Friday, April 12, 2024
Juan Mayorga might have been a crime writer in another life, he loves to set up complex, menacing conceits that explore behaviour on the fringes of criminality. What constitutes right? How f…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:21AMTuesday, April 9, 2024
Seeing a play you much admired five years ago for a third time isn’t always sensible. Will it be as good as you remember it? I saw Jauría, Jordi Casanovas’ verbatim play based on the ca…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:07AMMonday, March 25, 2024
There are a number of firsts in the new Teatro Real production triple bill that brings together Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (1959), adapted from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play, and Arnol…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:36AMThe 2023/2024 season has proved the year of Bernarda Albas. Lorca’s 1936 drama was completed only a few months before his death, as Spain was edging closer to civic conflict. Its razor-sha…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:33AMFriday, March 22, 2024
Susanne Kennedy doesn’t do things by half. When she creates a world, it has its own logic, its own rules, its own ethos. It’s not a world of participation but one where the audience are …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:34PMTuesday, February 27, 2024
Vincenzo Bellini’s penultimate opera, Beatrice di Tenda, rests between two more frequently performed works, Norma (1831) and I puritani (1835) – the latter his eleventh and final opera…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:23AMThursday, February 15, 2024
Alberto Conejero’s trajectory as a playwright has been rooted in telling the stories that have lain in the margins, side-lined or erased. He has a remarkable capacity to address that which…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:57AMThursday, February 8, 2024
Shakespeare’s King Lear has defied composers who refused invitations to render this bleakest of tragedies into opera: Berlioz, Britten, Verdi were all at some point approached about an ope…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:54AMTuesday, February 6, 2024
There is a lot to admire in Denise Despeyroux’s newest play produced by the Centro Dramático Nacional at Madrid’s Valle-Inclán theatre. Misericordia (Mercy) is about how we look back a…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:11AMSantiago a Mil is an annual theatre and performing arts festival held in the Chilean capital in summer. Since 1994 it has been welcoming audiences to its programme of activities across the c…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:10AMWednesday, January 24, 2024
Catching up with Guillermo Calderón’s Villa at Santiago a Mil after almost 12 years has been a treat. This is not because it presents easy or pleasurable subject matter but rather because…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:37PMTuesday, January 23, 2024
El Brote (The Break) is the tale of an actor who doesn’t feel he’s had the career breaks his talent deserves. The opinionated Beto has taken on a range of secondary roles with a state-su…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:30AMSaturday, January 20, 2024
Piel de Lava have been making work for 20 years and it shows. Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes may be best known in the English-speaking world for their film w…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:57PMFriday, January 19, 2024
Think of a film set where the audience gathered on the streets are not fully aware that they are watching a film being made: they know there is action and fireworks are coming but not a lot …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:50PMThursday, January 18, 2024
I read David Foster Wallace’s short story The Depressed Person soon after it was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1998. Capturing the insular circularity of chronic depression, it staye…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:51PMWednesday, January 17, 2024
Primavera con una esquina rota (Springtime in a broken mirror) has acquired a legendary status. First produced by Teatro Ictus in 1984, this adaptation of Mario Benedetti’s eponymous 1982 …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:49PMTuesday, January 16, 2024
How does one “write” a life for the stage? This question lies at the heart of Ana Luz Ormazábal’s brilliantly inventive staging of María Isabel, presented as part of Santiago a Mil, …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 08:41AMSaturday, January 6, 2024
I am going to be honest. I didn’t see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Real. I had wanted and planned to go but, in the end, circumstances conspired against me. The opportunity to watch the reco…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:47AMThursday, December 21, 2023
The relationship between theatre and life has been pervaded the work of dramatists from Shakespeare to Maria Irene Fornes. The porosity of the relationship, the boundaries and fissures of th…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 06:07AMFriday, April 21, 2023
There is nothing easy about Alberto San Juan’s Lectura fácil. His adaptation of Cristina Morales’ prizewinning novel, published in English by Penguin as Easy Reading in 2022, follows th…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:30AMTuesday, April 18, 2023
Alejandro Palomas has transformed his acclaimed 2005 novel La isla del aire (The Island of Air) into a play. The textured novel weaving together the voices of three generations of women deal…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:39AMWednesday, March 8, 2023
Xavier Bobés is one of those remarkable artists able to conjure a world through a few objects that he animates with a magician’s sense of the unexpected. His dramaturgy provides the spect…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 08:54AMTuesday, February 28, 2023
Juan Mayorga, one of Spain’s most decorated dramatists — a member of Spain’s Spanish Royal Academy since 2019 and recipient of the Princess of Asturias Literature Prize in 2022 — is …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:14PMTuesday, February 14, 2023
Florian Zeller’s The Father, first produced in 2012, remains a timely play for various reasons. It provides a direct and confrontational examination of the challenges of living with dement…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:38PMMonday, February 13, 2023
Catalan director Àlex Rigola, the former artistic director of the Venice Biennale’s theatre section, likes boxes. Many of his scenographic configurations have gravitated around a structur…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 05:19PMFriday, December 25, 2020
It’s December 22nd, not quite the night before Christmas but not far off, and the news has just reached me that Kamikaze productions will leave Madrid’s Pavón theatre, with its spectacu…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:39AMMonday, April 27, 2020
There was a moment on April 7th when the vision for culture in Spain under Covid-19 looked pretty bleak. While a series of streaming options were offering salvation to a nation under lockdow…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:21PMFriday, April 17, 2020
In late March, as Spain experienced the effects of Coronavirus lockdown, publishing house uÑa RoTa asked their authors—novelists, dramatists, poets, essayists—to film a video to post on…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:58AMThursday, April 2, 2020
Tracy Letts’s Bug may be fourteen years old, but this tale of a couple convinced that they are suffering an insect infestation feels infinitely more topical now than when it was first seen…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:51AMTuesday, March 10, 2020
Guillem Clua has produced a varied body of work for the Catalan theatre. His plays sometimes have a feelgood quality, as with Smiley (2012), a queer love story for the twenty-first century. …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 08:53PMSaturday, December 14, 2019
Alfredo Arias has been based in France for many decades now, but he is an increasingly frequent visitor to the Argentine stage—recent works seen in Buenos Aires include Tatuaje (English ti…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:08AM 
