The Visit.............................................16:3,91-92 Duras, Marguerite La Bte dans la jungle.......................16:3,106-7 Dsseldorf, theatre in..............................16:3,16-18 Dumas, Alexandre Angle................................................16:2,30-31 Dumont, Luc.................................................16:3,56 Dunham, Tony...............................................16:2,62 Duperey, Anny..............................................16:2,20 Dupuy, Olivier..............................................16:3,96 Durand, Jean-Claude....................................16:1,52 Durang, Christopher Baby with the Bathwater.........................16:3,57 DV8 Company, London The Cost of Living...................................16:3,36 Eberth, Claus................................................16:3,32 Edinburgh Festival..................................16:3,65-70 Eine, Simon..................................................16:3,89 El-Awadly, Hazim.........................................16:3,60 Elias, Carme..................................................16:3,75 Eliot, T.S. The Cocktail Party..................................16:1,16 El-Dirawi, Rodaina................................16:3,132-33 Elliot, Alex....................................................16:3,71

Elnosino, Eric...............................................16:2,37 Encarnacin, Esperanza de la.................16:2,43-44 Engel, Andr....................................16:1,53;16:2,18 Engel, Judith.................................................16:3,11 England, theatre in..............16:2,27-28;16:3,113-18 Escande, Philippe....................................16:3,95-96 Esener, Ayln...............................................16:1,8,10 Esnay, Christian............................................16:3,96 Espert, Nuria.........................16:2,53-54;16:3,79-81 Estienne, Marie-Hlne Tierno Bokar.................................16:3,34,78-79 Ettridge, Christopher...................................16:2,4-5 Euripides Helen.....................................................16:3,113 Iphigenia in Aulis..................................16:3,113 Everding, August..........................................16:3,26 Fabre, Jan......................................................16:3,45 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner Drops on a Hot Stone..............................16:3,32 Les Ordures, la ville et la mort..........16:2,15-16 Fau, Michel...................................................16:1,53 Fawthorp, Darren..........................................16:1,69 Felden, Jrg..................................................16:1,29 Fernandez, Raoul..........................................16:3,95 Ferrer, Pep....................................................16:3,78 Feydeau, Georges A Flea in Her Ear..............................16:3,94-96 Fievez, Jean Marie........................................16:3,54 Fillion, Carl......................................16:2,13;16:3,8l Finzi, Samuel..................................................16:3,8 Fischer, Rick............................................16:1,74,77 Fishbach, Frdrick......................................16:3,45 Fisher, Philip.........................................16:3:113-18 Fitz, Peter....................................................16:3,124 Fletcher, Diane.........................................16:1,72,77 Flimm, Jrgen...............................................16:3,43 Flores, Alfons...............................................16:3,66 Flotats, Josep Maria........................16:2,58;16:3,82 Foccroulle, Bernard......................................16:1,83 Fontser, Ramon......................................16:2,54-57 Foremny, Matthias........................................16:1,41 Fosse, Jan Melancholia..........................................16:3,110 Quelquun va venir...............................16:3,110 Something Beautiful...........................16:2,68,70 Winter......................................................16:2,70 Fossey, Brigitte.............................................16:3,60 Four, Olwen............................................16:3,121 Fox, Christopher......................................16:3,66-67 Fox, Kerry.........................................16:3,41,114-15 Fox, Tom.......................................................16:3,25 France, theatre in.....................................16:1,47-62

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See also Dijon, Paris Franois, Guy-Claude.................................16:3,108 Franon, Alain............................16:2,26;16:2,37-38 Frayne, Michael..............................................16:2,1 Democracy.............................................16:2,4-6 Frazer, Rupert...............................................16:1,72 Frey, Barbara...............................................16:3,7-8 Friedrich, Inka...................................16:1,4,8,10,45 Fromager, Laurent.................................16:3,98-101 Frosch, Kathrin...........................................16:3,125 Frycz, Jan......................................................16:1,57 Fura dels Baus, La...................................16:3,35-36 Gabel, Jacques.................................16:1,49;16:2,37 Gadebois, Grgory........................................16:3,91 Gaillard, Georges..........................................16:3,90 Gala, Antonio Les verdes campos del Edn...................16:2,46 Galasso, Michael..........................................16:2,31 Galiana, Manuel...........................................16:2,44 Galindo, Josep....................................16:2,37,71-73 Gallienne, Guillaume....................................16:2,25 Galvez, Maria...............................................16:3,92 Gamazo, Javier................................................16:3,2 Gancarczy, Roman........................................16:1,57 Garanger, Vincent.........................................16:1,52 Garcia, Nuria.................................................16:3,8l Garcia, Rodrigo............................................16:3,48 LHistoria de Ronald.........................16:3,51-52 Human Gardening.............................16:1,53-54 Garcia-Fogel, Ccile.....................................16:3,91 Garneau, Michel...........................................16:3,80 Garrido, Altea...............................................16:3,12 Garrido, Francesc.........................................16:3,78 Gartner, Martin............................................ 16:3,30 Gaud, Laurent The Sacrificed Women.......................16:2,25-26 Gavanelli, Paolo......................................16:3,27-28 Geish, Emilien..............................................16:3,60 Gelabert, Miquel...........................................16:3,71 Genet, Jean The Maids.......................................16:3,122,125 Genet, Mathieu.............................................16:2,25 Gennevilliers, Thtre de, Paris..............16:2,33-34 Gnovse, Eric..............................................16:1,49 Germain, James............................................16:3,98 Germany, theatre in...............16:1,4-46;16:2,59-80; 16:3,14-44,65-66 See also Berlin, Bochum, Cologne, Dsseldorf, Hamburg, Hannover Gerstiner, Muriel...........................................16:3,21 Geselson, David............................................16:3,91 Geyer, Gwynne.............................................16:2,51

Ghelderode, Michel de Balade du Grande Macabre....................16:1,39 Gil, Manuel Gonzlez Dario de Adn y Eva.........................16:2,45-46 Girard, Philippe............................................16:1,50 Giroudon, Grard............................16:1,48;16:3,89 Glaenzel, Max...............................................16:3,83 Glieizes, Gilles..............................................16:2,30 Glover, Jamie................................................16:2,11 Gluck, Christoph Alceste................................................16:1,83-84 Opheus and Eurydice.........................16:3,29-30 Goethe, Johann Clavigo....................................................16:3,32 Faust.........................................................16:3,3 Stella..................................................16:1,45-46 Goldoni, Carlo The Servant of Two Masters....................16:1,54 Goll, Ivan Royal Palace...........................................16:3,87 Gmez, Fernando Fernn Morir cuerdo y vivir loco..............16:2,42,46-47 Gonon, Christian.....................................16:2,31-32 Gordon, Mick...............................................16:2,58 Gorki, Maxim Summerfolk .........................................6:3,16-18 Gorsch, Jrgen.........................................16:3,16-18 Gotscheff, Ditimer...................16:1,5-6;16:3:4,8-10 Goudot, Rgis ................................................6:3,90 Gould, Michael......................................16:3,41,114 Gouln, Philippe............................................16:3,92 Gourtay, Anne Laure....................................16:3,58 Gozzi, Carlo The Green Bird..................................16:3,57-58 Grandage, Michael........................................16:3,74 Grashof, Christian...................................16:1,16-17 Grain, Glyn..................................................16:2,4-5 Grauwain, Nathalie.......................................16:3,63 Grnig, Renato...............................................6:3,44 Grigolli, Olivia.............................................16:3,12 Grima, Danielle............................................16:3,67 Grimaud, Flore..............................................16:3,95 Grimm, Helga.................................................16:3,8 Grnemeyer, Herbert .....................................16:1,3 Groves, Paul....................................................6:3,35 Gruberova, Edita.....................................16:3,27-28 Guesmi, Samir..............................................16:1,55 Guillot, Gilles...............................................16:3,62 Haas, Georg Friedrich In vain.....................................................16:1,27 Haase, Markus..............................................16:1,43 Haberlandt, Fritzi............................................16:3,5

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Hageneier, Stefan..........................................16:3,32 Haggig, Patrick........................................16:2,33-34 Haider, Friedrich...........................................16:3,27 Hall, Edward...................................................16:2,7 Halle, Adam de la The Play of Adam....................................16:1,51 Hambug, theatre in...........................16:3:5-7,18-20 Hammou, Malika..........................................16:3,97 Hancisse, Thierry.......................16:1,48;16:2,34-35 Hanfland, Alexander.....................................16:2,60 Hannover, theatre in......................16:3:20-21,65-68 Harfouch, Corinna...................................16:1,45-46 Hatisi, Robert................................................16:2,31 Hare, David The Breath of Life..............................16:2,52-54 Stuff Happens........................................16:3:113 Harneit, Johannes..........................................16:3,68 Hartmann, Matthias............16:2,63-74;16:3,128-30 Hartung, Petra..........................................16:1,45-46 Ha, Katja.....................................................16:1,45 Haug, Helgard...............................................16:3,18 Hauptmann, Gerhart Einsame Menschen.................................16:1,8,19 Hau, Philip..................................................16:3,15 Haussmann, Ezard..........................................16:1,7 Haussmann, Leander...................................16:1,6-8 Heaney, Seamus The Burial at Thebes.........................16:2,13-14 Heesters, Nicole............................................16:3,20 Hegel, Catherine...........................................16:3,93 Heine, Renaud..............................................16:3,54 Held, Alan....................................................16:3,30 Hellekant, Charlotte......................................16:3,35 Henkel, Alexandra........................................16:3,15 Henry, Guy....................................................16:2,11 Henry, Judith.................................................16:2,25 Hermann, Karl Ernst.....................................16:2,64 Hermon, Michel............................................16:2,27 Herrera, Andrs.............................................16:3,84 Heyme, Hans-Gnther.............................16:3,33,41 Hiegel, Catherine.....................................16:1,49,59 Hill, Conleth...................................................16:2,4 Hirsch, Robert...............................................16:2,20 Hodges, Patricia..............................................16:2,9 Hoffmann, Katrin............................................16:1,8 Holtzmann, Thomas........................................16:3,8 Homoki, Andreas..........................................16:3,27 Honnen, Hannelore.......................................16:2,61 Honore, Philippe...........................................16:3,63 Hossein, Robert............................................16:2,22 Horvth, dn von Faith, Love, and Hope............................16:3,91

Der jngste Tag..................................16:3,31-32 Judgment Day....................................16:1,53-54 Kasimir und Karoline........................16:1,81-82 Hoss, Nina....................................................16:1,35 Hlsmann, Ingo............................................16:1,21 Hudetz, Thomas............................................16:3,32 Humes, Steven..............................................16:3,27 Hungary, theatre in.............................16:2,28-29,37 Hunger-Bhler, Robert.................................16:3,13 Hunstein, Stefan..............................................16:3,8 Hunter, Kathryn.....................16:2,58;16:3,66,79,81 Hurdly, Sophie..............................................16:1,70 Hytner, Nicholas........................16:2,7-10;16:3,113 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll House......................................16:3,46-48 An Enemy of the People..........................16:1,23 Hedda Gabler....................................16:1,61-62 Peer Gynt................16:1,79-81;16:3, 64-66,123 The Wild Duck...............16:2,33-34;16:3:123-25 Im, Sunhae....................................................16:3,66 Ireland, theatre in................16:2,13-14;16:3,119-21 Italy, theatre in.....................16:1,54-55; 16:3,50-51 Jaoui, Angs and Pierre Braqui Como en las mejores familias.................16:2,58 Jeanneteau, Daniel..........................16:3,106,109-11 Jelinek, Elfriede..............................................16:3,5 Das Werk............................................16:3,13-15 Jackie and Other Princesses...................16:1,16 Jianwei, Wang Ceremony................................................16:1,58 Joglars, Els, Barcelona El retablo delas Maravillas.....................16:2,56 Jonas, Sir Peter.........................................16:3,25,31 Josephson, Erland.........................................16:3,80 Joshua, Rosemary.........................................16:3,29 Joven, Ricardo..............................................16:2,46 Jrgens, Hanna...........................................16:3,124 Kacimi, Mohamed Babel Taxi...............................................16:3,58 Kaegi, Stefan................................................16:3,18 Kaiser, Georg Der Protagonist.......................................16:3,87 Silverlake...........................................16:1,52-53 Soldier Tanaka.........................................16:1,52 Kalman, Jean................................................16:3,29 Kaminski, Roman............................16:1,7;16:3,124 Kammerloher, Katharina..............................16:3,26 Kane, Sarah Blasted.............................16:1,60-61;16:2,39-41 4:48 Psychosis....................................16:1,29,59 Crave..................................................16:1,29-30 Phaedras Love........................................16:1,29

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Karasoya, Vesselina......................................16:3,29 Karnus, Katerina.........................................16:3,25 Kaune, Michala............................................16:3,26 Kay, Charles..................................................16:2,12 Keene, Daniel Five Men............................................16:1,55-57 Keller, Inge.............................16:1,33;16:3,122,125 Kelly, Jude......................................................16:2,7 Kent, Jonathan................................................16:2,7 Kent, Nicolas...........................................16:1,63-68 Kessler, Anne................................................16:3,89 Kieseier, Hans...............................................16:2,61 Kiggel, Ryan.................................................16:2,28 Kimmig, Stephan.....................................16:1,45-46 Kirchner, Jrme...........................................16:1,54 Klamburg, Dani............................................16:3,78 Klaus, Hndl WildeThe Man with the Sad Eyes........16:3,20 Kleist, Heinrich von Das Ktchen von Heilbronn.............16:1,4,8-10 Klinga, Elin...................................................16:3,80 Knaup, Herbert.............................................16:1,32 Knipp, Joe.....................................................16:2,61 Koch, Wolfram...............................................16:3,8 Knig, Cristian........................................16:1,29-30 Kolts, Bernard.............................................16:3,83 Quai Ouest..............................................16:3,57 Struggle of the Black Man and the Dog........16:1 .....5-6;16:3,4,8-10 Roberto Zucco..........................................16:3,61 Kokkos, Yannis..........................................16:3,106 Komische Oper, Berlin...........................16:1,39-42 Komdie am Kfurstendam, Berlin...........16:3,126 Kon, Djenaba..............................................16:3,79 Konstantellos, Kristos...................................16:3,91 Konwitschjny, Peter......................................16:3,68 Kosky, Barrie...........................................16:1,39-42 Kosowski, Zbigniew.....................................16:1,57 Kouyat, Sotigui...........................................16:3,79 Kracht, Christian 1979...................................................16:2,65-66 Kraghede, Jette.............................................16:3,91 Krater, Fritz We Are Camera/Jasonmaterial........ .....16:3,5-7 Krauss, Helmut.............................................16:3,85 Kravchuk, Alla..............................................16:3,67 Kreizberg, Yakov..........................................16:3,87 Kresnik, Johann.......................................16:3,64-65 Krtakr Company, Budapest............16:2,28-20,37 Krohm, Uli..................................................16:3,127 Krger, Fabian....................................16:2,69-70,71 Krumbiegel, Ulrike................................16:3,123-24

Krstner, Thomas..........................................16:3,15 Kurdna, Ursula................................................16:1,7 Khert, Steffi..................................................16:1,7 Khn, Nikolous...........................................16:3,127 Kuhl, Anita......................................................16:1,7 Kunath, Gerd................................................16:1,35 Kunze, Andreas.............................................16:2,62 Kushner, Tony Homebody/Kabul..........................16:1,49,58-59 Labana, Ivan.................................................16:3,84 LaBute, Neil Day of Grace...........................................16:3,32 The Mercy Seat........................................16:1,17 Lagarce, Jean Luc Noce...................................................16:3,60-61 Lagarde, Alain.................................16:1,51;16:3,93 Lang, Annamaria..........................................16:2,29 Langenfass, Rolf...........................................16:3,31 Langguth, Thomas........................................16:1,21 Langhoff, Thomas...............16:3,26;16:3,32,123-35 Langridge, Stephen.......................................16:3,88 Lanoye, Tom.................................................16:1,79 Lapous, Yvon................................................16:3,55 Lasalle, Jacques...............................16:1,51;16:3,93 Lauterbach, Konstanze..........................16:3:125-26 Lauterbach, Peter..........................................16:1,34 Lauwers, Jan.................................................16:3,48 Isabellas Room..................................16:3,49-50 Lavelli, Jorge...................16:1,49,58-59;16:2,49-50 Laville, Pierre...............................................16:1,49 Lawlor, Tom Vaughn..................................16:3,121 Landre, Jolle..............................................16:3,90 Lebinsky, Horst...............................................16:1,9 Le Dantic, Jean-Guillaume...........................16:2,34 Ledroit, Christelle.........................................16:2,31 Lee, Woo-Chung.........................................16:3,128 Leger, Laurent...............................................16:3,55 Le Glanic, Armand.......................................16:2,34 Lehmann, Sven...................................16:1,20,45-46 Leloup, Jean..................................................16:3,63 Lemtre, Jean-Jacques................................16:3,108 Lemper, Ute Nomads..............................................16:2,21-22 Leonard, Alain.........................................16:3,53,83 Lepage, Robert La Celestina.......................................16:3,79-81 Le Poive, Ele................................................16:2,35 Le Roux, Loe...............................................16:3,96 Lessing, Gotthold Emilia Galotti.................................16:1,8,19-21 The Jews.............................................16:1,43-45 Minna von Barnhelm.........................16:2,59-61

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Lvque, Guillaume.....................................16:1,52 Levin, Hanoch Schitz.......................................................16:1,82 Lewis, Stephen Brimson...............................16:2,11 Ley, Pablo.....................................................16:3,71 Li, Xiaoliang.................................................16:3,67 Liceu, Gran Teatre del, Barcelona..........16:2,49-54 Lietzau, Heinz...............................................16:3,32 Lidon, Christophe.........................................16:2,23 Ligeti, Gyrgy Le Grand Macabre.............................16:1,39-42 Lindemann, David........................................16:2,70 Lizaran, Anna...........................................16:3,73,84 Loesser, Frank How to Succeed in Business....................16:3,85 Lw, Hans.......................................................16:3,5 Lollike, Christian........................................16:3,132 Dom over Skrig.....................................16:3,132 Trespassing......................................16:3,131-33 London, theatre in.................16:2,4-12;16:3,115-18 Lormeau, Nicolas....................................16:2,31-32 Lorquet, Aude...............................................16:3,56 Lowery, Nigel...............................................16:3,29 Loy, Christoph..............................................16:3,27 Lucchetti, Francesc..................................16:3,82,84 L, Shao-Chia...............................................16:3,67 Lubrich, Marina............................................16:1,46 Lukas, Florian...............................................16:1,32 Lupa, Krystian.........................................16:1,57-58 Lupescu, Constantin.....................................16:1,60 Lyddiard, Alan.........................................16:3,71,73 Lynch, Pauline..............................................16:1,50 Lyubimov, Yuri.............................................16:3,68 Madaula, Ramon...........................................16:3,74 Madrid, theatre in....................................16:2,42-48 Madigo, Ferran.............................................16:2,58 Maertens, Michael...................................16:2,63-64 Maeterlinck, Maurice La Mort de Tintagiles............................16:3,110 Pellas et Mlisande........................16:3,110-11 Maillet, Pierre..........................................16:2,15-16 Mairich, Antje...............................................16:2,60 Majwski, Marks.....................................16:3,125-26 Malai, Olimpia..............................................16:1,60 Malartre, Baptiste....................................16:1,49,59 Maltman, Christopher...................................16:3,30 Manceau, Michele........................................16:3,63 Mandaiargues, Pieye de................................16:2,27 Mann, Thomas..............................................16:3,32 Manzel, Dagmar.................................16:1,14-17,69 Marchal, Marcel....................................16:3,94-95 Margoni, Alain..............................................16:2,31

Maras Guerras Tras las tocas.....................................16:2,43-44 Mariel, Henry................................................16:3,55 Marigny, Thtre, Paris...........................16:1,61-62 Marion, Madeleine........................................16:2,35 Marthaler, Christoph.................16:1,58;16:2,36-37; 16:3,10-14,45 Groundings........................................16:3,48-49 Martin, Anna Maxwell..............................16:2,9-10 Martin, Caroline............................................16:2,28 Martinelli, Jean-Louis...................................16:2,25 Martnez, Fele...............................................16:2,58 Martinez, Jordi....................................16:3,75,82,84 Martinez, Nathalie........................................16:3,63 Martinu, Boguslav The Greek Passion..................................16:3,85 Matiasek, Hellmut........................................16:3,31 Matschke, Matthias.......................................16:3,13 Matter, Isabelle.............................................16:3,92 Matthes, Ulrich.............................................16:1,14 Marx, Minnie................................................16:2,54 Maxwell, Richard Caveman..................................................16:3,40 Showcase.................................................16:3,40 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mysterium Buffo...............................16:3,127-29 Mayenburg, Marius von...............................16:1,29 Mayette, Muriel.......................................16:3,89-90 Mazura, Franz...............................................16:3,26 McDonagh, Martin The Pillowman..........................................16:2,7 McMaster, Brian..............................16:1,74;16:3,67 Mee, Charles True Love.................................................16:1,16 Mehta, Zubin................................................16:3,27 Mehra, Anjali................................................16:1,69 Meininger, Laurent.......................................16:3,96 Melichar, Rudolf...........................................16:3,15 Melles, Sunnyi................................................16:3,8 Melquiot, Fabrice..........................................16:3,57 Mendes, Natacha..........................................16:2,33 Menndez, Enrique.......................................16:2,47 Mercure, Isa..................................................16:3,62 Mexme, Caroline..........................................16:3,91 Meyer, Andr................................................16:2,71 Meyer, Markus...................................16:1,35,43-44 Michaels, David............................................16:1,66 Michaud, Pascale..........................................16:2,31 Michel, Jean-Pierre.......................................16:2,35 Mihran, Sophie.............................................16:3,96 Milan, theatre in............................................16:1,54 Miller, Arthur

88

Death of a Salesman.....................16:1,14-15,17 Mishima, Yukio Madame de Sade.....................................16:2,27 Mitchell, Katie............................................16:3,113 Miyake, Issey................................................16:3,8l Mnouchkine, Ariane Le Dernier Canavansrail...16:2,21,38;16:3,33, 108-9,112 Molina, Pep....................................................16:3,8l Molnar, Ferenc Liliom......................................................16:2,37 Motlzen, Peter................................................16:3,5 Monori, Andras........................................16:2,29-30 Montesinos, Angel F.....................................16:2,44 Montsalvatge, Xavier Bebel 46.............................................16:2,49-50 Morabito, Sergio...........................................16:3,66 Moreno, Nuria...............................................16:3,8l Mortier, Gerard..............................16:3:21,33,36,43 Mortier, Roland.............................................16:1,83 Moss, Mireille.............................................16:3,99 Mota, Demarcy........................................16:3,104-5 Motton, Gregory Gengis among the Pygmies...............16:2,25-26 Mouzas, Ocane....................................16:3,98-100 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus....................16:3:21-23 Don Giovanni..........................................16:1,71 The Magic Flute......................................16:3,31 Mh, Stphane.........................................16:1,55-57 Mller, Heiner Der Auftrug........................................16:1,31-34 Landscape with Argonauts........................16:3,6 Mnzer, Susanne.........................................16:3,128 Munich, theatre in.............................16:3,7-8,25-32 Murauer, Herbert..........................................16:3,27 Murfitt, Etta..................................................16:1,69 Murphy, Tom The Gigli Concert..................................16:3,119 Murray, Neil..................................................16:3,72 Muynck, Viviane de......................................16:3,48 Myers, Bruce................................................16:3,78 Nadj, Joseph..................................................16:3,45 Nagelstad, Catherine.....................................16:3,87 Nagy, Zsolt....................................................16:2,29 Najmabadi, Shokouh...............................16:1,49,59 National Theatre, London.........................16:2,4-10 Natrella, Laurent...........................................16:1,48 NDiaye, Marie Papa Doit Manger.............................16:2,16-18 Needcompany..........................................16:3,49-50 Neilson, Tony................................................16:3,71 Neruda, Pablo...............................................16:3,57

Neuenfels, Hans............................................16:1,16 Neumann, Bert...16:1,23-24;16:1,20;16:3,23,38,43 Newson, Lloyd..............................................16:3,36 Nichet, Jacques......................................16:3,97-102 Nicolai, Olaf.................................................16:1,27 Nieva, Francisco...........................................16:2,46 Noble, Adrian.............................................16:2,7,11 Noethen, Ulrich..........................................16:3,123 Nono, Luigi Al gran sole carico damore...................16:3,68 Nordey, Stanislas.....................................16:3,95-96 Norn, Lars Demons....................................................16:3,54 Seven Three...........................................16:3:132 Norton-Taylor, Richard The Color of Justice................................16:1,63 Justifying War....................................16:1,63-68 Novarina, Valre La Scne..................................................16:1,54 Nbling, Sebastian........................................16:3,21 Nunn, Trevor..............................................16:2,7,11 OCasey, Sean The Plough and the Stars......................16:3,110 OCleary, Joan..............................................16:2,13 Odeon Theatre, Paris..................16:1,57;16:2,27-28 Oechel, Hagen............................................16:3,128 Oest, Johann Adam.....................................16:3,123 Offenbach, Jacques The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein..........16:1,11, 14-16 The Tales of Hoffmann............................16:3,31 Ohlmann, Holger..........................................16:3,31 Ohlmann, Ruth Ingeborg..............................16:3,31 Oll, Alex......................................................16:3,35 Ollivier, Alain..............................................16:3,111 Olyslaegers, Jeroen Deep in the Hole and the Pig..................16:2,71 ONeill, Eugene Mourning Becomes Electra.....................16:1,16 Opera-Comique, Paris.............................16:2,18-19 Oram, Christopher........................................16:3,74 Ordez, Marcos..........................................16:3,78 Orlandi, Marie..............................................16:2,19 Ormond, Nick...............................................16:2,28 Orwell, George Homage to Catalonia..............................16:2,37 Ossig, Dirk......................................................16:1,7 Ostendorf, Josef............................................16:3,12 Ostermeier, Thomas.....................16:1,29-30,36-38; 16:3,4,45-48 Oteyza, Blanca........................................16:2,45-46 Owens, Anne-Marie......................................16:3,30

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Pace, Agostino..............................................16:2,50 Padrissa, Carlos............................................16:3,35 Pagel, Peter...................................................16:1,20 Pajon, Lisa....................................................16:1,49 Pallem, Fred..................................................16:3,57 Pappelbaum, Jan........................16:1,36;16:3,45-46 Paris, theatre in....................16:1,47-62;16:2,15-41; 16:3,89-112 Parlon, Alain.................................................16:1,51 Parmentier, Julie-Marie................................16:1,54 Pasqual, Lluis.......................16:2,50-52,54;16:3,76 Paul, Christiane.............................................16:1,33 Paxinou, Nele.................................................16:3,6 Pavans, Jean..................................................16:3,93 Pavloff, Alexandre...................................16:1,49,59 Peduzzi,...................................................16:3,105-6 Penfold, Mark...............................................16:1,67 Penlington, Neil............................................16:1,69 Perceval, Luk................................................16:1,79 Perceval, Stefan.......................................16:1,79-81 Peretti, Thierry de.........................................16:2,25 Perez, Eric.....................................................16:1,53 Perruchon, Etienne........................................16:1,53 Peschel, Milan.............................................16:3,8-9 Pterfy, Bobala..............................................16:2,29 Philippi, Rainer...............................................16:1,7 Phillips, Jonny.................................16:2,28;16:2,28 Picchiarini, Anita..........................................16:3,90 Pickup, Rachel..............................................16:1,72 Piland, Jeanne...............................................16:3,27 Pilz, Gottfried...............................................16:3,27 Pineau, Frdrick..........................................16:3,95 Pirandello, Luigi Six Characters in Search of an Author.......16:3, 104-5 Plaice, Stephen..............................................16:3,88 Plat, Samuel..................................................16:1,70 Platel, Alain..................................................16:3,21 Podalyds, Denis..........................................16:1,51 Poetenpak, Potsdam.....................................16:3,44 Pohl, Anja Carolin...................................16:2,59-61 Poland, theatre in..........................................16:1,57 Polanski, Roman......................................16:1,61-62 Pollesch, Ren.......................16:1,23,25-27;16:3,45 Pablo in the Plusfiliale......................16:3,38-39 Soylent Green ist Menschenfleisch......6:1,25-27 Pons, Santi....................................................16:3,78 Porras, Fredy............................................16:3,91-92 Porras, Omar............................................16:3,91-92 Porter, Cole Anything Goes.........................................16:2,12 Pou, Josep Maria........................16:2,58;16:3,76-78

Pouly, Jrme................................................16:3,89 Pountney, David......................................16:3,85-88 Pouveur, Paul Contusione e minima..............................16:3,56 Pradier, Jean-Marie.....................................16:3,103 Pralon, Alain.................................................16:3,89 Preusche, Gerd..............................................16:1,23 Pscherrer, Kurt..............................................16:3,31 Puchades, Manuel.........................................16:3,8l Puget, Claude-Andr....................................16:3,89 Puigdefbregas, Bibiana..........................16:3,74,76 Puigserver, Fabi...........................................16:3,8l Pullman, Philip His Dark Materials............................ 16:2,7-10 Py, Olivier.....................................................16:1,50 Pye, Tom....................................16:1,50;16:3,29-30 Questel, Gregory...........................................16:3,63 Raba, Roland................................................16:2,29 Rabasse, Jean................................................16:1,54 Racine, Jean Andromaque............................................16:3,63 Phdre.....................................................16:3,32 Rhn, Anke.................................................16:3,127 Rfols, Mingo.....................................16:3,71,73,77 Rahma, A.R. Bombay Dreams......................................16:2,12 Raimund, Ferdinand Der Bauer als Millionaire......................16:3,32 Rath, Elizabeth...............................................16:3,8 Ravel, Maurice Lenfant et les sortileges....................16:2,49-50 Rebotier, Jacques..........................................16:1,51 Recklinghausen festival...........................16:3,33-44 Regnault, Franois........................................16:1,62 Rgy, Claude...............................................16:3,110 Reheuser, Bernd............................................16:2,60 Reichert, Katja........................................ 16:3,85-86 Reis, Thomas................................................16:2,62 Renault, Jose.................................................16:3,57 Renneberg, Annette......................................16:3,65 Revuelta, Len..............................................16:2,44 Reynaud, Yves..............................................16:3,63 Reza, Yasmina Art............................................................16:2,58 Drei Mal Leben.......................................16:3,32 Rezvani, Serge..............................................16:1,51 Richeux, Malik.............................................16:3,98 Richter, Falk.................................................16:1,29 Electronic City...................................16:2,66-68 Richter, Johannes............................................16:3,5 Rieck, Franziska...........................................16:3,32 Riedl, Anna...................................................16:3,32

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Rieti, Nicky...................................................16:1,53 Rigola, Alex.............................................16:3,74,76 Rigot, Antoine...............................................16:1,55 Rimini Protokol Deadline.............................................16:3,18-20 Rink, Moritz The Optimists.....................................16:2,67-68 Rivelles, Amparo.....................................16:2,53-54 Robert, Thierry..............................................16:3,57 Robin, Michel...............................................16:2,35 Rockstroh, Falk.............................................16:1,29 Rodrigues, Sophie.........................................16:2,37 Rogers, Laura................................................16:3,66 Rojas, Fernando de La Celestina...............................16:2,58;16:3,66 Rond-Point, Thtre du, Paris.................16:1,55-56 Rootering, Jan-Hendrik................................16:3,27 Rosenfeldt, Julian.........................................16:3,45 Rotger, Anne.................................................16:3,90 Roussillon, Jean-Paul....................................16:2,37 Roux, Sylvia.................................................16:3,57 Royal Shakespeare Company...............16:2,7,11-12 Rubio, Lpez Celos del aire..........................................16:2,44 Ruf, Eric........................................................16:2,35 Ruhr Triennale.........................................16:3,33-37 Ruiz, Boris....................................................16:3,71 Ruprecht, Heiko............................................16:3,32 Ryall, David.................................................16:2,4-5 Sabounghi, Rudy...........................................16:1,47 Sacher, Jrgen...............................................16:2,52 Sadlers Wells, London..............16:1,69-70;16:1,69 Sams, Jeremy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.........................16:2,12 Sander, Otto..................................................16:2,71 Sangar, Bakary............................................16:2,32 Sante, Cline.................................................16:2,35 Santos, Carlos..........................................16:3,68-69 Sarosdi, Lila..................................................16:2,29 Sattel, Volker.................................................16:1,27 Sautereau, Valerie Marion............................16:3,57 Sauvage, Laurent..........................................16:3,96 Savary, Jrme........................................16:2,18-19 Sawallisch, Wolfgang...................................16:3,25 Se, Anne......................................................16:1,54 Schall, Ekkehard...........................................16:1,32 Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin............16:1, 29-30,35-38 Scheeser, Katrin..........................................16:3,127 Schelhas, Achim...........................................16:1,14 Schiller, Friedrich Mary Stuart.............................................16:1,16

Schiaretti, Christian.................................16:2,34-36 Schilling, Arpad..................................16:2,29-30,37 Schlsser, Patrick..........................................16:1,16 Schlootz, Ellen..............................................16:1,45 Schmalenberg, Katherina..............................16:1,20 Schmidinger, Walter....................................16:3,124 Schmidt, Harald.......................................16:2,64-65 Schmidt, Marko............................................16:1,43 Schmidt-Gaden, Barbara..............................16:3,31 Schmitt, Eric-Emmanuel Frdrick ou le boulevard du crime.......16:2,23 Htel des deux mondes...........................16:2,23 Oscar et la dame rose........................16:2,23-24 Sarah..................................................16:2,20-21 Le Visiteur...............................................16:2,23 Schneider, Gregor.........................................16:3,20 Schneider, Simone........................................16:3,31 Schrapnel, Lex..............................................16:1,72 Schubert, Peter............................................16:3,124 Schtz, Johannes...........................................16:3,17 Schulat, Reinhold..........................................16:2,60 Schulte, Eike Wilm.......................................16:3,27 Schulte-Michaels, Thomas......................16:1,16-17 Schultz, Klaus...............................................16:3,31 Schwab, Peter..........................................16:2,59-60 Schwartz, Libgart..........................................16:3,15 Schweighfer, Michael...................................16:1,9 Seelig, Natali..................................................16:3:5 Seigner, Emmanuelle...............................16:1,61-62 Seigner, Franoise.........................................16:3,93 Selvas, David...........................................16:3,80-81 Seppler, Frank.................................................16:1,9 Serrano, Julieta.............................................16:2,58 Seweryn, Andrzej.................16:1,47-49;16:2,34-35 Seydel, Elisa Maria.......................................16:3,15 Shakespeare, William..............................16:3,43-44 Alls Well that Ends Well.................16:2,7,11-12 As You Like It..........................................16:1,16 Hamlet................................................16:1,71-78 Henry V.................................................16:3,113 Julius Caesar...........................................16:3,76 King John................................................16:1,75 King Lear...........................16:2,58;16:3,1,76-68 Macbeth.......................................16:1,71;16:2,7 The Merchant of Venice...........................16:3,32 Midsummer Nights Dream.....................16:3,44 Othello............................................16:2,7,27-28 Richard II................................................16:3,43 Romeo and Juliet................................16:3,27,29 The Tempest...........................................16:1,6-8 Titus Andronicus......................................16:3,32 Twelfth Night......................................16:1,47-49

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The Winters Tale...............................16:3,89-90 Shaw, Fiona..................................................16:1,50 Sheen, Michael.............................................16:3,74 Shepard, Sam Fool for Love..........................................16:3,57 Shleef, Einar..................................................16:3,14 Schlingensief, Christoph Atta Atta................................................16:3,132 Sibley, David..........................................16:3,40,114 Sicard, Julie.............................................16:2,31-32 Siefert, Martin.................................................16:1,6 Siegel, Gerhard.............................................16:3,87 Sienknecht, Christian....................................16:2,37 Sim, Ramon...........................................16:3,73-76 Sindi, Bewar................................................16:3,132 Sitj, Borja....................................................16:3,71 Smith, Robert Dean......................................16:3,26 Srenson, Jens Smaerup A Missing Child.......................................16:3,55 Sol, Miguel Angel..................................16:2,45-47 Solal, Jean-Paul............................................16:1,62 Solbach, Maik..............................................16:2,66 Soleil, Thtre de, Paris................................16:2,38 Soleri, Ferruccio...........................................16:1,54 Sophocles Antigone...........16:1,16;16:2,13-14;16:3,97-102 Women of Trachis........................16:3,41-42,113 Souppe, Denis..............................................16:3,63 Spain, theatre in.......................................16:2,42-58 Speckenbach, Jan..........................................16:1,24 Stafford, Maeliosa.......................................16:3,121 Stafford-Clark, Max....................................16:3,115 Stange, Helmut...............................................16:3,8 Stahly, Antonin.............................................16:3,79 Steckel, Frank-Patrick..................................16:3,43 Steifel, Erhard...............................................16:2,27 Steiger, Michaela..........................................16:1,29 Stein, Peter....................................................16:3,65 Stemann, Nicolas......................16:1,4,8-10;16:3,15 Strasbourg, theatre in....................................16:1,50 Strauss, Botho...............................................16:3,65 Der Narr und seine Frau........................16:3,32 Strauss, Johann Die Fledermaus.......................................16:1,71 Strehler, Giorgio...........................................16:1,54 Stepantchenko, Tatiana.................................16:3,54 Sttzner, Ernst..............................................16:2,64 Strosberg, David...........................................16:1,82 Str, Norbert.................................................16:1,6 Stuart, Meg Forgeries, Love and Other Matters........16:3,40 Visitors Only..............................................16:1,5

Stuckey, Bettina............................................16:3,12 Suarez. Emiliano...........................................16:2,27 Switzerland, theatre in.............................16:3,10-13 Synge, John Millington The Playboy of the Western World...16:3,119-21 Tabori, George.........................................16:1,43-45 Ttte, Jaan Bungee Jumping......................................16:3,32 Tamiz, Sylvia................................................16:3,62 Tardieiu, Jean Comment a va sur la terre?...................16:3,62 Taschet, Gilles..............................................16:2,25 Tchaikovsky, Peter The Nutcracker........................................16:1,69 Teatre Romea, Barcelona..............................16:3,40 Terhes, Sandor..............................................16:2,29 Tesfay, Mary...............................................16:3,132 Thalbach, Katharina................................16:2,69-70 Thalheimer, Michael............................16:1,8,19-22 Thvenon, Frank...........................................16:3,93 Thomas, Brandon Charleys Aunt...................................6:3,126-27 Thomas, Richard and Stewart Lee Jerry Springer: The Opera.......................16:2,7 Thureau, Amanda..........................................16:3,90 Thygesen, Mads..........................................16:3,132 Timar, Alain........................................16:3,58,106-8 Todorovich, Zoran........................................16:3,27 Tondino, Guido...........................................16:3,120 Tonqudec, Guillaume de.............................16:1,62 Topor, Roland Winter Under the Table......................16:3,93-94 Torre, Amelia de la.......................................16:2,44 Tricycle Theatre, London........................16:1,63-68 Trissenaar, Elisabeth.....................................16:1,16 Tsuchitori, Toshi...........................................16:3,78 Tsvetaeva, Marina Casanovas Demise............................16:3,90-91 Tsypin, George.............................................16:3,86 Turrini, Peter The Opening.......................................16:2,63-64 Tydn, Jesper................................................16:3,86 Uhry, Alfred Driving Miss Daisy.................................16:2,54 Unfried, Ariane Isabell....................16:1,73;16:3,76 Valadi, Dominique......................................16:1,50 Valds, Mara Jess......................................16:2,46 Valensi, Stphane..........................................16:2,33 Valentine, Graham........................................16:3,13 Valerian, Thibaud.........................................16:3,60 Valle-Inclan, Ramon del Barbaric Comedies.................................16:1,71

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Valles, Carmen del.........................................16:3,8l Vella, Vronique...........................................16:1,48 Ventris, Christopher......................................16:2,51 Vera, Raccosta..............................................16:3,63 Verdi, Guiseppe A Masked Ball.........................................16:1,71 La Traviata.........................................16:1,73,77 Il Trovatore...................16:1,73;16:2,58;16:3,86 Verdier, Jean-Franois..................................16:1,53 Verhelst, Peter...............................................16:1,79 Vesper, Michael.......................................16:3,33,43 Vetter, Adina.................................................16:1,14 Vial, Pierre ...................................................16:2,25 Viala, Florence..............................................16:2,32 Vidy-Lausanne, Thtre Eraritjaritjaka....................................16:3,69-70 Viebrock, Anna.....................16:2,37;16:3,10-13,48 Vieux Colombier, Paris......................16:1,49,58-59 Vignau, Eric..................................................16:1,53 Vigner, Eric.............................................16:3,106-7 Vila, Pep........................................................16:2,56 Vilchez, Frdric...........................................16:3,57 Vilers, Vanic..................................................16:2,34 Villaret, Daniela..........................................16:3,125 Vinaver, Michel.......................................16:3,58-59 11 September 2001........................16:3,53,59,76 Vinterberg, Thomas Das Fest..................................................16:2,61 Viotti, Marcello.............................................16:3,29 Viviani, Raffaele The Ten Commandments.........................16:2,37 Vrtler, Felix.................................................16:2,71 Vogel, Sebastian............................................16:3,15 Vogt, Henning...............................................16:1,21 Volksbhne, Berlin..........16:1,2-3,23-27;16:3,8-10, 37-41,127-30 Wagner, Richard The Flying Dutchman.............................16:3,85 Die Meistersinger..............................16:3,26-27 Wagu, Aly...................................................16:3,98 Waltz, Sasha.................................................16:3,45 Wandekeybus, Wim Sonic Boom............................................16:3,36 Wandschneider, Herbert..........................16:2,59-60 Ward, Anthony..............................................16:1,69 Warner, Deborah...........................................16:3,29 The Powerbook..................................16:1,48-50 Watanabe, Kazuko........................................16:3,67 Wedekind, Frank Springs Awakening............................16:1,13-14 Weill, Kurt..................................16:1,52;16:3,85-87 Der Protagonist.......................................16:3,86

Royal Palace...........................................16:3,86 Weiss, Peter Die Ermittlung.........................................16:2,61 Weitz, Pierre-Andr......................................16:1,50 Werner, Juliane.............................................16:3,15 Wesker, Arnold The Kitchen.............................................16:2,48 Wetzel, Daniel...............................................16:3,18 Wherlock, Richard........................................16:3,86 White, Sir Willard.........................................16:3,35 Wi, Min Cho.................................................16:2,69 Wildhorn, Gary.............................................16:2,12 Wieler, Jossi..................................................16:3,67 Willenbacher, Ulrike.....................................16:3,32 Williams, Tennessee Sweet Bird of Youth................16:1,5;16:3,40-41 Wilms, Bernd...........................................16:1,11-18 Wilson, Robert..............................16:1,36-38,83-84 Doktor Caligari.......................................16:1,16 Fables de La Fontaine.......................16:2,31-32 Winkler, Angelika.......................................16:3,123 Winkler, Martin.............................................16:1,40 Winter, Franz................................................16:3,31 Winterson, Jeannette The Powerbook.......................................16:1,50 Wion, Emmanuel..........................................16:3,89 Wittenbrink, Franz........................................16:3,41 Wolfram, Andreas.........................................16:3,86 Wonder, Eric.................................................16:2,69 Woolley, James.............................................16:1,63 Wrede, Bert.............................................16:1,19-20 Wright, Nicholas.......................................16:2,8-10 Wuttke, Martin..............................................16:2,37 Ycobalzeta, Ana......................................16:3,76-77 York, Deborah.........................................16:3,29-30 Zach, Feanz Xavier.......................................16:2,71 Zadek, Peter......................................16:3,65-66,123 Zahmani, Abbs............................................16:1,50 Zahonero, Coraly..........................................16:1,48 Zambello, Francesca.....................................16:3,86 Zanger, Meinhard....................................16:2,59-61 Zglinicki, Simone von................................16:3,125 Zilcher, Almut.............................................16:3,8-9 Zimet, Ben....................................................16:3,98 Zimmerman, Regine.....................................16:1,20 Zohonera, Coraly..........................................16:2,25 Zuber, Xavier...................................16:1,73;16:3,77 Zuckmeyer, Carl The Captain of Kpenick...................16:2,71-73 Zurich, theatre in...........................16:3,10-13,48-49 Zwarg, Olivier...............................................16:3,66

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Sor Juana Ins de la Cruzs House of Desires. Photo: courtesy Press Department, Office of the Arts, Madrid See pages 43 and 52.

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Contributors
ERIK ABBOTT is a student in the Ph. D. in Theatre Program at the City University of New York Graduate Center. SIMON BREDEN is a theatre director, currently also pursuing a PhD at Queen Mary University London in contemporary Spanish performance. He studied English and Spanish at Oxford, and trained as a director at GITIS (Moscow), RESAD (Madrid) and Central School of Speech and Drama (London). 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. BARRY DANIELS is a retired professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French Romantic Theatre. His book, Le Dcor de thtre lpoque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la Comdie-Franause, 1799-1848, was recently published by the Bibliothque nationale de France. He is currently working on a study of the Thtre de la Rpublique, 1791-1799. MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London and coeditor of the Routledge journal Contemporary Theatre Review. Her books include: Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (2003), three co-edited volumes for Manchester University Press, and two collections of translations for Methuen. She is currently working on a book on Lorcas production history for Routledge. CANDYCE LEONARD is a professor in the Humanities program at Wake Forest University. Her areas of specialization include the study of the image within a political context, both in theatre and film, and a concentration on Spanish theatre authored by living writers. Leonard has written extensively on contemporary Spanish theatre, in addition to co-editing five volumes of Spanish plays since 1950. Most recently, Indiana University invited her to deliver the 2003-04 Merle E. Simmons Distinguished Alumni Lecture. SCOTT MCMILLIN is a professor of English at Cornell University. He has published widely on early English theatre, and (with Sally Beth MacLean) was awarded the 1998 Sohmer-Hall Prize for The Queens Men and Their Plays by the Globe Trust in London. He most recently edited The First Quarto of Othello for Cambridge University Press. JUDITH MILHOUS is a Distinguished Professor in the Theatre Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. With Robert D. Hume, she is at work on a book on theatre finances in England, 1660-1800. In November 2004, the American Society for Theatre Research named her a Distinguished Scholar. LOURDES OROZCO is Lecturer in Spanish Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She recently completed a PhD on theatrical culture and public funding in Barcelona. She has published work on the performance group Els Joglars, and is currently working on Rodrigo Garca and his Madrid-based company La Carnicera Teatro. ELIZABETH SWAIN is a professor of Theatre Arts and coordinator of the Directing concentration in the BA program at Marymount Manhattan College. In 2002 she participated in an NEH Institute at the Blackfriars Theatre in Virginia and Shakespeares Globe in London. She is the author of David Edgar: Playwright and Politician. Directorial credits include an all female Hamlet at Barnard College and The Winters Tale at MMC.

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