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 JaurÃa, Jordi Casanovas' verbatim play based on the case…
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 Arnold Sc…
The 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-sharp…
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 invi…
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…
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 o…
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 opera…
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…
Santiago 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…
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…
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-subsid…
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…
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 …
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 stayed wi…
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 no…
How does one "write" a life for the stage? This question lies at the heart of Ana Luz Ormazábal's brilliantly inventive staging of MarÃa Isabel, presented as part of Santiago a Mil, Ch…
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 recordin…
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…
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 the …
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…
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 spectat…
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 not aver…
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 dementia…
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 structu…
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 spectacula…