WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 18, Number 1 Winter 2006

Editor Marvin Carlson

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

Contributing Editors Harry Carlson Maria M. Delgado Barry Daniels Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff

Jennifer Worth, Managing Editor

Robert Davis, Editorial Assistant

Lus Miguel Cintra. Photo: Lusa Ferreira

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration Frank Hentschker, Director of Programs Louise Lytle McKay, Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2006 ISSN # 1050-1991

To the Reader
This special issue is the seventh to concentrate on the theatre of a particular Western European country, the first being a special issue on The Netherlands (Summer. 1994), the second on Germany (Winter, 1995), the third on Spain (Winter, 1997), the fourth on Italy (Winter, 1998), the fifth on Sweden (Winter, 2000), the sixth on France (Winter, 2003), and now this issue with an emphasis on theatre in Portugal. Each of these has relied heavily upon the efforts and contributions of theatre experts in those countries, and the present issue is of course no exception. We are particularly grateful to Maria Helena Serdio, our special guest editor, who was responsible for organizing this special section, and to her contributing colleagues in Portugal. We hope this special issue will direct fresh attention to a theatrical tradition that has received comparatively little attention internationally and which is undergoing today significant growth and developing importance. Following this special section we offer, as usual, a sampling of interesting new work from a variety of locations. There are reports on the current season in Paris, Madrid, London and Barcelona, on Zeffirellis openair Pagliacci in Athens and an interview with the leading Spanish playwright and director Jeronimo Lopez Mozo. We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, or mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

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 18 Number 1 Winter 2006

Theatre in Portugal Guest Editor Maria Helena Serdio Theatre in Portugal: A First Approach......................................................................Maria Helena Serdio Gil Vicente: Poet and Artist of the Portuguese Golden Age......................................Maria Joo Brilhante Theatre of the Cornucpia: A Passion for Word and Meaning...............................Maria Helena Serdio CENDREV, 1975-2005: Thirty Years of Theatrical Decentralization..........................Christine Zurbach Reinventing a Cultural Concept, Creating a Theatrical Reality: The Teatro Nacional S. Joo Directed by Ricardo Pais.......................................Paulo Eduardo Carvalho When Producing Art is a Social Act: Artists United of Their Own Free Will................Sebastiana Fadda The Changeling Theatre: Madrid, Winter 2005........................................................................Simon Breden An Interview with Jeronimo Lopez Mozo: Memories of the Forgotten..............................Candyce Leonard Barcelona: Revisiting the Classics, Rewriting the Present.................................................Maria M. Delgado Zeffirelli Directs Pagliacci at the Acropolis............................................................................Marvin Carlson Paris Theatre, Fall 2005..............................................................................................................Barry Daniels American Countercultures on London Stages..............................Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Old Wine in New Bottles: The UN Inspector and The Philanthropist....................................Marvin Carlson 5 9 15 23

31 40 45 51 55 65 67 77 81

Contributors............................................................................................................................................................85

Title page to the First Edition of The Complete Works of Gil Vicente, edited by Luis and Paula Vicente, 1562.

Theatre in Portugal: A First Approach

Maria Helena Serdio Sharing the Iberian Peninsula with Spain, a much larger country, Portugal can still boast of nine centuries of history of political independence (with the brief exception of sixty years spanning the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century) and priding itself on a sea saga that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, took its vessels and crews all over the world to discover maritime routes to India, Africa and America. Some of these adventures were celebrated by Cames (1525?-1580) in the long epic poem Lusiads, as well as by modernist Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) in The Message. These great deeds did not go without criticism, both on the artistic level (with narratives of shipwrecks, as well as of other financial and moral miseries), and as a political assessment of Portugals inability to hold on to such a great empire, placing it far beyond our human resources or potentialities. In such a long span of history, our artistic abilities have been firmly established in many fields, although censorshipby the Catholic Inquisition first, and, later, by many political regimes (above all, the fascist rule by Marcelo Salazar and Caetano for almost fifty years in the twentieth century)inhibited free expression and an updated flowering of our imaginative creativity. Perhaps this long-term regime of censorship mostly affected our theatre, since it is unmistakably the broadest social art. This may be one of the reasons why so many scholars and creative artists tend to think that our literary genius is more visible and brilliant in lyrical poetry than theatre. It is true that it would be enough to recall great poets like Fernando Pessoa, Jorge de Sena (1919-1978), Carlos de Oliveira (1921-1981), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919-2004), Eugnio de Andrade (1923-2004), Antnio Ramos Rosa (b. 1924), Herberto Helder (b. 1930) or Manuel Gusmo (b. 1945) to definitely realize that their poetry is indeed a major achievement anywhere in the world. However, it is unfair to forget novelists such as Raul Brando (1867-1930), Aquilino Ribeiro (1885-1963), Miguel Torga (1907-1995), Alves Redol (1911-1969), Jos Gomes Ferreira (1900-1985), Manuel da Fonseca (1911-1993), Jos Cardoso Pires (1925-1998), Maria Velho da Costa (b. 1938), Antnio Lobo Antunes (b. 1942), Nobel Prize 1998 Jos Saramago (b. 1922) or Mrio de Carvalho (b. 1944). We can evoke an important line of gifted playwrights from our past history like Gil Vicente (1465-1536) [see also Brilhante in this volume], Antnio Jos da Silva (1705-1739), condemned for Jewish practices and executed by the Inquisition, or Almeida Garrett (1799-1854). These writers prepared the way for several talented authors in the twentieth century, like symbolist Antnio Patrcio (1878-1930), realist Bernardo Santareno (19201980) and Luiz Francisco Rebello (b. 1924), absurdist Jaime Salazar Sampaio (b. 1925), or, closer to our more contemporary sensibility, Lusa Costa Gomes (b. 1954), Jorge Silva Melo (b. 1948), and Abel Neves (b. 1956), among others. If we can look at our past as an ongoing process of negotiating a national identity in politics, culture and arts, we have to realize that (as has always been true anywhere in the world) certain historical dates point to a kind of rupture when forces of change impel our culture to move to a different stage. Such a shift occurred in 1974, with the Revolution of April 25. What became known as the Carnation Revolution was led by the military forces (the M.F.A., Movimento das Foras Armadas, Armed Forces Movement) and supported and strengthened by a broad social movement against the fascist regime of Salazar and Marcelo Caetano that had dominated Portugal since 1926. A landmark in our history, the Carnation Revolution changed the political, cultural and artistic atmosphere while also paying homage to several social movements and dissident ideas which, fighting for a place in society during those sinister years, had paved the way for political transformations. Indeed, this political and cultural resistance burst forth and progressed in a social, political, and ideological situation characterized by acute contradictions. It was precipitated by a colonial war (beginning in the early 1960s) led against the Movement for the Independence of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea that mobilized thousands of young men annually. Exile and desertion were some of the ways of chal-

A 1992 CENDREV production of Man is Man. Photo: lvaro Crte-Real

lenging the regime, but within the country there was clandestine political activity, as well as a cultural militancy where theatre life played a very important role. In order to understand the impact of the Revolution in the artistic field, it is enough to mention three major consequences: 1. Censorship for books, newspapers, and theatre productions was abolished; 2. Democratic freedom was established, making the formation of political parties, meetings, and demonstrations possible; 3. Regular subsidies to the theatre were created as a way of recognizing its cultural importance. This new political and cultural setting led to exciting new ways of experimenting. We can trace some of them back to changes in the theatrical landscape during the 1960s, when certain experimental groups worked to renew theatre processes. They freed the stage from naturalism, and displayed new kinds of drama ranging from socially oriented plays to plays that were close to existentialism or the theatre of the absurd. An identical attitude was located in University theatre groups, which grew in social and artistic importance. They managed to attract and educate young audiences for the theatre. Amateur theatre also contributed to the great ideological discussions along the way, bringing simple but effective and attractive scenic solutions to the theatre. And, as a last trend to be perceived in the late 60s, we can spot the development of a sharpwitted political satire in the popular Revue Theatre.

All these new tendencies pointed the way to an important artistic and political turnabout that was ready to happen in the early 70s. While these trends were searching for an audience for their dissident voices, the main theatrical scene in the early 1970s was still dominated by two hegemonic structures: the National Theatre and the commercial theatre. The former was occupied by a private company (Amelia Rey Colao/Robles Monteiro), which had been its concessionary since 1929. In the early 1970s, the company was clearly showing signs of exhaustion in its dramaturgy, staging, and acting practice. Commercial theatre included both Boulevard Comedy (which lived mostly on the fame of popular artists) and Revue Theatre. The latter had mostly shown a conservative ideology and tended to have a certain routine, but from 1969 on, and more clearly in 1972, it was renewed, gaining vitality as well as a good-humored spirit of social and political satire. In the early 1970s, some of the experiments begun in the former decade continued to oppose the mainstream tendencies. New companies were formed that came to define an independent theatre movement. This label signified their political and aesthetic attitude vis--vis the establishment, though we could find very different artistic procedures in the groups that came under the name. Two of them, Cornucpia and Comuna, came to represent the most important and elaborate artistic forms of theatre production in Portugal into 1990s.

April 25, 1974 opened up new perspectives to the existing independent groups and encouraged the formation of many other companies on the same or similar models. After censorship had been abolished, theatre companies possessed a greater freedom to choose their repertoire. They also profited from the occupation or assignment of spaces for them to work in. Last but not least, theatres began receiving regular subsidies. Another far-reaching consequence was the establishment of a decentralized theatre, by creating what was planned to be the first of many other regional Cultural Centers: the CCE in vora (now Cendrev). Decentralization, which began soon after the Revolution, aimed for two main goals: one, to oppose the traditional macrocephalic centrality of Lisbon, and the other, to create regional cultural focuses that would grant everybody the right of access to culture. The movement expanded gradually until 1984, but weakened after that for various reasons (lack of support, financial crises, unsatisfactory working conditions and technical equipment, etc.). At present, however, with a slight increase of their budgets, some municipalities have begun sub-

sidizing theatre groups on a more regular basis, thus allowing them to survive in difficult environments, even if the main subsidies for these companies still have to come from the Ministry of Culture. At present, four different groups are in the Portuguese theatre: 1. Commercial theatre, living on occasional hits, mostly by producer and director Filipe La Fria, or, more recently, by producers who choose good contemporary foreign comedies to be starred in by actors acclaimed by their work in TV soap operas and serials 2. The National Theatre, with two main venues, one in Lisbon (D. Maria II), another in Porto (S. Joo) (a third National Theatre, S. Carlos, located in Lisbon, is for opera) 3. Many subsidized companies, which can be broadly considered as following the model of independent theatre groups 4. Other fringe theatres that can be granted occasional subsidies for one performance a year Subsidies are granted to independent companies by the Arts Institute (a department of the

A recent production of Man is Man at Teatro da Cornucpia, directed by Lus Miguel Cintra. Photo: Lus Santos

Ministry for Culture, which also supports music, dance, and interdisciplinary work) according to certain rules and criteria (mostly accepted by all) which specify how many productions a year they should do, as well making other demands concerning the cultural importance of the repertoire, the diversity of audiences, engaging in experiment, etc. The National Theatres are not dependent on the Arts Institute. Their budget, significantly greater than those allotted to these independent companies, comes directly from the Arts State Secretary. Theatre companies or theatre directors can apply for these subsidies, which cover two or four years and are decided by an independent jury, generally inclusing one person from the Arts Institute amid four other who are invited as specialists. The most recent decision about subsidies was made in 2004 (to be initiated in 2005) and, for the first time, involved five different juries, according to the five regions of the country: Lisbon and the Tagus valley, the North (including Porto and other cities North of Douro river), the Center, around Coimbra and east inland, Alentejo, and Algarve. The whole budget for theatre involved in this most recent distribution was 9500000 (nine millions and five hundred thousand euros) for one only year, and the maximum of theatre companies to be accepted was seventy. The distribution among regions was: Lisbon (5600000, five million and six hundred thousand euros, for thirty-four companies), North (1800000), Center (1100000), Alentejo (800000), Algarve (200000). These professional companies will receive the allotted budget for the next two or four years (according to their application), while other, less structured companies or occasional projects will go on applying each year for another type of subsidy, more occasional and for one production only. The theatre company that received the highest amount was the Theatre of Conucpia (six hundred and twenty-five thousand a year), while a few others did not go over thirty-five

thousand a year. The difference was based on several criteria (predefined by the rules) and these included, among others, the past performance of the different companies, the merit of their project, and the worth of the artists involved. Several regional theatre companies were pleased with this solution, since it seemed to favour decentralisation. However, there was a more general disapproval due to somewhat unbalanced results when comparing the actual subsidy of similar companies working in different regions. Now, with a new government in office, everything is pointing back to a more centralised way of examining applications and granting subsidies. In this first step in introducing some case studies of the present Portuguese theatrical landscape, we decided to refer to five important features: our first national playwright, Gil Vicente, the leading theatre company that came out of the independent theatre groups of the early 1970s, Teatro da Cornucpia, as well as a recent theatre company engaged with contemporary drama, Artistas Unidos (United Artists), one of the National theatres that has been leading an important artistic policy, Teatro Nacional S. Joo, directed by Ricardo Pais, and the first decentralized theatre company, Cendrev, in vora. Many of the major trends in Portuguese theatre will be introduced in this journal, including the many important theatre companies operating in Lisbon and around the capital, such as Teatro da Comuna (directed by Joo Mota), Novo Grupo (dir. Joo Loureno), O Bando (dir. Joo Brites), and Teatro Meridonal (dir. Miguel Seabra), among others. But other relevant theatre groups are operating in other cities, and many specific agendas should also be mentioned, such as political theatre, women's theatre, queer performances, puppet theatre, theatre for young audiences, festivals, regional theatre, and many other interesting ways of engaging audiences and practicing stage productions.

Gil Vicente: Poet and Artist of the Portuguese Golden Age

Maria Joo Brilhante The Romantics made Gil Vicente the Father of Portuguese theatre. Although this premise might be challenged, this article takes it as a starting point in order to sketch the portrait of a figure who, like Cames, belongs within the Portuguese literary and cultural canon. It aims to question commonplaces by revisiting what we know about Gil Vicente and the works attributed to him. The article is divided into the following areas: biographical information, the sixteenth century context, the recovery of performance, editorial fortunes, the characteristics of his autos (a generic name which describes around fifty works of theatre, in the words of Osrio Mateus) and his place within the educational context and on the stage. To begin with, who was Gil Vicente? He is believed to have been born around 1465. A heated argument has raged for many years as to his profession. According to some, the man who wrote autos for the monarch could not have been the gold and silversmith in the service of D. Leonor, the elderly, widowed queen of Joo II. For them, being a poet and an artisan were irreconcilable activities. Others, pointing to the closeness of the arts and crafts during this period, have found traces of both these activities in the motifs and terminology associated with the visual arts in his plays. A recent study by Joo Machado (A imagem do teatro. Iconografia do teatro de Gil Vicente, Lisbon: 2005) posits a real intersection between the visual arts and theatre, as well as a pragmatic use of both in the symbolic construction and exaltation of the figure of King Manuel I. It also illustrates the transit and aesthetic exchange between them in religious or courtly festivities. During the sixteenth century, the organization of theatrical performances as part of court festivities may have become a profession, albeit a minor one. This was due precisely to the regular, organized activity of Gil Vicente and others, about whom we know even less. As Osrio Mateus remarks in his biographical note to the CD-Rom The Complete Works of Gil Vicente (2002): The first third of the sixteenth century is the apogee of the court in Portugal as the centre for expansion to Africa, India and Brazil. Lisbon becomes a place of luxury and art, which is only rivalled by the court of the Pope. Theatre defines itself as a limited practice and a commodity. Some order theatrical performances and others perform them. Within this new division of artistic labour, the crafts of author and actor emerge seeking legitimization. Buyers order products of a certain length to be ready by a certain time, what is performed is paid for, and theatre attempts to balance artistic supply and demand. From existing documentation, we know that Gil Vicente the gold and silversmith was made overseer of gold and silver-work (Master of the Mint) by Royal Charter in 1509, and that he was also named in the Charter as the gold and silversmith of Queen Leonor. In 1512, he represented the craft in the House of 24 (crafts) and within the Lisbon municipal authority. Vicente appears to cease activity in 1517, when he sells his position. We do not know if this is the same Gil Vicente who disguised himself as a shepherd in 1502 to visit the chamber of Queen Maria and greet the newborn Prince Joo. However, we do know that in January of the following year, an auto with a Christmas theme, The Magi, was commissioned from him as organizer of theatrical performances for Queen Leonor (the aunt of the Prince). Vicentes theatrical activity continued both under the patronage of Leonor (until 1518) and through direct commission from the King, as can be seen in the payments he received in 1511 for an auto produced for the Corpus Christi procession and his assignment to organize the festivities to welcome King Manuel and his third wife, Leonor of Austria, to Lisbon. In 1524, this activity was later given an official title, when Vicente was made Master of the Rhetoric of Playing. Vicente became more involved in the following reign, as he accompanied the life of the court (which meant moving around the country to avoid the plague, for example), under the terms of the annuity granted by the king. This factual data serves less to sketch a portrait of the man as to understand his connection with the court in the thirty years he produced theatre for Manuel I and Joo III (1502-1536). If the information which has reached us from the rubric to his collected works is to be believed, he responded to external commissions on a few occasions (as is the case with Canaan, created for the Abbess of the Monastery of Odivelas). Nevertheless, it can be affirmed that the theatre he produced at, and for, the

court reveals an artistic project which is not restricted to courtly life. The autos, which celebrated specific moments of the religious calendar or major events like weddings, births and receiving kings, provide evidence of a moralistic project which sought to educate and instruct the nobility. This can be seen in the religious nature of the material, in the diversity of poetic and linguistic models which are used, and in the representation of moral and ethical principles to be followed at court. Little or nothing is known about the ways in which the autos of Gil Vicente were performed. Reading them brings us up against innumerable grey areas, such as the increasing remoteness of sixteenth-century Portuguese and Castilian, which are sometimes combined in the same auto. Even after the studies by Paul Tessyier (La langue de Gil Vicente, Paris: 1959) and Stephen Reckert (Esprito e letra de Gil Vicente, Lisbon : 1977), we do not know the conditions in which the autos were performed. There is some documentation about the paratheatrical elements of the processions and royal entries. There are also paintings and sculptures of the period, such as Biblical figures, angels and demons, or symbols and emblems from Church ceremonies, which can help us to imagine how some of Vicentes works might have been performed. However, we lack many of the references to the socio-cultural context of the period that would help us understand more about the ways in which they were performed. Vicente wrote verse to be spoken by actors (whether professional or organized for each performance, we do not know) and it is said that he performed in his own plays. Vicente was also responsible for choosing the material and spaces for each auto, for composing the music or selecting pieces he already knew, for creating properties and costumes, and, most importantly, for composing sequences of actions for the performers bodies. There are traces of all these activities in the texts which have reached us. Recovering the memory of theatrical performance from them has been a prominent area of study among those who have written recently about his work. Autos such as St. Martin, Faith, and Fairies reveal much about conditions of performance, the first two because of the occasions for which they were created (Corpus Christi and Christmas). These autos evoke images, forms of speech, canticles and narratives which had to be accessible to the audience, some of whom participated in the performanc-

es. Frequently, Vicente interweaves Biblical events with contemporary situations and mythical spaces with performance spaces. The adoration of Jesus by the shepherds in Bethlehem, for instance, is the model for Visitation, which celebrated the birth of Prince Joo in an outdoor courtyard. Similarly, performance of the charitable gesture of St. Martin enabled a celebration of the charity of D. Leonor, who founded the hospital in Caldas da Rainha where the play was performed. In Faith, two shepherds describe what they see in the chapel they have inadvertently entered, where the religious celebration of Christmas takes place. They refer to all the people present, that is those participating in the event, some of whom wear crowns, sacred objects like the vase of holy water, and the solemn gestures appropriate to a place of worship. The allegorical figure of Faith dressed in the Moorish style is to explain the significance of everything to be found there, because she must be learned. However, the explanation, ostensibly occasioned by the ingenuity of the simple shepherds, is also for the nobles present. In Fairies, the Witch addresses the members of the court and describes their romantic affairs. In this way, she makes them characters in the fiction. The play parodies the recourse to witchcraft to resolve romantic ills and is an entertainment that incorporates existing court games such as Drawing Lots. Much of its meaning and theatrical efficacy came from the shared context of the audience at the first performance. Nowadays, these autos constitute invaluable source material in the recovery of the memory of theatrical performances, of which they are the least ephemeral element. Yet there are also examples from Vicentes theatre work that are less connected to courtly life, and which, for this reason, are more artistically autonomous, although he also transforms existing material. It is worth remembering, however, that it is the printed word, and not the theatrical performances that have come down to us over the years. For this reason, theatrical characteristics have gradually been lost, while the texts literary and stylistic qualities have become more pronounced. The works of Gil Vicente are undoubtedly of great poetic quality, and literary criticism in the twentieth century has concentrated primarily on this aspect of the work. The vast existing bibliography underlining Hispanic and wider European influences or his originality illustrates the importance attributed to Vicentes drama. Critics often point to it as either pioneering

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the drama of the Spanish Golden Age, or as an important transition point between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The similarities between the autos of Gil Vicente and the work of his contemporaries, such as Juan del Encina and Torres Naharro, have often been highlighted. However, the diversity of the models which he incorporated and transformed, as well as the inventiveness of the theatrical aspects of the plays, indicate why Vicentes work has continued to interest academics and directors. Only the lack of a wider knowledge of his work in other languages has prevented it from transferring to other world stages. Although Gil Vicente wrote autos which were performed in chapels with religious themes, he also wrote comedies, ballads and even his own epitaph. His creative work is characterized by the theatrical efficacy of his use of diverse forms of nondramatic material, such as chivalric romances, psalms, parables, and dialogues, as well as the exploration of multiple discursive forms, such as litanies, prayers, proverbs, and Latin sententiae. As Osrio Mateus puts it, this represents the catalogue of forms in use in contemporary European theatre, with a special emphasis on the monologue, the precept, the miracle and the sermon. It may not be correct to talk in terms of the experimentalism of Vicentes writing, but there is no doubt as to the mastery with which he employed existing materials which were, to a certain extent, already known to his audience. The contemporary reader, who reads Vicentes work chronologically, notes the invention in repetition of the autos. If the processional structure predominates in many, connecting them to the liturgy, significant variations can also be detected in others, where complex plots and double plots emerge (as in Duardos, Rubena and Lusitania). The characters Vicente creates demonstrates this same ability to introduce variations into already existing models. A wide canvas of friars, shepherds, brothel-keepers, squires, gypsies, Jews, negroes, knights, Biblical and mythological figures are transformed through the new situations in which they are placed. They are simultaneously familiar, in terms of their language and character traits, but also surprising, because of the distinctiveness of their situations. One of the features worth highlighting is Vicentes verbal virtuosity. Some of the elements that are present throughout his work include an exploration of plurilingualism, the intersection of

the lyrical and the dramatic, the recourse to different metrical forms (seven or eleven syllable lines) which create diversity as well as guide the ear and create a harmony between forms of speech and character. There are also relationships created between the sacred and the profane, and the comic and the serious, which, although they can be explained by the medieval syncretic vision of the world, also illustrate the conscious theatrical economy of his means. These isolated examples can do no more than indicate some of the ways in which the creative processes behind Vicentine theatre and the daring of his practices can be seen. It is also important to refer to the existence of the Compilation of the Complete Works of Gil Vicente, which was put together with the royal seal of approval by his son and daughter, Lus and Paula Vicente, and published in 1562, almost twenty-six years after Vicentes death. Much has been written about the intervention of the editor-son, who was responsible for corrections which changed the autos from their original form, and, consequently, transformed the theatrical event for which they were written. Gil Vicente was preparing his Book of Works at the behest of Joo III when he died, and we know, for example, that his classification of the plays into comedies, farces and moralities does not correspond to that in the Compilation, which also adds the category of tragicomedy. Moreover, the rubrics in the Compilation, which inform the reader of the circumstances of the first performance of each play contain errors. These include dating errors, cuts, and some corrections which show that the auditory effects of spoken dialogue were not sufficiently taken into account. If we set aside the autos like the Morality of Hell, Maria Parda and Ins Pereira, which were printed separately (some during Vicentes lifetime) and for which no copy exists without the Compilation, little would be known about the theatre work of Gil Vicente. Our view of theatre in Portugal in the sixteenth century would be very different. Both because of the period of time they cover (seventy years from the first performance to the first edition) and because of their formal and thematic diversity, the works of Vicente act as a laboratory for the study of sixteenth-century theatre. They enable the almost eighty autos on which he worked to be read as a great puzzle that is unique in the history of theatre in Portugal. The Compilations was also the first book with theatre texts to face the censors of the Inquisition and to be

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Miguel Guilherme, Fernando Heitor, Jos Manuel Mendes and Alda Rodrigues in Teatro da Cornucpias Fair, directed by Lus Miguel Cintra. Photo: Paulo Cintra

expurgated by them, as can be seen in the cuts and changes made to Hell, for example. In 1586, a second, more heavily censored, edition was put on sale. It included a different version of Duardos, as well as a notable collection of iconographic representations of characters and scenes, which were common in other sixteenth-century texts. The third edition was published in Hamburg in 1834 by Barreto Feio and Gomes Monteiro, two liberals in exile. Isolated manuscripts of some autos had already been circulating during the seventeenth century, but Gil Vicente was poised to become the first major author of the Golden Age, in the words of Osrio Mateus, mainly because of the efforts of these two exiles and the Romantic Almeida Garrett, who represented him fictionally as the father of Portuguese theatre in his own drama A Play by Gil Vicente. Some of Vicentes autos entered the literary canon as part of the Romantic search for the origins of national drama, after circulating (the farces particularly) among a more popular circle during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Romantic edition served as a basis for others up until the twentieth century. The inclusion of autos or excerpts from them in literary anthologies for

secondary schools, and the inclusion of Gil Vicente in Portuguese and Portuguese Literature study programmes, confirmed his status as a major author. A recent study by Cristina Serdio (Gil Vicente e o olhar da escola: cnone, ritos, Gil Vicente 500 anos depois, Vol. I , Lisboa: 2002) notes the frequency with which Gil Vicente and his work are mentioned in official documents between 1888 and 1954, where he is included among the most renowned Portuguese writers. The selection of autos or excerpts from them, for study reveals the attempt to control reading for moralistic and nationalistic purposes. Even after 1974, with a lessening of the attention given to him in school programs, the image of an author who, on a par with Cames, is representative of national literature, persisted, as did the objects and methods of study (religious and bucolic lyricism, the resources of the comic, the observation of the real). Gil Vicente, the troubadour and master of scale, whose life and work Braancamp Freire bought to the attention of the public between 1907 and 1944, has been the subject of many studies by foreign researchers, who are also responsible for a certain internationalization of his work. The studies of Carolina Michalis de Vasconcelos, Thomas

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Hart, Stephen Reckert, Luciana Stegagno Picchio and Cleonice Bernardinelli illustrate the concern of literary criticism with the difficult task of classification of Vicentes works, and with the lack of information about the author himself, as well as the infinite variety of readings which the autos have given rise to. These committed scholars have also been responsible for several of the translations which exist today. Some of these are now dated, some aim to spread the works in Italian or Castilian, and some of them adhere to strict principles of what constitutes translation, as is the case with the group around the late Paul Teyssier. Subsequent generations have studied and continue to study the autos, revisiting the data that has been unearthed, and opening up new areas of exploration of the creative process and theatrical practices of our author/actor. In 2002, to celebrate the five hundred years that had passed since the first performance of Visitation, The Centre for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon organized an international conference which brought together the most celebrated Gil Vicente scholars. It analyzed the current state of Vicentine studies and promoted the expansion of these studies to new comparative, icono-

graphic, and cultural perspectives. The bibliography included in the second edition of the journal Sinais de Cena (Theatre Signs) illustrates that the years 2002 and 2003 were extremely productive ones in the editing of his works, the organization of academic and theatrical events, and the publication of critical studies. To a certain extent, the fortunes of Gil Vicente on the stage have replicated his literary fortunes. A search on the CET database, (found at www.fl.ul.pt/centro-estudos-teatro.htm) reveals the existence of 252 performances of Gil Vicente texts. They cover a period of time from 1897 (The Portuguese Pastoral Comedy, at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II) to September, 2005 (The Boat to Hell, by the amateur group Didaxis). In addition, there were certainly more performances than these numbers indicate. The CET list merits closer study, but I shall merely highlight some performances which have remained in my memory because they constitute interesting contributions to the history of the staging of Vicentes autos. In 1980, the montage Is it a Girl or a Boy? was presented by the group A Barraca. In 1988, The Fair was performed by Teatro da Cornucpia, and in 1996, The

The Boats, a co-production of the National Theatre of D. Maria II and the National Theatre of S. Joo (Oporto), directed by G. B. Corsetti. Photo: National Theatre of D. Maria II

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Tragicomedy of D. Duardos was presented at the Teatro Nacional de S. Joo in Porto. In 2000, and then again in 2002, The Boats was performed at the same theatre, directed by the Italian Giorgio Barberi Corsetti. In 2004, The Service of Love, a new montage of excerpts, was performed at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, and in the same year, The Fair was performed as a New Circus exercise by the Professional Arts and Crafts School. Whether performed by amateurs, students or professionals, whether in Italian-style theatres or in the street, whether part of a companys regular programming or (as with most of them) a one-off production, the autos have survived and remain available for contemporary stage readings. As compulsory school reading material, Vicente has been losing ground, but the stage continues to welcome him, sometimes if only as an example of the origins of Portuguese theatre. It is, however, encouraging to see that among the careful and informed productions by Teatro da Cornucpia

and the hasty (and often uninformed) productions for schools, there are some inventive and daring productions which are salutary for the reception of Vicente. The linguistic and historico-cultural difficulties that younger audiences find in his work may be overcome by a new generation of actors and directors rediscovering his scenic efficacy. Despite the long journey over five centuries and the historical weight that has become attached to the autos, the comic and satirical dimension of Vicentes play with elements of the human soul remains intact, as does the fantasy and joviality with which Vicente portrays even the darkest themes, such as old age, death, unrequited love, hostile nature, or the unfathomable mysteries of God. Yet it is the surprisingly performative dimension of his autos that will continue to attract the creators of tomorrow. (translated by Francesca Rayner)

Joo Reis in D. Duardos, a production of the National Theatre of S. Joo, directed by Ricardo Pais. Photo: Joo Tuna

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Theatre of the Cornucpia: A Passion for Words and Meaning

Maria Helena Serdio Stemming out of a university theatre group at the University of Lisbon, the Cornucpia company was formed in 1973 by Lus Miguel Cintra (b. 1949) and Jorge Silva Melo (b. 1948). Ever since its beginning, the presiding forces have been the ideas of an ensemble that would share the same aesthetic project, be demanding in its repertoire choices and be devoted to theatre as something vital to their lives. Its first performance was The Misanthrope, (translated and directed by Lus Miguel Cintra), which was occasionally performed at a small venue near the center of Lisbon through an arrangement with the producer who allowed them to use the facility. In its cast were various young actors like Carlos Fernando, Filipe La Fria and Orlando Costa, who would later be engaged in their own productions, but others, such as Lus Lima Barreto and Raquel Maria, would stay longer in this new venture. Though young and venturing in a first commitment, the group was able to attract actresses with a firm reputationGlicnia Quartin and Dalila Rochawho were to stay with the group for a long time. The attention aroused by this first performance was due not only to the quality of the project and the youth of the leading artists, but also to the fact that as students in the university theatre group, they had been responsible for a major renovation in the Portuguese theatre landscape. Indeed, in 1969, they presented a stunning Amphitrion, based on the puppet-opera written by the Antnio Jos da Silva (1705-1739), and directed by Cintra, a few days after his twentieth birthday. Da Silva, the most important eighteenth century Portuguese playwright, was born in Rio de Janeiro in a Jewish family (persecuted by the Inquisition, and ultimately beheaded and burned in an auto-da-f, he later inspired Bernardo Santareno to write a play about his life and death, The Jew (1966), which used a kind of Brechtian dramaturgy to allude to Salazars political regime). Amphitrion proved to be a wonderful creation, not only because of the imaginative costume design (as if the actors were themselves puppets in funny, puffed-out clothing), but also for its scenic solutions, which were simple and appeared handcrafted. Extremely original, the performance showed not only a deep and learned knowledge of the play in its deepest senses and its cultural background, but also an unconventional approach to theatre, highlighting its amateurish elements, while demonstrating great competence in all aspects. Four of the actors in this productionLus Miguel Cintra, Jorge Silva Melo, Eduarda Dionsio and Lus Lima Barretoremained together in the group for a long time. Critic Carlos Porto wrote enthusiastically in his review for Dirio de Lisboa: Lus Miguel Cintra, actor, director, set designer and costume designeris the greatest theatre man that has ever appeared in Portugal since I was bornand many years have elapsed since then. Much of the future Cornucpia was anticipated in this early performance: the logo, designed by Lus Miguel Cintra from an image of the student actors, the name of their company (Cornucpia is one of the characters of the play), and even the way they named the venue given to them after the Revolution of 1974. Teatro do Bairro Alto, is not only relevant because it mentions the neighborhood where it stands, but mainly because it was the name of the theatre where Antnio Jos da Silva presented his comic puppet-operas, which must have been in that area. There is another aspect that links the history of Cornucpia to this student production. An important concern for Cintra, then and still today, was to write a program note explaining the reasons for selecting the text and the aesthetic choices made for the production. In the leaflet that accompanied the 1969 production, Cintra wrote about the seven manias that inspired his work: 1. The Mania that you need to like the text you direct 2. The Mania that theatre direction is the art of coherence 3. The Mania that the stage is a place that bears that name 4. The Mania that if there is choreography it should be seen 5. The Mania that there is no reason the body of the actors and the set design should not be liars 6. The Mania of practical things 7. The Mania of significant things This firm basis of learning and artistic inspiration has been behind all the major artistic contributions

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Cornucpia has made to theatre in Portugal: not only their repertoire choices (classical and contemporary, national and foreign), but also the attention given to the programs which include the directors note, information about the author and text, as well as iconography that inspired the designs of the production. In a 1992 article in Vrtice looking back on Cornucpias achievement, Lus Miguel Cintra recalled the beliefs they had adhered to for so long, and which had inspired their work since the formation of the company: 1. A theatre of text or that stems out of a text, the construction and deconstruction of texts, a relationship founded on the passion for the word 2. A theatre that takes a side, forces people to think, is the basis for an analysis of things, a tool to think 3. A theatre that does not take the place of life or confounds itself with life, a theatre able to assume itself as a metaphor, with stage wings to be seen, against illusion. As Jorge [Silva Melo] kept saying, it is a theatre based on self knowledge, a theatre that, because it plays with itself, reaches the rest of the world. We name it the theatre of the comic illusion 4. A theatre that shows its own artificiality, plays with space and does not forget that movement can generate meanings 5. A theatre tortured by the idea of truth, searching for a more true and loyal relationship with the audience, in love with playfulness and complicity 6. A theatre that refuses decoration and superfluity and escapes mannerism 7. A theatre that searches for a meaning or meanings, facing up to the world However, something else was added that did not exist in that first year, when the actors were still students at the University, or even in 1973, when the company was inaugurated, and it has been growing ever since: a political engagement with the moment (although in an elaborate and metaphorical way), and a deeper approach to the contemporary canon, in order to interfere directly in the reconfiguration of our present imaginary. They achieved this by choosing a more politically engaged repertoire (Brecht, Bond, Fo, Mller), and by working against the grain of theatre-as-entertainment. Jorge Silva Melo would leave the company by the end of the 1970s to engage in film directing, (although he would later create his own theatre

company, United Artists, in 1995 [see Sebastiana Faddas article in this issue]). From then on, the image of Cornucpia has become one with Lus Miguel Cintra, as director and actor, although he has since shared the direction with set and costume designer Cristina Reis, a most reserved and dedicated partner. Her work with the group had already established her as a supremely gifted artist, introducing new perspectives to set design in Portugal. Against both decorative and practical effects, she chooses instead fragmented, heterogeneous and deliberately artificial compositions. Her first grand design was for 1976s Ah Q (Jean Joudheuil and Bernard Chartreuxs version of Lu Suns text), followed by Casimir and Caroline, by Odn von Horvth, in 1977, and Georg Bchners Woyzeck, in 1978. This repertoire points to a preference for the tragic mode, and soon this interest would lead them to Shakespeare (Richard III), Strindberg (Father, Ghost Sonata), and above all to Heiner Mller. With these three playwrights, Cornucpia would establish cycles of three different plays produced in sequence, so that the understanding of their dramatic worlds might be deeper and more coherent. In a similar vein, Cintra would direct War Trilogy, by Edward Bond, thus conflating a tragic atmosphere with a political allegation against violence and injustice in our world. These performances will be remembered as a vehement plea that theatre must not resign its capacity to engage in debate about social matters. He would be drawn again to Bonds world for plays like The Prison and The Chair. Brechts heretic disciple Heiner Mller entered their repertoire for good. With this German author, Cintra would develop an artistic relationship that would prove to be deeply effective, lasting and magnetizing. It began in 1984 with the revelation in Portugal of his play The Mission, signaling a painful and disquiet meditation on the political malaise created by a revolution that had not accomplished many of the hopes it had promised. The production turned out to be an artistic and cultural event of the greatest import in the Portuguese theatre, even if its political message seemed perplexing and pessimistic. Curiously, Cintra felt the need to elaborate a second production out of this play, after the fall of the Berlin wall. He did so in 1992, declaring: The first time we performed it, we learned new artistic languages and a new

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way to understand dramaturgy, we analysed our Portuguese treason, and we bled. We did at that time [1984] a confessional performance, with wounds open. Now a new treason, a world one, the end of the communist mission, occupies our conscience, our despair and our hope, at the same time. The reading of the play was now different: more mature, more vehement and at the same time more compassionate. When they returned to the author it was to stage Mauser (1992) and HamletMachine (1998), performing the latter in high schools for students and teachers, trying to reach the youngsters in their daily milieu. Mller is a favorite author of Cornucpia, since they both share a similar anxiety towards the contemporary world disorder and the hope that some of our present afflictions can be better approached and questioned by inquiring into great literature. But if it is true that their preference for tragedy and political awareness shows a challenge to theatre seen as mere amusement, we can still recall extraordinary comic productions that were real milestones in Portuguese theatre, not only

because of the high quality of scenic artistry, but also for Cintras most brilliant performances: a selection of sketches, Cant We Exterminate Them?, by Karl Valentin, in 1979 , in which Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo both impersonated the main character, offering extraordinary performances, a hilarious Cant Pay, Wont Pay! in 1981, a fabulous The Country Wife in 1986, and a subtle and funny Don Juan and Faustus, in 2001. Although searching for a contemporary repertoire, Cintra has seldom chosen to direct living Portuguese playwrights. He has, however, staged poets, either putting on their poems dramaturgically arranged by him (as was the case with Ruy Belo, in 1996, and Herberto Helder, in 1999), or producing poetical plays. It happened this way with Fiama Hasse Pais Brandos Play of the Family, and later, in 2001, with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen The Necklace, a marvellous fantasy about a young girl falling in love in Venice while Lord Byron traveled in Italy. Sophia had explicitly written this play for Cintra as Lord Byron. When approaching Portuguese literature, it is mainly the classics that have attracted Cintras attention, allowing for excellent performances. Gil

Sofia Marques, Marina Albuquerque, and Pedro Lacerda in the 2004 production of Filodemo, by Lus de Cames. Photo: Paulo Nuno

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Vicente has been his major inspiration, giving birth to wonderful productions, seldom repeating the same artistic conception, and very often revealing a new and engaging way of producing his fictional worlds. The Fair (1988) blended a memory of the looting of Rome, an imaginative medieval fantasy with angels and devils, and a marketplace where so many things (the Catholic world needed so badly) were for sale. The Comedy of Rubena (1991) used a more psychological approach to speak of womens fears and anxieties, presenting a witch and evoking an nightmarish atmosphere, but ending by celebrating life, pleasure and womans imagination. With Triumph of Winter (1994), Cintra deconstructed the text in order to highlight the fact that the play was a loose script that allowed for a variety show. It was in this same vein that he would later stage Love Errors (conflating Forge of Love and Forest of Errors) in 2000, creating a splendid world of romance, benign satire and a compassionate vision of humanity. Another major production came out of Almeida Garretts romantic play A Play by Gil Vicente, where the founder of the National Theatre in Portugal celebrates Vicente as our first playwright by showing him at work, presenting his Jupiters Court at the court as Princess Beatriz was leaving for Italy to marry an Italian aristocrat. The performance opened in 1996 and it was an amazing reinvention of the play, which derived not only from the deepest understanding of its literary significance, but also from by the extension of this playful meditation on Portuguese fate through the portraying other icons of our Portuguese-ness in a brilliant, cheerful way. More recently Cintra directed (and performed in) two wonderful productions by Portuguese authors, both in 2004: Lus de Camess Filodemo and Antnio Jos da Silvas Aesopaid, or Aesops Life. His approach was based on a superior philological accuracy, but it also succeeded in lending both a robust humour and a delicate, romantic atmosphere to the plays. Not surprisingly, many critics think that Cornucpia has been playing the role of a real national theatre in staging the classics in such a competent, unconventional, and brilliant way. That might be one of the reasons Cintra has been often invited to direct the National Theatre in Lisbon, an offer he has kept refusing for fear of losing his independence in choosing the repertoire and being at the mercy of political changes each time elections are

held. With his Cornucpia, he is in a better position to define his aesthetic options and invite the actors (and other creators) he feels are better equipped to do ensemble work. With the subsidy he annually receives from the Ministry of Culture, though it is always less than he wants, he is free to produce what he and Cristina Reis are fond of doing. And he has been attracting young actors, like Rita Duro, Jos Airosa, Ricardo Aibo, Nuno Lopes, Sofia Marques and Rita Loureiro, who regularly come to work with him, sharing Cintras attitude toward discipline, accuracy and a demanding interpretation of great literature. They work with him regularly, joining the other actors who have repeatedly engaged with Cornucpia: Lus Lima Barreto, Mrcia Breia, Jos Manuel Mendes, Glicnia Quartin, Antnio Fonseca and Lus Lucas. The first two, together with Cintra and Reis form the nucleus of the company, while the others can be considered their compagnons de route. A few other actors have left the group either to work in television or other projects, like Raquel Maria, Rogrio Vieira and Lusa Cruz, but their stay in the company will always be remembered as important in their artistic curriculum as well as that of the company itself. Although these actors are not a permanent company and may occasionally collaborate with other theatre companies, they enjoy being available whenever Cornucpia needs them. Many of these actors help identify a certain way of doing theatre, as if they share a kind of a trademark. Twenty years ago, some critics of Cornucpias style could have denounced the slow rhythm of some of their performances, or too-seriousness acting, an opinion that was in no way shared by all critics or their very faithful audience. But to maintain this kind of criticism today would be unfair and moreover, incorrect. They are, at the moment, the most important Portuguese theatre company, offering us wonderful performances, blending accuracy with enjoyment and leaving their unique imprint in our contemporary culture. Cintras talent shows its proficiency and inventiveness in staging great literature, which testifies to his admiration for a theatre of art. The fact that he directs his own company has helped him to establish a way to perform. He has succeeded in attracting and preparing young actors, thus making it possible to create ensemble performances based in a great discipline, while joyfully celebrating great art. Shakespeare is one of the authors he has

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staged most often, showing not only his admiration for the way Shakespeare created great roles, but especially for the way he analyzed the human predicament in society. After staging Richard III in 1985, he directed Much Ado About Nothing in 1990, The Winters Tale in1994, Cymbeline in 2000, and Titus Andronicus in 2003. He puts great care in translating the plays to the stage, either by utilizing the translations of major poetsSophia de Mello Breyner Andressen (Much Ado) or Gasto Cruz (The Winters Tale)or by doing them himself with the help of fellow actors and translators, as happened with Richard III, Cymbeline and Titus Andronicus. With Shakespeare, as with Vicente, Cintra has not used a stereotyped approach, but rather varied ways, so that each of the scenic worlds will be exposed differently. Since Richard III pointed to a medieval morality, its world was dominated by the idea of a rigid hierarchy, privileging the relationship of man with God. The set design was organized vertically, with its medium level as a tribune displaying the leading characters pride and ambition. This wooden platform, located at one angle of the large black box of the Cornucpias venue, opened traps to reveal the heads of those who curse Richard before the final battle. For a comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing, a different cosmography was created, not showing the relation of

man to God, but rather the relationships among men, as shown from above. The set was totally open, as if it were a large game table, festively composed and beautified with artificial flowers and delicacies. The difference between these scenic worlds was also stressed by the actors interpretations. For Richard III, it was less ambition than absolute evil, interpreted as libidinal perversity, that created a psychological approach. In Much Ado, Arcadia triumphed over evil, when it appeared, through the naivet of the clowns, the purity of love and the seductive logomachia of the witty lead couple. The Winters Tale was mounted in a nineteenth century theatre, the Teatro da Trindade in downtown Lisbon, since their regular venue was being refurbished at that time. Cintra chose to place the acting nearer to the audience, leaving the rear stage for the green world (a most engaging set design by Reis). The performance emphasized the serenity obtained both by the experience of suffering and the victory of love. So, after a first part dominated by Leontes, overpowered by jealousy (again locating in the lead character a destructive eroticism), the second part gave way to a less psychological interpretation, that stressed exuberance and the explosion of youth, spring and the renewal of the world. For Cymbeline, another late romance showing the possibility of familial reconciliation, Reis designed a square stage, placing the audience

Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, a 2003 production. Photo: Jorge Gonalves

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Lus Miguel Cintra, Lus Lima Barreto, and Rita Duro in Anatomy Titus, Fall of Rome, by Heiner Mller. Photo: Lus Santo

in three of its sides. Therefore the world of fantasy was brought near the spectators, even if it was somber and cruel. The upright feelings involved and the happy ending brought joy to everyone, showing how great art can be a solace for us. His most recent approach to Shakespeare was in Titus Andronicus, included in a cycle dedicated to the struggle for power, which meant questioning the relationship between power and ethics, and studying the possible corruption brought about by the exercise of power. The cycle involved Senecas Thyestes (2002), Calderns Life is A Dream (2003), Shakespeares tragedy, and Anatomy Titus, Fall of Rome by Heiner Mller (2003). This theme has been persistent in Cornucpias repertoire, but a certain dreamlikeor rather nightmarishapproach allowed for an interesting new emphasis. Seneca resulted in the theatrical composition of a monstrous figure, while Caldern, in a beautiful translation by poet Manuel Gusmo, brought a dreamlike state to the forefront to speak of power as elusive and deceptive. Shakespeares Titus, staged at our National Theatre (in a co-production), kept a balanced tone between crude melodrama and a Roman tragedy by presenting Titus

as an indisputable general, wronging himself and Rome because of a political error. But it was with Heiner Mllers play that Cintra really achieved a major performance. As adjusted by Mller, the original Shakespearean text served as a reflection on the decadence of the modern empire of the so-called civilized world. As often happens in Mllers plays, intertextuality was put into the service of an exasperated political reflection, showing violence inflicted upon bodies and intense sexualization of conflict. Moreover, the dramaturgy showed a kind of a rhapsodic style, as identified by Jean-Pierre Sarrazac in his 1998 Lavenir du drame. Following the aesthetic of the text, Cornucpias production was a brilliant mixture of theatrical possibilities, visible in the heterogeneity of the design, and also in different performance quotations inserted into play: expressionist metaphors, clownish attitudes, mechanical gestures, conventional performance, and the hint that Titus could simply be a dictator in a military profile. Another trend visible in Cintras unending quest is a preference for the lyrical mode, a poetics that rises from the suspension of chronological time,

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the overlapping of powerful images, and the revelation of contradictions. This is the world Cintra detected in some twentieth century authors he has staged: Federico Garcia Lorca (The Public, in 1989; When Five Years Have Passed, in 1998), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Afabulation, in 1999) and Jean Genet (Splendids, in 1995). With these three playwrights, Cintra conjured a dreamlike world of anxiety and fascination, evoking an eroticism animated by desires and prohibitions, fears and sudden illuminations, as well as bodily metamorphoses. In these scenic worlds, Cintra found that celebrating solitude and the absolute but contained desire of the Other are some of the most sublime purposes of theatre. If we can locate here some of his most accomplished ways of enacting his theatre poetics, we still need to stress his growing ability in staging plays with music. Cintras has been regularly invited to direct operas by Purcell, Mozart, Haydn and Hans Werner Henze, but he is also interested in using music in his own productions. In 2001, in a cycle dedicated to German romanticismin which he included Grabbes Don Juan and Faustus, Lenzs The New Menoza and Hlderlins The Death of

Empedocleshe invited a pianist to be onstage playing Schuberts sonatas. In 2002, he directed Ramuz and Stravinskys The History of the Soldier with a charming mixture of delight and fear to evoke the folklore, with the help of conductor Joo Paulo Santos, who directed a small, live orchestra. Cornucpias most recent venture into music and literature took them to Brechts Man is Man. Cintra chose the 1953 version of the play, adding the intermezzo The Elephants Baby, staging it as a play within the play. The story of Galy Gay deals with several important themes that run through Brechts theatre, denouncing social alienation (which prevents men from fighting back against enforced ideology), war and imperialism (as aggressive and predatory behaviors), religion and capitalist system. The performance avoided conventional Brechtianism by going back to the real Verfremdungseffekt, highlighting the plays contradictions and making them seem funny. Not only was the direction remarkable, but the artistic cohesion of the group was outstanding, illuminating many aspects of Brechts play. The intermezzo was performed in a furiously funny way, blending intel-

Dinarte Branco, Henrique Cardaror, Maria Joo, Joo Lizardo, and Ricardo Aibo in 2005s Man is Man. Photo: Lus Santo

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ligence, farcical derision and brilliantly amateurish acting. Both the music, played by pianist Nuno Lopes, and the songs, sung by all the cast used some of Weills most famous melodies (Alabama-Song from Mahagonny, among others) as well as some that Paul Dessau had written for the last version of this play, thereby creating another stage in a mature and refined artwork. This is a highly abridged version of the history of one of Portugals best theatre companies. For those who would like to know their work better, I recommend Cristina Reis and Margarida Reis

Teatro da Cornucpia: Espectculos de 1973 a 2001, which includes 1400 photographs, a complete listing of nearly thirty years of performances (including all the artists involved, the number of performances as well as of the number of spectators for each performance, and the places where they premired and toured), the program text for each of their productions, and a magnificent set of Cristina Reissketches. One can also consult my own work, Questionar apaixonadamente: O teatro na vida de Lus Miguel Cintra (Lisboa: Cotovia, 2001).

Duarte Guimares, Nuno Lopes, Ricardo Aibo, Dinarte Branco, and Henrique Cardaror in Man is Man, Bertolt Brecht (2005). Photo: Lus Santo

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CENDREV (1975-2005): Thirty Years of Theatrical Decentralization

Christine Zurbach Nowadays, the theatre historian who writes on the theatre of his/her time as a living relationship between artists, public and critics, no longer should be restricted to factual data, lists of names, or statistics on spectatorship and number of productions. To register a memory of theatre as an enlightened critic, one must attend to the characteristics which distinguish particular theatre practitioners and their projects. These characteristics identify the art of theatre in a particular historical moment as a combination of discourses and practices that interact with the social and cultural reality which gives rise to them. The presentation of any theatrical company should, for this reason, base itself on the idea of theatre upheld and developed in the companys theatre work. It is in this idea, and the chance encounters on the path towards its implementation, that the true specificity of a project resides, whether in terms of what is understood by the generic term of theatre or in terms of the role attributed to it. These presuppositions are often visible in the outward signs manifesting the essential characteristics of a group. One of these is certainly the name with which it presents itself publicly and whose semantic implications determine the understanding of its theatre practice. At the time of its creation in 1975, the company at Cendrev adopted the name of Cultural Centre, before changing it to Dramatic Centre in 1990. However, it remained faithful to, and even reinforced, its connection with the model of theatre that inspired it: the experience of theatrical decentralization promoted by Jeanne Laurent in France after 1945. This experience guided the groups practice and its public stance. Such a characteristic wove its way through this text, to the extent that much of the companys identity has been closely associated with the significance of the names adopted by it in each of the phases of its history. The parameters for a well-founded interpretation of the guiding principles of the company, as well as for an analysis of the cultural implications of their theatrical practice, of the productions staged and of their inscription within the social fabric, point to another decisive characteristic: the contextualization of the Cendrev project within a particular historical time and physical space. This has conditioned its relationship with the socio-cultural universe within which it operated. From an initial, fifteen-year phase marked by the great ideological openness of Portuguese society, where all the arts formed part of a policy of cultural dynamization, they entered a phase of reorienting and specializing their artistic practice. The project was begun in 1975 by a group of actors and directors whose roots and methods fed into the artistic practices of the project in the first fifteen years. The model of theatrical activity put forward by the group during this time emphasized the primacy of a transversal cultural practice based upon theatre, as signalled in the name Cultural Centre of vora (CCE). From 1990 onwards, they gave priority to artistic creation and the staging of productions within an expanded legal and institutional framework, and this change was signalled in the new name adopted, the Dramatic Centre of vora (Cendrev). The evolution of the CCE/Cendrev was linked to the transformations and vicissitudes of Portuguese political, social and cultural life after April 1974, which were themselves reflected in the main elements of the companys cultural practice. These factors were visible not only in Cendrevs choice of repertoire and aesthetic choices, but also in their institutional organization and relationship with the State. Taking this descriptive matrix as its starting point, this brief review of the theatrical project of the company currently based at Cendrev will set out its historical and institutional trajectory in the two phases of the companys thirty-year history. It will end with a description of Cendrevs aesthetic principles. The first phase of the Cultural Centre of vora (CCE) lasted from 1975 to 1990. For the Portuguese artistic milieu, the revolution of April 25, 1974 signalled the end of the jaded Salazar regime and the gradual movement to a parliamentary democracy on the European model. It also led to an effective political and ideological openness which, with the abolition of censorship, enabled the creation and importation of cultural models which had been non-existent in the country. In the period following the revolutionary caesura of 1974, those artists who made theatre devoted themselves to reorganizing theatrical life. They created new production structures that advanced a new form of institutional relationship with the structures of power, aiming to reach a public that had not been

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able to enjoy theatre. To implement such projects, artists also worked on the renewal of repertoire through the introduction of non-Portuguese dramaturgies. Dramaturgy here is understood broadly as referring to the writing about/for theatre in both the poetics of texts and also the languages of stage representation. This opening up was a phenomenon of wide-ranging importance for theatre in Portugal and contributed towards an effective liberation of artistic languages and practices. As a result of the expressive and political importance attributed to the word in the context of widespread social change in this period, theatre became a privileged tool in the cultural work needed to counteract the backwardness of the country. This was true to such an extent that institutional structures were made responsible for dynamization in order to guarantee its stability. This was not, however, an unambiguous process, as a 1995 article in the journal Adgio, which commemorates 20 years of Cendrev, makes clear. The article evokes the rather anarchic, yet inevitable generalization of what was at the time called cultural dynamization throughout the country, a country which was at the same time lacking definitions of priorities or forms of action. In this context, the November 1974 document entitled Suggestions towards theatrical decentralization, written by director Mrio Barradas and dramaturg Norberto vila (quoted in this same article), is notable for the clarity of its programmatic foundations: The Cultural Centres should place theatre at the centre of their activities as it is an art which is capable of motivating the support, interest and attraction of large sections of the public in a movement towards the democratization of culture. It is curious to note references to examples of French failures in a programmatic document of this kind, together with statements made by two French theorists, Andr de Baecque and Gaeton Picon, about the Maisons de la Culture. This indicates a clear position regarding the adoption of the model formulated by Andr Malraux. Similarly, the choice of the name Cultural Centre is referred to in the same 1995 publication as a clear tactical inflection of a terminological nature, which, despite being justified in the context of 1975, is seen a posteriori to have been a mistake. In truth, the project was more profoundly linked to a general view of the implementation of new rules for Portuguese theatrical politics in order to launch an innovative theatrical program. This program,

financed by the State in accordance with the central demand of the director Jean Vilar for a public service theatre, could be implemented because of the opportunities created by the strategy of decentralization and other transformations occurring in Portugal during 1974-5. The program implied the State taking responsibility for a real reorganization of theatrical life nationally, with the CCE playing a pioneering, experimental role as the first example of the Centres, to be created until the whole country, including the islands of Madeira and the Azores, is covered. In the year it was established, the CCE was the only example of a professional theatre company created by the State. Managed as an institution financed through regular contractual state subsidies, it was responsible for developing a program of theatrical decentralization. Besides requiring the selection of a repertoire that was appropriate for this purpose, the CCEs responsibilities also included a programmed set of activities. These activities were in association with officially endorsed policies to introduce new authors and texts, and creating and organizing new audiences. These policies were implemented by a group of directors, actors, technical and administrative staff, most of whom already had experience of theatre in Portugal or had been trained abroad. The work of the Centre was based on productions aimed primarily at a provincial audience that had been marginalized by the companies concentrated in the main centres of Lisbon and Porto. Instead of reproducing the itinerant model favoured sporadically by these companies, the activities of the CCE implied settling in a local geographical area. The site chosen was vora, the district capital of the Alentejo region in the southern-central region. At the time, Alentejo possessed a conservative agrarian tradition based on large landholdings. It was an area that had developed a strong culture of resistance to the previous regime in both labor relations and the cultural arena. The town of vora, which already had many cultural operators and a vital tradition of amateur theatre, offered material resources and exceptional conditions. These included the possibility of using the nineteenth century Garcia de Resende Municipal Theatre, with its Italianate theatre style architecture. CCE made an agreement with the local authorities that enabled them to use the theatre. They made another with the central government regarding a system of regular financial support, guarantying the necessary material and technical means to operate the project. On

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January 1, 1975, the Cultural Centre of vora (CCE) professional theatre company began its work from the Garcia de Resende Theatre. The first season in 1975 addressed the problems of the country and the region. It included four productions whose common denominator was a critical reflection on History and the role of the individual in worldwide transformation. To inaugurate its activities, the Centre chose to perform a work written and directed by the French director, Richard Demarcy, in collaboration with Teresa Motta, on the events of the Night of September 28. Using an aesthetic style adapted from the historical fable, a bullfighter, a general, a priest and a farm worker (four emblematic figures of the conflicting values of the society of the period), performed a version of a recent historical event which had impeded the revolutionary process, side-by-side with the audience. Similarly, the following productions staged denunciations of the capitalist system and of the

colonial war using texts by Luis Valdezs Teatro Campesino (The Two Faces of the Boss and The Lowest Ranking Soldier), and two texts by Bertolt Brecht (Lux in Tenebris and Master Puntila and his Servant Matti) to end the season. The latter raised questions of land ownership that were being debated as part of the process of agrarian reform in the region. The repertoire of 1975 illustrated the desire of the CCE to make known the dramaturgies of contemporary theatre, including Brecht, who had been systematically banned by the censors up until 1974. The year of 1976 also inaugurated work on the classics with The Triumph of Love, by the eighteenth-century French author Marivaux. This deliberately historical and critical treatment of canonical authors, who had invariably been subjected to psychological and idealistic readings, began what was to become a characteristic trademark of the company. The same season initiated a third area of

The Night of September 28, by Richard Demarcy, directed by Demarcy and Teresa Motta. Photo: Centro Cultural de vora

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the CCE repertoire: work on the comic genre and its inexhaustible critical resources. There was a particular concentration on farce, a minor form particularly well-suited to trtau theatre, which enabled the company to move outside the large theatres and travel around the region to perform for audiences in towns and villages. The fourth and final area of their repertoire was national drama, of which Almeida Garretts The Count of Novion and Jos Regios Mario and Myself were performed in 1977. From this point onwards, contemporaneity and the classical inheritance, the national dramaturgy and the comic genre became the pillars of CEE programming throughout its twenty-five years of theatre work. Towards the end of the 1980s, the CCE added a final area to its artistic responsibilities to the region when it decided to take on both the collection of traditional marionettes known as the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo, as well as the revitalization of their repertoire, which formed part of the companys regular theatre work from that point onwards. Apart from theatre productions, the CCEs activities demonstrated three crucial aspects of the renovation of Portuguese theatrical life after 1974. The company established three separate departments to implement work on these areas: the training of (future) theatre professionals, the creation of a specific repertoire for children and young people, and the promotion of support for amateur theatre, whose dynamism in local and regional structures was notable at this time. Managed by young actors, these departments functioned as centres that extended the CCEs theatre practice into the wider work of cultural dynamization. In tandem with specific areas of theatrical practice, the CCE was particularly concerned to launch decisive initiatives for its progressive work theatrical decentralization. The Theatrical Training School, managed by the director Luis Varela, was founded in 1975. Its aim was to train qualified actors and cultural organizers who were aware of the theoretical and practical questions raised by the recent process of decentralization. They would receive advanced technical, artistic, and cultural training. Besides the subjects that formed the basis of an actors training, such as history and the history of the theatre, dramaturgy and aesthetics, it also included experimental workshop readings. From 1986 onwards, with the possibility of new forms of European funding, the School adopted new guidelines for the recruitment and training of young theatre professionals.

The Childrens Unit was begun in 1976 and operated more or less regularly until it was dismantled at the end of the 1980s because of financial difficulties which forced the CCE to gradually restrict the areas in which it worked. The Unit was managed by Manuel Guerra, a director trained in France who had come into contact with the French movement to renovate theatre for children and young adults, particularly the Thtre de la Pomme Verte. The Unit put forward a plan to work with a public that still operated within the school theatre tradition, a tradition that was artistically unambitious and rarely educational. The Units repertoire included translated plays, such as Catherine Dasts The Eucalyptus Wizard and James and the Tortoise, which inaugurated the Units theatre work. Those responsible for the Unit also aimed to introduce a new perspective on the different elements of theatre performance for children. In 1977, The Clowns, for instance, gave a theatrical treatment to the world of the clown. A production without words, it was based on absurd or entertaining games that required a new relationship with the young theatre audience. A second area of work, which was no less important, involved running training sessions for schoolteachers as well as regular meetings with national and international specialists. By bringing together the school and the theatre in an educational and artistic project, the Unit aimed to contribute to the education of future theatre audiences. Lastly, the Department for the Support of Amateur Theatre was placed in the hands of several actors with experience in this area, such as Leandro Vale. They ran training sessions for theatre groups. Some companies had a long experience of theatrical and local association work, while others had sprung up all over the place, particularly in schools and companies. In promoting the theatrical practices of the local areas and associations, which were extremely active at this time, the CCE introduced new repertoires through translation of the dramaturgies of the European canon. It also ran theoretical and practical artistic training sessions on directing, acting, and improving technical resources. Based in vora, the company created a network of theatrical decentralization with other companies in provincial towns, from the North to the South. It gave public expression to its program in the Meetings of the Technical and Artistic Association for Theatrical Decentralization (ATADT), which was founded in 1976. Further meetings were organized in 1979, 1980, and 1982,

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giving the ATADT a prominent role State politics with regard to the expectations of Portuguese theatre workers. This role is illustrated in programmatic texts on the organization of Portuguese theatrical life, particularly the difficult relationship between the State and theatre artists during this period. The second phase of the company as the Dramatic Centre of vora (Cendrev) began in 1991 in response to such difficulties. In 1986, the revocation of the Ministry for Social Communications law decree that had created the CCE on January 11, 1975 led the Centre to reformulate its project. The crisis provoked by the end of a connection with the Ministry of State for Culture and, in the 1989 season, the replacement of the regular annual subsidy by a system which attributed more irregular subsidies, led the CCE to embark on a new model in association with the Teatro da Rainha, a young professional company based in the town of Caldas da Rainha. Teatro da Rainha was directed by Fernando Mora Ramos, who had trained at the CCE as a director, and who had developed his own program of theatrical decentralization there. Cendrev maintained the essential characteristics of the CCE repertoire, but with less emphasis on dynamization. A new structure was created, whose legal status was that of a joint partnership between two autonomous com-

panies. With its new name, the initial project illustrated a desire to redirect the groups activity away from a project primarily geared towards theatrical decentralization, towards the institutionalization of the idea of public service theatre. In edition 26 of the journal Adgio (created by Cendrev in 1990), which commemorated the twenty-fourth anniversary of the vora project, director Mrio Barradas underlined the prolonged cultural backwardness of the country in the European context, adding a desire for the future: What Adgio hopes [] is that Portugal heads clearly and in an informed way towards a situation which [] comes close to the organizational parameters of the theatre world in practically all parts of Europe. This plan confirmed Cendrevs institutional growth and its gradual recognition. A positive note was struck immediately in 1991 when vora was chosen by the Ministry of Culture to be the first National Capital of Theatre. In 1992, the centenary of the Garcia de Resende Theatre promoted the international profile of Cendrev with the exhibition Experiences of European Theatre. The second edition of the International Biennial of the Marionettes of vora (BME) associated the work done up until then by Cendrev through the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo collection, with the global movement towards the

Llia Guerreiro, Ana Madureira, Joo Srgio Palma, Victor Zambujo, Figueira Cid, and Jos Caldeirain a 1985 production of Ins Pereira, by Gil Vicente, directed by Jos Peixoto. Photo: lvaro Crte-Real

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Students of the Cendrev school perform Vicentes Lusitnia, directed by Mrio Barradas, in 1993. Photo: lvaro Crte-Real

theatrical canonization of the art of the marionette. Besides reaffirming a theatrical production project based upon a repertoire marked by the aesthetic and discursive coherence of the former CCE, the reformulation of tasks undertaken by Cendrev led to the transformation of previous work in several areas. This is the case with the expanded theatrical training enabled by the European framework and with the new relevance given to technical professionals in association with the Thtre National du Strasbourg and the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona. It is also the case in the area of theatre costume, with a course led by Master of Costume Amlia Varejo in 1993. On the other hand, the work of the Childrens Unit for young people was reborn on a more solid footing thanks to its establishment in Montemor-oNovo, in association with the local authority. New areas of work were also begun. These included Cencrevideo, which specialized in the production of videos within an educational context, and the Documentation Centre which was responsible for promoting its own editorial project, and Adgio in particular. The journal aimed to spread the companys artistic priorities and perspective to a wider and more diverse public within Portuguese theatre, an

aim which is illustrated in texts that assume a political and theoretical position on the increasing adversity surrounding theatre. Adgio offers students of theatre invaluable source material on the aesthetic principles of the national and international practitioners who worked at the CCE/Cendrev, as well as articles that illustrate the principles of the institutions repertoire and artistic strategies. In the twenty and twenty-five year commemorative editions (nos. 15/16, JulyDecember 1995 and no. 26, series 3, February-May 2000) particular attention is given to the link between the CCE/Cendrevs dramaturgical choices and the directors artistic principles from 1975 to the present day. Similarly, the texts written for production programs, which were produced initially to educate the audience, indicate the discursive homogeneity of the company. Excluding improvisation and collective creation, they argue for performances of texts from the universal textual corpus. The choice of repertoire, therefore, was built on a large number of translated texts. Many of these were from French and German, as these were the formative models of those responsible for the project in France at the Thtre National de Strasbourg. This

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influenced the so-called readings of the classics, which included Shakespeares Measure for Measure and Alls Well that Ends Well, Molires George Dandin and The School for Women, and Corneilles Horace. These were followed by the Enlightenment drama of Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Kleist, and Goldoni. There was also a critical return to the national literary and theatrical tradition, as illustrated in the decanonization of Gil Vicente. Almost two dozen of his plays were performed throughout the CCE/Cendrevs thirty-year existence, as well as in plays by S de Bandeira, Cames, and Almeida Garrett. These productions both questioned the inheritance of the canon and its past ideological appropriation and problematized its more recent reception through historicization. The CCE/Cendrevs critical approximation to the theatrical theory and drama of Brecht also played an important role in the aesthetic principles of the company, as is seen, for instance, in the recurrent references to central Brechtian concepts and the extensive research that lay behind productions of plays such as Man is Man in 1992. Yet much of their repertoire was also composed of contemporary drama. This included Portuguese drama to stimu-

late national dramaturgy and the national theatrical heritage, as well as international drama, as in productions of Demarcy, Luiz Valdez, Brecht, Kateb Yacine, Peter Weiss, Weisenborn, Tankred Dorst, Horvath, Vinaver, Chekhov, Ibsen, Adamov, and Bchner. From the 1990s onwards, the CCE/Cendrev also included authors such as Edward Bond and Peter Turrini, who are committed to readings of conflict and the dehumanization of the contemporary globalized world. This work represented a darker, even tragic, view of the task of deciphering and questioning reality. Such a view also appeared in their recurrent use of the comic genre in plays or minor forms, whose advantage lies in the fact that they could be easily exploited in logistical terms. These included Ruzzante, the medieval farces of Gil Vicente, the interludes of Lope de Rueda, and the cabaret of Karl Valentin. The CCE opened up a path to politically committed and socially critical theatre, which has now been reformulated into more ambitious productions. The aesthetic principles illustrated in direction through regular invitations to international directors, or in scenography with the work of the scenographer Jos Carlos Faria, or in work with actors, many of whom had been trained at the CCE

Victor Zambujo, Gil Salgueiro Nave, lvaro Crte-Real, Jos Russo, Isabel Bilou, Jorge Baio, Paulo Pires, and Rosrio Gonzaga in Daniel Lemahieus Bye bye, Lehrstck, directed by Pierrre-Etienne Heymann in 1999. Photo: Paulo Nuno Silva

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School, conferred an importance on the literary dimension of the text in production. This importance provided material and sustenance for a new poetics, in a productive-receptive conception of the mise-en-scne, such as that put forward by Patrice Pavis in his 1990 Le Thtre au croisement des cultures. Over the years, the CCE/Cendrevs programming has revealed dominant themes, ranging from the internal conflicts of the new democracy in the first few years of the Revolution, to the denunciation of war and capitalist, or neo-liberal, exploitation in the present day. Rooted in a program of popular theatre based on the French post-war model, the aesthetics of the CCE/Cendrev can be seen in its historicosocial realism and its recourse to Brechtian theory. In scenic terms, this associated form and content and foregrounded forms of behaviour by distancing them from their multiple conditioning factors. The entire working process for the production of plays, from the selection and translation of texts to the dramaturgy applied, to the relationship between text and performance, and to the performance and reception of the plays, always included a reflection on history and ideology. This historical and sociopolitical consciousness, which was expressed in the demand for a public service theatre, is, in my view, what could properly be described as the political vocation of this theatre, in the sense that Bernard Dort understands the theatrical work of art, with its

performance to a public of citizens committed to the destiny of the polis. The company has necessarily been forced to make changes, which have been determined above all by the limitations on a theatre dependent upon official subsidies. Recently, it entered a third phase of its history. Nevertheless, besides the importance given to the relationship with their audience, there are other elements of continuity in the project. The most decisive of these are the maintenance of a permanent company of actors, who are essential guarantors of the discursive stability of the group, and the composition of its current management, led by Jos Russo and Rosrio Gonzaga, two company actors who were trained at the CCE/Cendrev School. They also include retaining their commitment to keeping alive marionette theatre through the regular realization of the BIME, as well as their efforts to support new national dramaturgies and consolidate artistic and professional relations with other countries. Even as it is commemorating thirty years of theatre, the CCE/Cendrev is facing the demise of theatre into spectacle or the search for more experimental forms distanced from social realities,. However, the CCE/Cendrev persists in its determined search for a theatre of resistance, sustained by the homogeneity of the ethical and aesthetic principles that surrounded its birth and continue to shape its theatrical practice.

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Reinventing a Cultural Concept, Creating a Theatrical Reality: The Teatro Nacional S. Joo Directed by Ricardo Pais
Paulo Eduardo Carvalho Every time we do something thoroughly, we always teach something to somebody. --Giorgio Strehler Any discussion in Portugal around the concept of a national theatre meant, for more than a century and a half, talking only about the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (TNDMII), the theatre that Almeida Garrett helped to create in Lisbon, inaugurated April 13, 1846. We owe him not only the idea of erecting a theatre building, but also a vast and structured set of considerations about the more general situation of Portuguese theatre, particularly regarding actor training and the renewal of the national dramatic art. In spite of the states responsibility, that theatre ended up being less capable of stimulating the national creation of new texts for the stage, and more open to the promotion of certain foreign drama, not always in accordance with the highest or most updated staging methods, and thus far from complying with its initial ambitions. Its functioning was frequently assured through concessions to companies of actor-managers, such as the company Rosas and Braso (1880-1898), and especially the company Rey ColaoRobles Monteiro, between 1929 and 1974although, after 1964, outside the original premises, because the building suffered a fire in December of that year. Finally reopened in 1978, four years after the revolution which gave Portugal a much deserved democratic regime, TNDMII would be the protagonist of a turbulent history, characterized by successive and for the most part ephemeral managements, closings and new openings, that illustrate the prolonged irresponsibility with which the state has long postponed a much-needed intervention in the Portuguese theatre system. The erratic path followed by TNDMII, and its inability to lead, in a consistent way, any artistic renewal, contributed to the complex network of ideas and some prejudices that, during more than two decades, developed around the mission and even the justification of a state theatre initiative. It was in this context, characterized by the absence of a coherent policy aimed at the revitalization of the Portuguese theatre that, on 8 October 1992, the State bought the Teatro S. Joo, located in Porto, and inaugurated it as the Teatro Nacional S. Joo (TNSJ) in November of that same year. The important symbolic meaning attached to that decision was not, however, immediately followed by the strategic and programmatic vision demanded by the creation of a second national theatre in Portugal, especially in light of the conditions outlined above. The acquisition of the Teatro S. Joo by the Portuguese government meant for that city the

Ricardo Pais at TNSJ. Photo: Joo Tuna

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repossession of one of its most extraordinary theatre buildings, with a history that goes back to May, 1798, when the Real Teatro S. Joo, designed by the Italian architect Vicente Mazzoneschi, was inaugurated. Little more than a century had passed when the building was partially consumed by a fire in April, 1908. Redesigned by the architect Jos Marques da Silva in an impressive demonstration of the extraordinary economic power of the towns bourgeoisie, a new theatre opened in March of 1920. Although in its first years it managed to regain its prestige with seasons exclusively dedicated to theatre and opera, during the late 1930s the theatre began a slow process of decay, until it ended up as the So Joo Cine, reflecting not only the evolution of the entertainment industry, but also the important changes in the social and cultural fabric of the city and the effects of the totalitarian regime installed in Portugal in 1926. Less than three years after it had been bought by the State, in 1992, the much-degraded building was submitted to an intensive process of rehabilitation, under the guidance of the architect Joo Carreira. Since its inauguration in late 1992, TNSJ has already had three directors: the art critic Eduardo Paz Barroso, between 1992 and 1995; the theatre director Ricardo Pais, between late 1995 and July 2000, and later, between October 2002 and October 2005, with a renewed three-year term until 2008; and Jos Wallenstein, a younger director, between September 2000 and September 2002. Besides the vicissitudes of national political life, with particular consequences on this succession of administrative and artistic responsibilities, the tenure of Ricardo Pais was and still is the most significant, due to his role in the reinvention of the problematic concept of a national theatre and in the effective creation of a singular artistic vision, unparalleled in the thirty-two years of Portuguese democracy. As the theatre critic Joo Carneiro recognized in an 1998 article in Expresso: Never, in such a short periodhas a National Theatre had such an exemplary type of activity. Its not only the coherence of the repertoire, which is remarkable; it is above all the way that repertoire has been used in order to suggest a way of creating productions that affects the artists who participate in them as well as the audience that attends those shows; its the way it suggests, all at once, standards of quality and professionalism with

which all the other agents will necessarily have to comply with. Thats exactly what we can expect from a National Theatre. It is important to add that since October 2002 the TNSJ added to its structure a second venue, the Teatro Carlos Alberto (TeCA), which was also the object of a vast project of reconstruction, designed by Nuno Lacerda Lopes, whose more ambitious original project of transformation was somewhat compromised by budgetary shortcomings and political hesitations. Although the invitation addressed by then Minister for Culture, Manuel Maria Carrilho, to Ricardo Pais to become director of TNSJ was initially received with some resistance at the local level, demonstrating resentment towards the nomination of someone from outside the town, it is now widely regarded as a productive choice. Curiously enough, the establishment of that director in Porto interrupted three decades of a very nomadic artistic life, distributed through many different towns: Coimbra, where he studied and worked in an university group with the Argentinean theatre director Victor Garcia, a town to which Pais would return in later years to work; London, between 1968 and 1974, where he completed the prestigious directors course of the Drama Centre and where he did his first artistic experiments before his return to Portugal; Lisbon, the town in which he carried out the largest part of his activity and in which he directed some of his most important creations; and Viseu, where he eventually decided to live and work. But Ricardo Pais career can also be described as nomadic due to the fact that, contrary to what happened with most of his contemporaries, he was one of the few Portuguese theatre directors without a formal attachment to a company (except with Os Cmicos, between 1975 and 1978), having developed his activity around more isolated projects promoted by himself or in response to institutional invitations. One of these institutions was TNDMII, where he created Anatol, by Arthur Schnitzler, in 1978; Faust. Fernando. Fragments., after the Faustian fragments written by the modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, in 1988; and Clamor, a collage of texts by the great orator of the Portuguese baroque, Antnio Vieira, in 1994. Those are just some examples of a staging approach that is equally attracted to wordsby native and foreign, classic and contemporary authorsto images, and to music, in an intense and

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Ricardo Pais in front of photographs of some of his productions at TNSJ. Photo: Joo Tuna

very particular exploration of the aural and visual plurality of the scenic event, with daring connections to performance and dance. The variety of experiments he directed were geared towards a research on the essential stage languages, characterized by a startling reinvention of their respective codes, giving evidence of an understanding that overcomes the illustrative approach to the dramatic text. Instead, his works are always open to more plural methods of staging, aware of the various contributions that technology can make, and to crossdisciplinary exercises based on gestures and signs capable of transforming the stage into an intensely playful space inhabited by unexpected events. The powerful stage metaphors and the visual and aural landscapes he has created throughout his career have always implied a commitment to the exploration of the most productive articulations between body and movement, space and image, voice and sound, and words and their various forms of reverberation, leading to a profound re-dimensioning of the actor. The wide range of his creative work cannot be separated from his vast experience in the areas of teaching and cultural management, closely associat-

ed not only with the overall dynamic he always lends to his own productions, but also with more formal projects he led in Viseu, where he coordinated a pioneer regional recentralization, in Coimbra, and in Lisbon. In this very sketchy profile of Pais artistic and professional work before his arrival at TNSJ, one must stress his idea that to direct is also to organize, to plan and to manage, and that all projects of artistic success are projects in which its creator is cumulatively its strategic manager, he noted in an interview in Expresso of 25 May, 1996. Quite early in my career I discovered in myself the impulse of the animator, of the cultural producer. Ive always considered that the work around theatre or artistic creation is only interesting insofar it is creative. When I plan training projects or parallel activities, I always do imaginative work which is only possible because I have theatre practice. Pais has always practiced an intensely demanding view of theatre, followed by the claim that this major artistic expression requires complex and highly professionalized infrastructures. It

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emerges as quite natural that one of the first objectives he defined for the new TNSJ was the need to inscribe it in the Portuguese theatre system by its excellence, in an attempt to establish new standards both for creators, interpreters and spectators alike. In his formal speech of acceptance as Director of TNSJ, he stated that the duty of any national theatre is to function as a reference at all levels of theatre creation and promotion, assuring the necessary stability to procedures that go well beyond the mere domain of stage work, so that they all become routines allowing the creative personality of everyone to have the necessary space of expression, usually restricted by the contingency of the means available for production, in that including the creative personality of the resident director. From the very beginning of that venture, his main purpose was to reinvent the concept of a national theatre, to obtain the best of results with the means and dimensions, organization and methods, that are in themselves the most effective and unexpected instruments for our artistic development. Pais developed this program through a daring continuation of the strategies of art theatre, characterized by maintaining a permanent questioning of theatres forms and vocabulary as the only way to assure its artistic integrity, and of projecting itself as

a public, formative, and civic project, with collective appeal. The idea was to explore the potential of an artistic professional production unit for the development of city and country. In a in program bill for Portogofone in March, 2004, he observed: What I want is to stimulate an idea of theatre not of Porto, but in Porto, in this perimeter, this meeting point, of infinite generosity and self-esteem, unique in this country. Its important to add that the city of Porto lived, in the mid-90s, a very privileged moment, characterized by cultural renewal and animated by projects with an institutional profile, such as the creation of several theatre schools and training centers, and the opening of both the Museum of Contemporary Art (Fundao de Serralves) and the Rivoli Teatro Municipal. The conditions necessary to make Porto a real city of theatre existed. The project developed by TNSJ in these last years was structured around a carefully defined set of areas and activities: (1) the definition and exploration of place, the theatre building itself, including the effort of creativity associated with the development of the image that the institution intended to convey to its potential audience; (2) the constitution of professionally committed artistic and technical working teams, together with the optimization of means; (3) the development of a coher-

UBUs, after Jarry's Ubu plays, directed by Ricardo Pais at TNSJ in 2005. Photo: Joo Tuna

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UBUs costumes were designed by Bernardo Monteiro. Photo:

ent repertoire, designed according to a more global project, articulated along with the improvement of the level of artistry; (4) the creation of opportunities for a dialogue with other forms of artistic expression, programming events characterized by the plurality and diversity of languages; (5) the establishment of an editorial policy and the multiplication of different means of support designed to overcome the ephemeral condition of the theatrical event; (6) the deployment of a training practice, not only for actors but all other artists and technicians involved in a show; and (7) the development of privileged connections with the local and national cultural milieu as well as foreign artists and international circuits. Although Ricardo Pais inherited a building rehabilitated in a very conservative manner and dominated by older theatrical models, he tried different strategies for a more versatile use of the the-

atres many spaces. For instance, its Salo Nobre was used for exhibitions and installations of many Portuguese contemporary visual artists, or for photography exhibitions, like Suspiros de Chumbo, by Paulo Nozolino, with images of Venice, or Lapsos e Memrias, the original display of photographs of the many shows presented at TNSJ captured by Joo Tuna. The same Salo Nobre was also used for theatre and musical productions and as a place to meet, discuss and debate important public issues regarding the theatres main activities. The auditorium itself was frequently altered and transformed according to the desires of the different directors who worked there. The ideological openness that has always characterized his vision of theatre, together with its acute awareness that the success of any theatre project also depends on its program of events, naturally led Pais to explore different formulas of cultural promotion and advertisement, adjusted to the reality of the performing arts. The creation of an image for Joo Tuna TNSJ has been one of his major concerns, to the point of transforming posters and other promotional materials into extensions of the aesthetic project. The experience accumulated by the theatre in this field has become one of its most important contributions to the symbolic reaffirmation of the performing arts in the contemporary cultural scene. The establishment and training of highly professional, technical, artistic, and administrative teams have always been among the dominant concerns of the reinvented TNSJ. This spirit of renewed demand has made it nationally and internationally recognized for the excellent conditions created there for the achievement of its ultimate goals of creation and presentation of theatre productions. Notwithstanding some less successful attempts, TNSJ has been able to promote, train and develop both individual artists and departments that combine technical expertise with artistic talent. A good

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example is its Sound Department and Francisco Leal, a much-awarded sound designer. The building of working teams is closely tied to the financial means necessary to achieve all the varied tasks currently indispensable in the world of theatre. No matter how poor the understanding of theatre a given director or a spectator might have, one cannot ignore the many technological developments applicable to the performing arts. TNSJ has frequently promoted an awareness to this, clearly visible in the technological resources used in many of Pais productions. Its not easy to summarize the complexity and variety of the stage work developed by TNSJ during these past ten years, so diverse is its rich history. Its activity includes productions of its own, co-productions, presentations of touring works, both national and international, and festivals. According to the law regulating the TNSJ, its general director or manager should also be a resident theatre director, thus assuring a reinforced coherence of the artistic project. Consequently, Ricardo Pais has been responsible for the greatest number of productions there, but other theatre directors have also been invited to work at TNSJ, amplifying and multiplying the styles and approaches to the established repertoire. Between 1996 and 2000, the artistic programming reflected the assumedly meta-theatrical idea of artifice and disguise, which allowed the promotion of a very self-reflexive kind of staging that was acutely aware of its artistic status and its aesthetic implications, strategically capable of promoting a consistent exploration of the notions of theatricality and performativity at almost metaphorical levels. During those first five years, Ricardo Pais directed a very productive combination of classic and contemporary, Portuguese and foreign texts: The Tragicomedy of Dom Duardos, by Gil Vicente, Venice Preserved, The Lesson, Twelfth Night, Skyscraper, by Jacinto Lucas Pires, and Madame, by Maria Velho da Costa. Nuno Carinhas was invited to direct The Great Theatre of the World and The Theatrical Illusion, while the Italian theatre director Giorgio Barberio Corsettiwho was appointed as Ricardo Pais successorstaged Pirandellos The Mountain Giants, and Boats, after a famous trilogy of Vicentine moralities. Paulo Castro directed Red, Black and Ignorant, by Edward Bond and Fernando Mora Ramos, Struggle of the Dogs and the Black, by Bernard-Marie Kolts. In the period between 2002 and 2005, when Ricardo Pais was again the

director of the theatre, he staged Castro, the sixteenth century Portuguese tragedy by Antnio Ferreira, One Hamlet More, a variation around some themes from Hamlet, Extras, by Jacinto Lucas Pires, and UBUs, a fabulous adaptation of Jarrys Ubu roi cycle. The young theatre director Nuno Cardoso, responsible for the activity developed in TeCA, directed Springs Awakening and Woyzeck. Complying with another responsibility of a national theatre, together with the revisitation of the classics of our own dramatic heritage (Gil Vicente, Antnio Ferreira, Antnio Jos da Silva, Almeida Garrett), TNSJ has tried in very different ways to stimulate the development of Portuguese contemporary drama, through commissions to young playwrights like Jacinto Lucas Pires, who was given full productionsas happened with Skyscraper and Extrasor through other initiatives, like those promoted by Dramat. Created in 1999, this Center for Contemporary Drama, first under the leadership of Fernando Mora Ramos, and later of Maria Joo Vicente, organized a vast series of seminars dedicated to the different realities and dimensions of contemporary drama, hosted creative writing workshops, and housed an influential collection of books. A dimension that strongly characterized many of the shows either produced or presented at TNSJ explored what Ricardo Pais likes to call the scenic fatality of musical expression, thus giving continuity to a passion that was present in his work since the beginnig. All his theatre work has used music, be it preexisting material, adapted for stage purposes, or original compositions by musicians like Carlos Zngaro, Antnio Emiliano, Vtor Rua, Miquel Bernat or Srgio Godinho. At TNSJ, Pais has directed and promoted an extraordinary diversity of musical and scenic creations, in unusual combinations of images, words, sounds and melodies including Tables, Radios, Pianos, Percussions and Repercussions (1996), in collaboration with piano players and percussionists; Rural Roots, Urban Passions (1997), co-produced with Cit de la Musique, Paris, where the show was also presented, establishing an almost magical dialogue between different forms of Portuguese musical expression; Music for Vieira (1997), a production in which the words of the Portuguese baroque orator were combined with the sonorities of the Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti; Piano Forte: For Chopin (1999), a very special exercize that gave theatrical expression to the more traditional format of the piano recital, performed by Pedro Burmester, with

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Joo Reis and Micaela Cardoso in a scene from 1998s The Lessons, after Ionesco, directed by Ricardo Pais. Photo: Joo Tuna

the support of video and other images captured by surveillance cameras; Curved Line, Foggy Line (1999), an intensely amusing and daring collection of songs interpreted by a group of actors associated with previous and more serious works produced at TNSJ; Sondai-me! Sondheim (2003), a sophisticated reconfiguration of the many stories told in the songs by the well known North American composer; Out! Music Scenes for Theatre (2003), a rearrangement of the many songs and themes originally composed for previous productions directed by Ricardo Pais; Returns (2004), the unforeseen meeting between fado singers and musicians with the musical universe of Rabih Abou-Khalil; and White Hair Means Longing (2005), a return to the exclusive universe of fado, with the participation of some of the oldest and most characteristic voices of this national musical genre, in a production which has toured widely, both in Portugal and abroad. This very particular attention to musical language and its endless possibilities of theatrical expression influenced the work of many other directors invited to work at TNSJ, which has lead to productive dialogues among creators, interpreters and spectators with very different tastes and experiences. It is in this context that one must understand

the organization of very eclectic cycles, like The Mystery of the Acoustic Shell (1996), or The Return of the Acoustic Shell: Music for the Stage (1999), in which a performance of Mauricio Kagel compositions could be seen with Lo Speziale, an opera by Haydn, with libretto by Goldoni. This plural understanding of the stage also led to the presence at TNSJ of such diverse personalities as Eartha Kitt, June Anderson and Laurie Anderson, or the unforgettable Schnberg Kabaret (1999), featuring Madalena Crippa and directed by Peter Stein. Another remarkable effort concerned the development of an intense publishing activity that included the publication of programs complete with original texts written by some of the most prestigious national and foreign experts. More recently, these programs became even more generous Reading Manuals, printed like newspapers and freely distributed to all the spectators. Other publishing initiatives concerned discursive and critical extensions of the stage events: Cadernos Bis, for instances, recorded the discussions organized by the theatre around some of the shows produced there. Between 2003 and 2005, TNSJ also regularly published a newspaper titled Two Columns, dedicated to articles, interviews and reviews of the activity

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developed there, edited by Joo Lus Pereira. Another publishing initiative, which was implemented with the collaboration of different publishing houses, regarded the publication of play texts, both those in Portuguese and translations of foreign plays. A much more complex and daring effort has been to commercialize carefully edited recordings of many of the theatres productions, now on DVD, in an unparalleled initiative in Portugal to compensate for the ephemeral nature of theatre events, thus multiplying the instruments for viewing and analysis. From the very beginning, TNSJs decision not to have permanent artistic teams has enabled a regular rotation of artistic collaborations, opening up opportunities for the contribution of some prestigious foreign artists, like lighting designers Pierre Zach and Dominique Bruguire, the costume designer Vin Burham, director Toni Servillo, set designer and director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and the filmmaker Fabio Iaquone. However, the theatre has also practiced a policy of regular collaborations with national artists, including designers Antnio Lagarto, Nuno Carinhas, Nuno Lacerda Lopes, Joo Mendes Ribeiro, Pedro Tudela, and Bernardo Monteiro, enabling the development of important creative collaborations with rare, innovative effects. The regular collaboration with informal groups of actors has also had extraordinary formative effects, and participation in many of the productions, particularly those directed by Ricardo Pais, was always regarded as long-term training. The acting model researched by Pais presupposes a flexible and agile interpreter, willing to become a part of the whole project and capable of elocutionary rigor, among an almost endless set of other expressive qualities. His actors are subjected to continuous work to improve their vocal, physical, and musical expressiveness. His acting style is characterized by a delicate balance between a playful type of creativity and an almost obsessive tendency to codify every gesture and inflection. Together with older and more experienced actors, a younger generation has been working there for some years, adding not only to the aesthetic identity of the theatre, but also to their own skills. Two of the actors that have worked at TNSJ since 1996, playing the leads in some of that theatres most important productions, are Joo Reis and Micaela Cardoso, who have become indisputable protagonists of the contemporary Portuguese theatre scene. The dialogue between city and country

established by TNSJ has also included a policy of co-productions and presentations of national experiences, some of them organized in cycles, in an attempt to help other companies to produce otherwise-impossible projects, while also functioning as a showcase for some of the most significant theatrical experiences from all over Portugal. A very good example was the 2004 co-production of Blindness, a stage adaptation of the eponymous novel by Jos Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, directed by Joo Brites. The company, O Bando, presented four other productions from their repertory during their four-week residency. Another case involved two companies from Porto, ASSDIO and Ensemble, who together with TNSJ produced Uncle Vanya, directed by Nuno Carinhas. Carinhas also staged a reading of I Take Your Hand in Mine, Carol Rocamoras montage of the correspondence between the playwright and Olga Knipper. The intensely cosmopolitan attitude that Ricardo Pais has from the very beginning adopted as director of TNSJ has led to some international collaborations, like those mentioned above. This dimension was significantly improved with the organization of an international theatre festival, PoNTI (Porto Natal Teatro Internacional), which has already taken place four times: in 1997 and 1999, during a three week period in December; then in 2001, throughout the year, when Porto was European Cultural Capital and the director of the theatre was Jos Wallenstein; and most recently in 2004, coinciding with the prestigious UTE (Union des Thtres dEurope) Festival. Although the director of the theatre has always appeared ultimately responsible for the Festival, its executive organizer has been Jos Lus Ferreira, who has worked tirelessly to increase TNSJs international connections. Those four offerings of PoNTI have brought a wide variety of works directed by some of the most prestigious and stimulating artists of the contemporary scene to Porto: Robert Wilson, Stphane Braunschweig, Jrome Deschamps and Macha Makeieff, Robert Lepage, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Ivo van Hove, Peter Stein, Silviu Purcarete, Alain Franon, Romeo Castelucci, Francis Tanguy, James Macdonald, Thomas Ostermeier, Armin Petras, Thomas Bischoff, Jos Luiz Gmez, Anatoli Vassiliev, Alexandru Tocilescu, Gbor Zsmbki, lex Rigola, etc. As Ricardo Pais suggested in the program for PoNTI in 1999: All theatre cities are part of a cosmogony

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of many other cities and their languages. To create theatre is naturally to belong to a plural, infinite nation. And surviving in that nation is an ethical imperative for those who are fully aware of its dimension. To be cosmopolitan is not to mimic the greatness of others; it is to accept the challenge of allowing oneself to be thrilled by such greatness. UTEs acknowledgement of the quality, consistency and originality of the work developed at TNSJ by Ricardo Pais and his collaborators led to an important change in that theatres relations with the rest of Europe. Until very recently, the only production by TNSJ that had been presented abroad was Rural Roots, Urban Passions, in May 1997, due to the collaboration with the Parisian Cit de la Musique. More recently, UBUs was presented in Rome, in October 2005, and in Reims, France, in February 2006, while White Hair is Longing traveled to Naples and Madrid, and Woyzeck journeyed to Madrid in January 2006. This listing of the many initiatives developed by TNSJ, an effort to characterize its historical contribution to the contemporary Portuguese theatre, is hardly capable of giving a fair account of the artistic and scenic work, perhaps the most expressive and influential of its contributions, developed there. The role that a national theatre can play in the

definition of standards for the creation and circulation of Portuguese drama should include all the different strategies sketched above, but its fundamental contribution depends on the artistic quality of its creations and the complex articulation of texts, expressions and forms. Its precisely in this almost vertiginous succession of voices, languages and places that the stage work developed by Ricardo Pais finds luminous expression. Many of the most important formative effects already hinted at are due to the regularity of his talent and expertise, and because his directorial work is characterized by a productive tension between an extreme codification and an equally intense tendency for destabilization. For him, the creation of a stage event is always an opportunity to unfold and deploy the idea of theatre, and thus, more than the importance of the text, what really matters is scenic experimentation. This artistic and ethical curiosity about the many understandings of theatricality explains his renewed exploration of theatres languages, from the more traditional ones, like set and costume design, to those with larger technological requirements, like sound design and video. The way he has personalized his experience as director of a national theatre has contributed to the artistic identity of TNSJ and to its role in broadening our own understanding of what theatre might be.

Joo Reis in Curved Line, Foggy Line. Set design by Nuno Lacerda Lopes and Teresa Grcio, TNSJ, 1999. Photo: Joo Tuna

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When Producing Art is a Social Act: Artists United of Their Own Free Will
Sebastiana Fadda The Artistas Unidos (United Artists) are one of the most prestigious contemporary Portuguese theatre groups, with characteristics that make them exceptional within the Portuguese theatrical panorama. They emerged in 1995 as an initiative of Jorge Silva Melo, their creative, restless, dedicated, culturally omnivorous and explosive artistic director. Silva Melo was one of the people who revitalized university theatre in Lisbon during the sixties as part of the Faculty of Letters theatre group. With one of his companions from this period, Lus Miguel Cintra (another key artist in Portuguese theatre), he founded Teatro da Cornucpia in 1973 [see Serdio article in this issue]. However, his collaboration with Cornucpia ended in 1979. From then on, he divided his time between theatre and cinema. Between 1979 and 1981, he lived in France, Germany and Italy, where he trained and worked in well-known theatres with directors like Jean Jourdheuil, Peter Stein, Giorgio Strehler and Patrice Chreau. He worked as an actor in France, Germany and Switzerland between 1985 and 1995, producing three feature-length films between 1980 and 1987 (Passage orHalfway, Nobody Twice Over, and August). His passion for cinema continued even after returning to Portugal to work in theatre again during the 1990s. His other films included two features (Poor Jorge and Antnio, a Young Man from Lisbon), two documentaries (Antnio Palolo and Joaquim Bravo) and an extended documentary interview to celebrate the actress Glicinia Quartins eightieth birthday. As Silva Melo himself admits, it was the desire to maintain the artistic and emotional ties created between those working together on temporary projects that led to the founding of the new group in 1995. The groups name was suggested by the lawyer Jos Antnio Pinto Ribeiro, a friend of Silva Melos, out of admiration for United Artists, the first production company to emerge in Hollywood independent from capitalist financiers, representing an active response from cinema artists/producers to the impositions of capital. The first Artistas Unidos productions were based on Silva Melos scripts. Antnio, a Young Man from Lisbon, PrometheusDrafts in the Light of Day and The End, or Have Mercy On Us were performed in 1996, and The Liberation of PrometheusDrafts and Prometheus in Chains/Liberated, in 1997. However, the characteristics already evident in these early productions were the result of the collaboration of the author with the actors and an attempt to work in a non-hierarchical way. This sense of sharing and collective creation is one of the main reasons for the cohesion of this initial nucleus of artists, as well as those who subsequently joined the group. Silva Melo repudiates the status and the responsibilities of the director: Instead of wanting things done, have I finally learnt to see? But what kind of seeing is this? In his recently published book Deixar a Vida (Leaving Life), he affirms that, fundamentally, this means respecting and nurturing the inner flame of the actors working with him, who then naturally suggest creative solutions. Silva Melo rejects any interference that stems from the desire for power and prefers to act as a mediator, like a maestro who works from a score without imposing himself on the musicians, but instead brings out common desires. What is important is to create work which is genuinely collective, or rather choral. These ethical and artistic premises led, in 1998, to a unique experiment, significantly entitled Without God or Leaders 1, and then a second experiment more limited in scope. In the first initiative, which took place in an abandoned factory in Seixal (on the outskirts of Lisbon), the actors took on an active role as creators and producers. In this way, they rejected the posture of the nineteenth century star-actor, but also that of the creative artist from the early twentieth century, based as it was on the hegemony of the director and the passivity of the actor. Criticizing this attitude, Silva Melo states in his book: The star-director is the new fetish, who has taken over (in the name of public service) from the actor-manager. A new type of actor is, in my view, necessary, and the word I associate with him/her is responsibilityresponsibility for the practical choices s/he invents onstage, responsibility for his/her continuing freshness and reinvention and responsibility for his/her production.

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Exactly. The actor is now asked once stage, and to encourage young Portuguese artists to more for the fundamentals: discovering produce original work. They have been particularly the roots of a text, doing his/her utmost to keen to spread the work of international marginal appropriate it, discovering his/her reperdramatists. toire, finding answers to the question: The spaces where the Artistas Unidos perwhy do theatre? I have only one answer: formed were marginal, and occasionally institutionto test, with others, the limits of his/her al, until the end of 1998, when they occupied a freedom. building which had previously produced the newsThe passage from words to action is quick paper A Capital (The Capital). This building was in and concrete, in that the stage is understood as the the heart of Lisbon in the Bairro Alto, an area which space where actors measure the limits of their indiattracts young people and creative artists from the vidual freedom for artistic purposes. One could go surrounding areas. The company occupied the further and establish a baroque parallel between the building with the agreement of the Lisbon local stage and life. The stage thus acts as a metaphor for council, who allowed them to use a space without life, which is understood as a space where citizens adequate infrastructures, but which became an altermeasure the limits of their individual freedoms. Yet native theatre space (or a space for alternative thein this case the objective is even more ambitious atre), in which any abandoned room could be con(and here Brecht is much more than a mere guiding influence), because the aims are ethical and civic (in other words, political), as Silva Melo wrote recently in the journal Artistas Unidos, which he edits: I am more and more convinced that the art of directing is little more than the seductive dressing-up of great works of literature, and that, in a slow process of alienation, the notion of production has been taken away from the majority of actors. For this reason, I think that preparing for the future means helping people to produce in the present. Production means choosing, adjusting, adapting and transforming material conditions. All the teachings of Brecht (who we worked on in some depth during 1998) are based on this materialist ethos: production is an act of creation and a social act. The social act is indeed greatly in evidence within the groups repertoire, as is a productive/creative ability unique in Portuguese theatre. Its ethical and aesthetic principles are well-defined. From its beginning as an artistic project, Without God or Leaders has become a real leitmotif, revealing a desire to create ripples in the stagnant water of conventional Portuguese society, and a sense of rebellion against the inanity and cultural backwardness of the country. The Artistas Unidos have an uncommon, if not extraordinary, ability to produce contemporary dramatists, to adapt texts The End, or Have Mercy on Us, written and directed by Jorge Silva Melo, which have not been written originally for the
1996. Photo: Susana Paiva

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verted into a creative space for encounters between artists and spectators. In opting for a non-conventional space, the Artistas Unidos also transformed their relationship with the audience, making them into a potential source of complicity and fortuitous encounters. The spectator could decide to attend out of a desire to see a less conventional production, reinvented texts, or theatrical readings. Yet the simple passerby, wandering through the Bairro Alto, could also enter the space on impulse or out of momentary curiosity and come into contact with the unexpected. In 2002, the A Capital theatre space was closed due to safety reasons, and the idea of creating an Arts Center in its place was, in a matter of months, first delayed and eventually shelved. In the meantime, the group presented its productions in the exquisite Teatro Taborda, a tiny theatre with an Italian stage dating from 1870. The agreement with the Lisbon local council had envisaged the Artistas Unidos remaining in this space until August 2005, after which they would return to the rebuilt A Capital building. However, this latter promise was not kept and the group refused to remain at Teatro Taborda. Currently, the company is without a permanent home. If a major author like Shakespeare can interest the company, another canonical author, Bertolt Brecht, is closer to Silva Melos project. Of his works, they have performed In the Jungle of the Cities, Baal, The Fall of Johann Fatzer, the Egotist (in the version by Heiner Mller) and a dramatic composition To Those Born After UsSongs by Poor BB. Another dramatist who has merited their artistic attention is Harold Pinter, and they have performed his One for the Road, The Dumb Waiter, The Lover, Ashes to Ashes, Old Times, The Collection, The Caretaker, Victoria Station, New World Order and Press Conference. Among their other performed works are two of the most well-known plays by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, which were given iconoclastic readings by two choreographer-directors, Joo Fiadeiro and Madalena Victorino respectively, at Silva Melos invitation. Texts not originally written for the stage have been adapted by Manuel Wiborg (Nobodys Lover, from Dostoevsky), Jos Maria Vieira Mendes (Crime and Punishment, Kafkas Two Men, and, from several short stories by Danon Runyon, If the World Were Not Like This) Miguel Borges (First Love, from Samuel Beckett), Francisco Lus

Parreira (The Story of the Scribe Bartleby, from Herman Melville), Jorge Silva Melo on his own (The Ship of the Blacks, from Herman Melville) or in partnership with Pedro Marques (Each Day to Each One Freedom and the Kingdom, from parliamentary speeches). In fact, one of the main tendencies in recent theatre is to make use of non-dramatic material in this way. The onstage result, which is risky and never obvious, has often been surprising. This was the case with the superb work by the actors in If the World Were Not Like This, with its circuslike games, citations from films and irresistible complicities established between the performers. Encouraging Portuguese dramatists to produce original work has also been highly successful, leading to contributions by experienced as well as new authors. These include Rui Guilherme Lopes, Jos Maria Vieira Mendes and Jos Tolentino Mendona, among others. If from within this group, Jos Maria Vieira Mendes stands out, it should also be added that they have also performed the work of one of the most well-known dramatists of an older generation, the octogenarian Jaime Salazar Sampaio. They performed an old, but still interesting, play of his entitled The Line Fisher from 1961. Work on new international marginal dramaturgies has included Czech writers like Bohumil Hrabal, Dutch writers like Gerardjan Rjinders, Arne Sierens and Judith Herzberg, Irish writers like Mark ORowe, English writers like Sarah Kane, Joe Orton and Gregory Motton, Norwegians like Jon Fosse, Scottish writers like Duncan McLean, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson, Italians like Spiro Scimone, Fausto Paravidino, Davide Enia and Letizia Russo, French writers like Jacques Prvert and Jean-Luc Lagarce, Spanish writers like Antonio Onetti and Russians like the Presniakov brothers. Despite their social and geographical differences, some common denominators can be identified among these writers, including their cruelly ingenuous vision of reality, their desire to liberate a society which risks going to rot, their cold observation and denunciation of unusual and unexpected situations, and their use of a language which can be clinical and aggressive, but also reveal the frustrated or frustrating need for tenderness and love. An initiative with important cultural ramifications is the editorial work promoted by the Artistas Unidos. They publish a journal of the same name, which began in December 1999 and is now on edition 13. They have also published much foreign drama in translation. This highly important

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work has been carried out in partnership with the Lisbon publishers Cotovia under the title Livrinhos de Teatro (Little Theatre Books). The series includes authors they have performed, like Antonio Onetti, Spiro Scimone, the Presniakov brothers, Jean-Luc Lagarce, Jon Fosse, Letizia Russo, and Judith Herzberg, but they have also published work which does not yet belong to the companys repertoire, such as Juan Mayorgas The Path of Heaven, The Burnt Garden and Nocturnal Animals, and Antonio Tarantinos Stabat Mater and The Passion according to John. The same collection includes three Portuguese authors: Jos Maria Vieira Mendes, Miguel Castro Caldas and Nuno Jdice. Various other texts have been published by several Portuguese publishers at the instigation of the Artistas Unidos. These include the Complete Dramatic Works of Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Harold Pinter as well as plays performed by the group, which include works by Fosse, Rjinders, Sierens, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beckett, as well as Silva Melo himself.

Other important aspects that are worth mentioning, apart from the more than forty productions they have brought to the stage, are the staged readings, the large number of poetry recitals, their civic interventions in radio programs, their collaboration with the Atelier Europen de la Traduction, which is based in Orlans and which has stimulated some very promising exchanges, and the creation of parallel autonomous production companies within the Artistas Unidos. The oldest of these is the Artistas e Produtores Associados (Associated Artists and Producers), which was founded in 1998, and the most recent is T Safo (Youre Safe), which was founded in 2002. After all, the more united artists are, the freer they will be to devote themselves to their artan art that is expressed as a theatre of and for the polis in which the Artistas Unidos are necessarily integrated. (translated by Francesca Rayner)

Prometheus, written and directed by Jorge Silva Melo, 1997. Photo: Susana Paiva

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En un lugar de Manhattan. Photo: Jordi Bover

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The Changeling Theatre: Madrid, Winter 2005

Simon Breden Miguel de Cervantes and Federico Garca Lorca are the most internationally recognizable names in Spanish literature. At the same time, they also come with the most preconceptions from readers or viewers of their work. It is impossible to think of Don Quijote without the stereotypical old man in armor on a scrawny horse charging at windmills. Likewise, it is hard to find examples of Lorcas work, onstage or elsewhere, that have not been underscored with a flamenco guitar or stock images of rural Andalusia. Even the Andalusian tourism board absurdly used the opening verses of Romance sonmbulo (Sleepwalking Ballad), a poem ostensibly about a murder, in a television commercial promoting their tourist industry. Nevertheless, avoiding stereotype in favor of a more radical reading is not always beneficial to the work. One has only to look at the failed attempts to depart from archetypal readings to realize the difficulties: tawdry commercial musicals based on Don Quijote, or the recent National Theatre production of The House of Bernarda Alba, which managed to avoid the flamenco stereotypes of Lorca on the British stage by anglicizing the characters. And yet the balance wasnt quite right, with melodramatic performances unsuccessfully replacing the dramatic buildup of the play. Both of these instances demonstrate the dangers of merely replacing one form of convention with another, with extraneous elements thoughtlessly overcompensating for a rigorous probing of the text. Ultimately, Lorca and Cervantes are not easy authors to stage because it is so hard to balance the spirit of the original with developing an innovative theatrical language. Given the difficulties of staging these authors, it is even more striking that both major productions of their work in Madrid this winter are such resounding successes. Teatro de la Abada has

Teatro de la Abadas production of Lorcas Comedia sin ttulo (Play Without a Title). Photo: Ros Ribas

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invited Portuguese director Luis Miguel Cintra to direct a Spanish cast in one of Lorcas notoriously unstageable pieces, Comedia sin ttulo (Play Without a Title). Meanwhile, Els Joglars, commissioned by the Comunidad de Madrid for the fourhundredth anniversary of Don Quijote, have produced their own uniquely perverse interpretation of his masterpiece, entitled En un lugar de Manhattan (Somewhere in Manhattan). Both productions faced similar obstacles in their conception regarding their suitability for the stage: Lorcas play is surrealist, unfinished and included under the genre of teatro imposible, whilst the two volumes of Don Quijote contain an immense amount of material to condense into a two-hour play. Both companies have had to face the challenge of developing a theatrical register that could be applied to the texts, making significant dramaturgical choices in order to extend or shorten the pieces to a suitable length. In developing their own interpretation and dramaturgical shape, the companies have managed to produce innovative performances whilst reinvigorating the work of the respective authors and rediscovering their worth for todays jaded audiences. The more radical of the two adaptations must be Els Joglars take on Don Quijote, En un lugar de Manhattan. The plot involves a theatre company in search of a groundbreaking interpretation of Cervantes novel, set in trendy New York. However, the efforts in rehearsal are thwarted by a less than enthusiastic cast and the interruptions of a plumber, Don Alonso (the incarnation of Don Quixote), called in to fix a leaky ceiling. Gradually he and his assistant are pulled into the actors improvisations, as the Quixotic figure, like his hero, is unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. The characters feel very lived-in, unsurprising when you consider the company have spent six months devising the show. Ramon Fontser heads up the ensemble with the quivering bundle of intense twitches and nervous energy that is Don Alonso the plumber, backed up by his loyal Sancho, played by Pep Vila. Pilar Senz plays the role of experimental director Gabriela Orsini with real gusto, lounging around the stage with an air of complacent superiority. The rest of the group: Xavier Boada, Xavi Sais, Dolors Tuneu, Jess Agelet, Minnie Marx, and Francesc Prez, all take on disinct roles within the fictional rehearsal process, each poking fun at recognizable actor types. Boada is delightfully campy; Agelet is the experienced actor who reminds everyone of his time with Robert

Wilson as often as possible; Tuneu is the clueless, pretty, young actress; Sais the inveterate show-off; and Marx the leading lady who doesnt quite realize she has passed her prime. Each one tackles their character with spectacular physical expressivity, against the blank canvas of the studio-space that comprises the set (designed by Anna Alcubierre): the empty house of a small venue creates the flexible world of the play, which switches between rehearsal room chaos and Don Quixote recreations in a flash. The props are likewise suggestive rather than fixed, enabling swift transformations of the space. Each character holds a simple wooden stick, which is used variously to indicate swords, a double-barrelled shotgun or a sheeps tail. The iconic windmills are created by a spinning row of open umbrellas teasing Don Alonso. Even more striking is the finale, when each performer holds up a section of a giant suit of armor, animating the figure of the Caballero de la Blanca Luna in an overwhelming, bullying gesture. These simple visual pointers empower the actors to make their own transitions between characters just as quickly. Their jumps in an out of their own personalities, characters from Cervantes novel, and Orsinis play are a joy to watch. Sais is particularly memorable as he moves with perfect comedic timing between a stereotypical Cuban poser and his Spanish actor persona. Ultimately, the simplicity of the props, deliberate stage set and the broad but expressive characterizations all conspire to remind the audience of the theatrical context. Just as the actors play a trick on the plumber, Els Joglars are playing a joke on the audience by involving them in at least three fictional stage worlds. In essence, the whole production is a modern-day parallel to the second part of the novel which sets up the Dukes trickery to fool Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for their entertainment. So too, here the actors bait the plumber with scenes from his beloved Don Quijote. However, this is as literal as the production gets in adapting the novel. In a year of Cervantine celebration overdose, Els Joglars deal precisely with the form of bardolatry that Cervantes has inspired. The company has a track record of shattering the audiences preconceptions, both regarding theatre itself and the ideas in question, as their artistic director Albert Boadella made clear in a 1985 interview: Tenemos muy en cuenta la predisposicin del pblico para romprsela a cada minuto, para tratar de lograr que

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este pblico con Joglars al menos, no tenga ninguna predisposicin in mente a la hora de ir al teatro (We are very aware of the audiences preconceptions so we can shatter them at every turn, to try and make sure that the audience, when it comes to Els Joglars at least, should have no preconceptions in mind when going to the theatre). It is no surprise, then, that the company only uses the stereotypes of Don Quijote in order to send them up. A memorable sequence near the opening sees the cast, with the overture to Star Wars as a soundtrack, enacting a rehearsal game in which simple instructions are used to improvise clichd interpretations of Don Quijote to exorcise them from the process. All the typical, potbellied Sancho Panzas and insane, sword-wielding Don Quixotes parade past the audience in a comic rejection of convention. The company, however, uses this exercise to go beyond the traditional stereotypes of the novel and also to attack the superficial parallels and modernizations that theatre often serves up. Hence, the same Quixote-Panza duos repeat the exercise, but this time as two suicide bombers waving wildly; or as two balaclava-shrouded ETA terrorists performing a recognizable Basque dance. The provocation is clear, satirizing the Quixotes of modern-day society. As stated, avoiding conventional interpretation does not always offer the best results because radical readings can be even more remote, entirely removed from the concerns of the original work. Els Joglars have always been scathing of the pro-

Els Joglars En un lugar de Manhattan. Photo: Jordi Bover

gressive theatre-makers whom they believe produce art for an elite when theatre ought to be accessible to a wider audience. Yet in spite of their rejection of convention, the company save their harshest criticism for the experimental artists, ridiculed in the figure of Argentinean director Gabriela Orsini. The characterization seems to take in the wave of experimental practitioners currently creating the stylized, imagistic pieces that Boadella dislikes so heatedly.

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Orsinis one goal is to produce a radical and personal new production of Don Quijote, but to do so without even reading the book itself, suggesting that to do so would taint her creativity. Every time an actor tries to place the volume in her hands, it is cast across the room with the words muerto el perro se acab la rabia (once the dogs dead you cant catch rabies). Likewise, whenever an actor questions her dictatorial vision she storms out of the rehearsal room, berating the actors unable to understand her genius. Setting up this tension between cast and director early on makes their later distractions, when they decide to perform sections of the novel pulling the Quixote-obsessed plumber into their improvisations, more convincing. We witness their lack of conviction when playing Gabrielas version of Don Quijote, where two actresses play a lesbian Quixote-Sancho double-act whilst plotting to bomb a sperm bank, to register Els Joglars distaste for raping the original artwork to produce a cynically innovative result. However, Boadella has more than experimental theatre artists in his sights with this production. In the program notes, Boadella comments on the decline of the Cervantine spirit in todays society: No queda un solo vestigio Quijotesco en nuestra sociedad contempornea (there is not one remaining vestige of Quixotic behavior in our contemporary society). This has led the type of vain creator Orsini represents to desperately attempt a redefinition of Cervantes character, at the cost of destroying it: Orsinis lesbian Quixote becomes completely unrecognizable. Hence, Els Joglars statement, nos hemos sumado al IV centenario con la buena intencin de hacer visibles determinados rasgos del autntico Quijote, enfrentndonos en desigual batalla a esta obsesin timadora que caracteriza el momento artstico (we have joined in the fourth centenary celebrations with the good intention of presenting certain aspects of the authentic Quixote, facing in unequal battle this obsession with conning the public that characterizes the current artistic climate). In essence, the company is not merely commenting on a theatre that has lost touch with itself, but also on a society that has lost touch with the spirit that Don Quijote embodies. Els Joglars are attempting in their inimitably anarchic style to reinvigorate a spirit of playfulness that extends beyond the world of theatre. This is why the production uses the reality of the rehearsal room alongside the creation of a fiction, a metatheatrical parallel to the novels metafiction. The fiction can-

not withstand the eruption of real life and falls apart; specifically, the actors lose all interest in Orsinis fatuous imaginings and energetically jump into scenes from the book to play a practical joke on the plumber Don Alonso. En un lugar de Manhattan becomes a return to a rough interpretation of Don Quijote that draws its inspiration directly from the novel instead of tugging at unrelated threads. In tilting at the windmills of vanguard theatre, Els Joglars speak directly to the playful and bellicose spirit of Don Quijote, communicating more about human nature in their attitude to the production than any overtly artistic reinterpretation ever could. Meanwhile, at the Teatro de la Abada, Luis Miguel Cintra faced the contrasting challenge not of conflating but of inflating Lorcas Comedia sin ttulo beyond its original thirty minutes. The piece is effectively a staged argument for a new brand of theatre capable of bridging the gap between artifice and reality. Throughout the play, various theatrical illusions and eruptions of an outside world emerge to fuel the debate. However, as the theatres Associate Director Carlos Aladro points out, upon commissioning the production from Cintra they stipulated that the piece should be extended to at least one hour to allow for a commercial show. As a result, many of the more salient elements of the production are drawn from elsewhere, including scenes and ideas from Lorcas most famous impossible play, El pblico, such as the role of El Director, played by Abada regular Ernesto Arias. Likewise, certain sections of discussion between the Director and the Author are lifted straight from El pblico, as is the final exchange of the play: Traspunte: Ah est el pblico. (Stage Manager: The public.) Autor: Que pase! (Author: Let them in!) This is a particularly necessary and useful addition, since Comedia sin ttulo was the unfinished first act of a play, and as such was in need of some form of conclusion. All of the dramaturgical work has gone into developing a natural flow to a piece that combines various works by Lorca, as well as the opening exchange between the Author and the World from Calderns El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World). This last excerpt from a non-Lorquian source should not surprise us, because Calderns metatheatrical conceit was part of Lorcas touring repertoire as director of La Barraca (there is even footage of Lorca playing the role of the Author in this very play with the compa-

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Teatro de la Abadas production of Lorcas Comedia sin ttulo (Play Without a Title). Photo: Ros Ribas

ny). To La Abadas credit, this process of cutting and pasting works surprisingly well and is very consistent, as it has all been focused by the argument contained in Comedia sin ttulo. La Abada and Cintra have succeeded in exploring the relationship of the play to Lorcas body of work and ideology; thus they avoid the pitfalls of mainstream reinventions that seek to impose an idea which does not originate in the text. It may sound like an obvious part of the process, but La Abada and Cintra have clearly made the effort to define the spirit of Lorcas work. In the case of Comedia sin ttulo, this understanding relates directly to Lorcas view of theatre as a profoundly social phenomenon, as he explained in one of his many public speeches, which were also used to construct dialogue in this production: El teatro es una escuela de llanto y de risa y una tribuna libre donde los hombres puedenexplicar con ejemplos vivos normas eternas del corazn y del sentimiento del hombre (Theatre is a school of tears and laughter and a free tribune from where people mayexplain with living examples eternal laws of the heart and human feelings). This sentiment regarding the expressive

potential of theatre is echoed in Comedia sin ttulo, as the Author (played with passion by Alberto Jimnez) calls for a clear social connection with the audience: el autor no quiere que os sintis en el teatro sino en mitad de la calle (the author does not want you to feel like youre in the theatre but in the middle of the street). Lorcas conceit is based on the fact that, for once, the play actually calls for the audience to be reminded they are in a place where fictions are created. This explains the interruptions from a production of Midsummer Nights Dream that appears to be taking place nearby, as well as Lady Macbeths presence. Aside from these more literal invocations of the world of theatre, the play exists in a magical world of artifice. The expressionistic set, designed by Cristina Reis, recalls the world of surrealist art. There are clear references to Dal, with distorted objects from daily life, rows of drawers and a table with a drawn up table-cloth revealing no means of support (the cloth is in fact solid, explaining the illusion), and Lorcas surrealist drawings are invoked by the child-like outlines of objects that litter the space. Arias, in the role of El Director, delivers his opening monologue with the comfortable air of the consummate theatrical show-

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off. He is heavily made up and wears an opera cloak and top hat, which is taken off to produce a white dove, which obligingly sat throughout the performance on a table centerstage, as if by magic. It only seemed mildly fazed by an actor dressed as a fox moving in slow-motion, who, after ten minutes of stalking around the background of the set, tripped and hurt himself only to earn the reprimand of the Author, who ordered him to get out. The multiple levels of stage reality emerge to puzzle the audience, as a theatrical illusion (the stylized fox) is ruptured by a real-life event (tripping up) that is of course simulated. The audience is drawn into this blurred world of reality and fiction and follows the planted audience members as they go on-stage to see what lies behind the fiction. We gleefully observe the Wife as she begins to open the drawers of the set, her actions echoing the audiences voyeuristic desire to poke their noses where the theatre does not usually allow them; of course, this is all another scripted simulation. Cintras subtle production rises to the challenge of providing a heightened theatrical reality by simultaneously being vivid and real, but also deliberately stylized and artificial. The spectators who emerge from the audience are dressed in clothes from the 1930s, and behave in a blustery and disruptive fashion that no ordinary audience would ever contemplate. Later in the play one cant help but notice that the recorded crowd noises from the foyer during the plays revolution sound somehow muted and synthetic. Likewise, in a very deliberate coup de thtre, the spectator shoots the revolutionary worker who is calling down from the dome above La Abadas lighting rig. When his body is brought down to the stage by a couple of heavily made up but burly fairies from Shakespeares universe, the stage blood is easy to identify, and the corpse unceremoniously stands up and wanders off when his death scene is over. At

every turn, the theatre strives to talk about reality but always includes a hint of artifice to position the audience according to the authors wishes: Por qu hemos de ir siempre al teatro para ver lo que pasa y no para ver que nos pasa? El espectador est tranquilo porque sabe que la comedia no se va a fijar en l (Why must we always go to the theatre to see what happens but not to see what happens to us? The audience is always relaxed because they know the play wont take notice of them). Lorca reminds us that even in the artifice of theatre, it is reality that is at stake. The clash between reality and fiction is adroitly handled by the company to repeatedly disorient the audience, just long enough to make the point hit home. The dangers of dealing with canonical authors are clear: it is too easy to slip into recognized modes of delivery or to attempt to depart entirely from the text in a bid for originality. Both Els Joglars and Cintra with the Abada actors have successfully evaded either route, unafraid to apply an understanding of the literary text to a vivid theatrical presentation. This, however, does not make the shows seem literary in the least. Since both productions constantly remind us of their theatrical nature, they speak of the theatre practitioners struggle to find stage languages that may instruct and entertain an audience. Both seek to talk about society at large by means of revealing the paper-thin transparency of theatre. Caldern tells us that la vida es sueo, and Cervantes presents us with a character, Alonso Quijano, who lives out a dream while Lorca writes an oneiric world where characters may get up and walk away from their deaths. In directly redefining the surrounding theatrical world, the theatre empowers us to affect a wider social context. And by drawing the audience right into their changeling theatrical worlds, these productions invite us to consider how we too are writers of our own fates.

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An Interview with Jeronimo Lopez Mozo: Memories of the Forgotten

Candyce Leonard Jeronimo Lopez Mozo (1942-), winner of the 2005 Gold Medallion Award conferred by Spains Association of Theatre Directors of Spain, won his first theatre award, the Sitges de teatro, in 1967 for his play Moncho y Mimi. He garnered both the prestigious Tirso de Molina award in 1996 and the esteemed National Prize for Dramatic Literature in 1998 for his play Ahln (an Arabic word meaning welcome). The author served on the editorial board of the important theatre journal Pipirijaina of the early democratic period, and currently contributes to a wide variety of theatre journals such as Spains influential Primer Acto, the newly formed Acotaciones (1998), published by Madrids highranking school of performing arts, and Estreno, the prominent U.S. journal featuring contemporary Spanish theatre. While the interview that follows features Memories of the Forgotten which was published and debuted in 2003 in Madrid, Lopez Mozos career as a playwright is extensive, and his fifty plays embrace a variety of themes ranging from the Spanish Civil War to pressing current issues such as immigration (Welcome, 1997), unemployment (Elodes, 1992), and violence against women (Shes Going Away, 2002), and most recently, a stage adaptation of a portion of Cervantes novel of Spains national icon, Don Quixote (In that Place called La Mancha, 2005). Lopez Mozo wrote about the Spanish Civil War in his 1969 play Guernica (first published in Estreno in the United States in 1975), when the environment in Spain was scarcely receptive to or tolerant of any open or critical assessment of the civil strife. But by the mid 1990s, political, cultural, and social forces had gathered to analyze, lament, and publish the events of the War and its aftermath via an abundance of novels, films, theatre, and exhibits, and documentaries, all part of a nationwide effort to permanently record past events of political and social upheaval. The title taken from a book by Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, Lopez Mozos Memories of the Forgotten premiered in February of 2003 in Colmenarejo, a small town on the outskirts of Madrid where the director, Antonio Molanda, had been allowed to rehearse the play. To repay the kindness, Molanda opened the play in the small town before bringing it to Madrids Circulo de Bellas Artes for another premiere on April 25, 2003. After the performance in Colmenarejo, Molanda added a preshow video presentation of civil war images for its premiere in Madrid. The decision to use the video images was to provide a visual narrative that would settle the audience into an atmosphere of remembering the past. Some of the images were familiar to Spaniards due to media events such as the impressive photo and document exhibit titled Exile, mounted in Madrid in the Fall of 2002, accompanied by an equally impressive three hundred page catalog of text and photos. In the same

Jeronimo Lopez Mozo. Photo: Candyce Leonard

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year, a television documentary of the same title garnered an enormous viewing audience with its authentic film clips of actual events during the war, such as hundreds of Spaniards fleeing their native land on foot and personal interviews with those migrs who left Spain as small children to spend their entire lives in Spanish America or other European countries. In addition to using pre-show video to put the audience in a reflective mood, the images selected for Memories of the Forgotten were intended to recreate the atmosphere which the protagonist, Edmundo Barbero (played by Francisco Merino) fled. Some of the images were configured so that the actor playing the role of Barbero appeared in them, thus lending authenticity to the play, while also corresponding to the metatheatrical structure of the drama that trades on illusion and reality. Another change from the text to the performance was the use of stage space. The action takes place in several spaces: the dressing rooms, the directors office, and the stage of the interior play where the protagonist dies. But these separate spaces were abandoned for a non-mimetic set design where only a few pieces of fixed furniture represented the different rooms as indicated by lighting techniques. WES: Given all of the attention to Civil War themes, how did you decide to work with the theme of exile? JLM: Its something that has really happened, especially among the intellectuals. When they went into exile, their careers had already taken off in Spain and they were more or less famous. So I thought of some of the actors who had left Margarita Xirgu, for exampleor other others, who had not reached the same level of accomplishment or fame that Xirgu had, but when they left their professional lives were established. But it was in exile in Spanish America where their careers matured and where they became famous. Then time passed and these actors, or some of them, such as the author Max Aub, tried to return to Spain. Its difficult because the exiles want to return to Spain and believe that their reading or theatre public in Spain will know who they are, but they get here and find out that no one even recognizes their name. WES: What about your protagonist Edmundo Barbero, why him?

JLM: I actually met the historical Edmundo Barbero, an actor, when we traveled together in 1981 or so. We were part of an itinerant conference that traveled around on a bus with Rafael Alberti, Nuria Espert, Jos Monlen and others, starting in Madrid, then traveling to Almagro, then Sevilla and Cadiz. Im not sure when Barbero returned from exile. One day Rafael Alberti saw him in the Plaza de Colon and said what are you doing here! Because Barbero was already in his 80s, he hadnt gotten in touch with anyone or tried to return to work as an actor, and the general public, of course, had no idea who he was. But Alberti told Jos Monlen of his chance meeting with Barbero at the same time Monlen was organizing the conference on Spanish American theatre, so Barbero was invited to join the group. In Cadiz we planned an evening gathering in his honor. It occurred to me that those persons invited to give speeches didnt know the smallest detail about who Edmundo Barbero was or what his professional life had been in Spain before he went into exile. They gave him a gift, a plaque of some sort, and I dont know if Rafael Alberti spoke, but Nuria Espert did and she had never known him. I may still have those speeches somewhere, but I remember quite well that they said very little of substance simply because we didnt know him. So, my fictional Edmundo Barbero is based on this experience. I had to invent his life because in spite of all of my research, I found only two books on the historical Barbero. I obtained one of the books through a colleague, and I found out that the second book is in the New York Public Library, but I havent seen it. From there I thought about studying this disillusionment about an exile who returns as a stranger to his homeland, then trying to decide whether to return to his adopted home, where he actually has a life and career, or continuing struggling to come home again. I wanted to introduce some other elements, such as young people who know absolutely nothing about the Civil War. I didnt live during the Civil War, but in the years following the war everyone continued talking about it, even how it began; many of us heard our parents discussing it. But after only two generations, no one really knew about the Civil War, nor did they really have any interest in finding out about it. Some of the young people today dont even know who Franco was.

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WES: I remember being in Madrid in 1984 and seeing a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in the streets, dressed in punk fashion with eight safety pins piercing one ear. When I mentioned him to a playwright here in Madrid who had already complained to me about the complete apathy of the young people toward what life in Spain had been like only some ten or fifteen years earlier, he said that the teen was a perfect and frightening example of how quickly the past is forgotten. JLM: Yes, thats exactly what Im talking about. My play also refers to this lack of interest in the past and the loss of historical memory, and part of my thesis is the mandate to recover this memory, that a country cannot move forward without doing so. You cant construct a future without taking the past into account. WES: One of your characters says, To be silent is to murder our memories. JLM: The director of the play-within-the play that the character Barbero is in speaks these lines, and the director knows what francoism was. He knows the past but doesnt want to talk about it. During the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain, there was a series of circumstances that created an atmosphere of not talking too much about the past. The transition was negotiated within the political parties so that the dictatorship didnt end in any sort of dramatic way; the dictator simple died peacefully in his own bed of natural causes. He had even named his successor. It was a peaceful transition, fortunately, which is the most positive thing we can say about it. No blood was lost, but we paid for it with a pact of silence. The old military of Francos period had to pass into a democracy from one day to the next, adjusting to a new system but continuing to occupy positions of responsibility, so for Spain to talk about or hang onto the past didnt make sense. It would be unthinkable in other circumstances for a minister such as Manual Fraga, for example, to be the democratic president of a self-governing region because he was a man who for way too many years was linked to Francos government. So, many people understand that the transition was a positive model of eliding from one form of government to another. But for the Spanish people, it came with the price of being unable to be open about our own history.

WES: Does the role of the young journalist Julia serve to publish a record of the events of the War? JLM: At the beginning, I created Julias role simply as a pretext for getting the actor to talk about himself, his feelings, his experiences, via the interview that Julia wanted to publish. But as I got into writing the play, her role took on greater depth so that she became more pivotal to the plot. The character Julia is young and knows nothing about the past, so she doesnt really understand Edmundos exile. She is from a well-to-do family, but just meeting Edmund sparks her interest in knowing what happened in Spain decades earlier. WES: Once you decided on your thesis, how did you determine the dramatic structure of theatrewithin-theatre for Memories of the Forgotten? JLM: The format of a play-within-a-play fascinates me, so Ive used this approach in a fair number of my dramas. It can be a bit intimidating to try to write plays that are completely realistic in part because its hard to make some things believable. The more realistic you try to make it, the less believable it is, so it makes sense to say from the outset that all of this is fiction and that these are actors and not real people. Metatheatre responds to the way I understand theatre since it allows me to divide up a single scene in different ways by moving forward or backward in time, for example, or by choosing the order of all the scenes according to how I want them to play out, rather than by following a chronological order based on real time. WES: Im interested that your play-within-a-play is Calderons powerful drama of illusion and reality Life is a Dream, which relates to the (dis)illusion and reality that the returning expatriate experiences, but also that your protagonist is cast in the role of Clotaldo, then Basilio: lesser roles than the young, strapping lead, Segismundo. JLM: Yes, when Edmundo returns to Spain, he remembers that as a young, well-known actor in Spain he had performed in Life is a Dream, but in the lead role of the prince, Segismundo, but now he has to accept the supporting role of Clotaldo. The director hates Edmundo and the past that he represents, but yields to the actors clamor that he deserves a better role, so he gets to play the old king Basilio, an important role, but a role for an aging

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actor, obviously. Edmundo cant really tolerate the insult and humiliation. WES: The insult and humiliation are part of the disorientation of finding himself in a country so different than the one he left. His death on stage during the performance of Life is a Dream is so dramatic and heartbreaking, and succeeds without becoming a theatrical clich. How did you decide that you werent going to let him live? JLM: It is an ending that in a certain sense is logical. Throughout the play Edmundo becomes more and more disillusioned about his return to Spain, while at the same time he knows that returning to Spanish America isnt realistic. He intuits that the end of his life has come and that the great roles that he played on Spains stages in his youth, such as Segismundo, are no longer his to play. So he feels that his time has run out; he is ill with heart disease and arrives at what he must do. He plans his final act on stage as an insult to all those who dont know who he is by interrupting the evenings performance. So when his cue to enter the stage comes, he takes off his costume and wants to explain to the audience who he was in the days before he went into exile. The tension in him becomes so great that he suffers a fatal heart attack. One thing thats not as clear in the text of my play as it is on stage is that Edmundo is taking pills. During the performance whenever he is stressed out or nervous, he takes out his pill bottle and takes a tablet. WES: What type of medicine or drugs is he taking? Even though you say that he has a heart disease, it feels like he also dies of anguish and a broken heart so that his death makes sense. JLM: They are pills for his heart condition, nothing more. So when you ask me why the play ends like this, I would say in part because it should end like this, but also because the characters death on stage in the final moments of the play creates a dramatic impact. Audience members wept when they saw it.

WES: You chose a topic that strikes a chord with so many people, especially given the outstanding exhibit in Madrid, Exile, which drew thousands of people, as well as the celebrated television documentary of the same name that also drew large audiences. What year does the action of your play take place? Does Edmundo return toward the turn of the twenty-first century? JLM: No, the year is 1982, only seven years after Francos death. But in the case of Max Aub, for example, who returned to Spain before Francos death, the country had already changed substantially. He had lived in Mexico for so many years thinking that Francos overthrow would happen at any moment, but then Franco lived for forty years after the start of the Civil War. There was a plan of development starting in 1968 to make a number of improvements, such as to the highway system. Those who were returning from exile didnt want to admit that even within a dictatorship there could be improvements and advancements. Its a knotty issue at best, because in order to justify that the Franco regime was completely wrong and evil, the migrs need to return to a backward, stagnant Spain, but instead they find a modern nation that is more or less one more country within Western Europe. WES: There are probably quite a lot of twenty-first century Spaniards who would have stories to tell about exiles from their respective families. Do you have such a story? JLM: I do have family members in Mexico. My mothers brother left during the final days of the war. He and another friend fled to France with my father who was already engaged to my mother. My father returned to Spain, but my uncle and aunt went to Mexico, getting married on the boat while crossing over. They didnt return to Spain for some thirty years, but they had five children and some twenty grandchildren who are for all intents and purposes Mexican. When my aunt and uncle returned, they were completely surprised, but thirty years is a really long time; it allows for a lot of changes.

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Barcelona: Revisiting the Classics, Rewriting the Present

Maria M. Delgado Sergi Belbel may not yet have officially started as Artistic Director of the Catalan National Theatre (TNC), but the director-elect has certainly created a real buzz around his appointment with a sparkling new production of Marivauxs Les Fausses Confidences, packing the notoriously unplayable Sala Gran. It is perhaps not surprising that Belbel, an accomplished translator of Kolts, should turn to a similarly dexterous playwright whose linguistic games are as brittle and elegant as the world whose conventions he chronicles and questions. Too often Marivaux is imprisoned within a Watteau-like pictorial field of aesthetic posturing and social hierarchies. Belbel moves away from period detail to a mythical world, part-movie kitsch, part-1940s screen culture. This is an environment fabricated from the imaginary of Hollywoods classic era. Although its look smartly references the design produced by Max Glaenzel and Ester Cristi for Belbels operatic debut at the Liceu with Il Viaggio a Reims (2003), it is clearly indebted to the studio era. There are imposing marble staircases (a sly nod to Ricard Bofills TNC building), lush red sofas, secluded gardens, a shiny Cadillac, and a polished Biscuter. Additionally, in the fashion of the feistiest farces (Belbels production is infused with the spirit of the farces that followed Marivaux), the dcor accommodates enough doors to ensure characters are concealed and revealed whenever the plot demands. This is Marivaux refracted through the lens of Preston Sturges (with elements of George Cukor and Howard Hawks thrown in for good measure). The results have proved an unexpected commercial and critical hit. Belbel evidently sees Marivauxs intrigues and witty language (marivaudage) as a prototype for the screwball comedy. The wily Duboiss (Miriam Iscla) machinations to get the wealthy young widow Araminte (Laura Conejero) to fall for her poor but handsome ex-boss Dorante (Eduard Farelo) are visually evoked within a costume register that critics have seen as indebted to The Philadelphia Story (1940). While Aramintes mother, Madame Argante, hopes that she will marry the powerful Count Dorimont, Dorantes uncle, Rmy, secures his employment with Araminte and then misleads her maid into believing that Dorante is actually infatuated with her. Araminte, however, finds out that his amorous intentions lie elsewhere, and, despite existing hierarchies, cant help falling for the guy. As her mother prepares to sack Dorante, Araminte declares her intention to marry him. The man on the make is made. There are echoes of Lope de Vegas El perro del hortelano (Dog in the Manger) in the plays treatment of class and hierarchy, and in the scheming servants orchestration of the romantic liaisons. The shape of the play suggests Marivaux as a palpable influence on Jacinto Benavente, as well as a debt to commedia dellarte. Here, however, as Marcos Ordez so astutely noted in his review of the play for El Pas (7 January 2006), echoes are refracted through a contemporary prism: Dorante as a great-great grandfather of Ripley, or the wily tennis coach played by Jonathan RhysMeyers in Woody Allens recent Match Point. The production has a sleek, seductive look, much like Farelos slick, suave Dorante. Laura Conejero gives a glamorous Araminte who floats across the stage in suitably star-like fashion (and boasts numerous costume changes), and Miriam Isla imbues Dubois with an ever-so-slightly menacing air. There is something of Peggy Shaws knowing butch protagonists here, watching over proceedings with a meaningful, complicit air. Indeed, she juggles the masculine and feminine characteristics of a role that may have been written for a male performer but that Belbel views as imbued with feminine wiles. Albert Guinovarts music is suitably atmospheric. Belbel juggles anachronisms knowingly and wittingly. His colloquial adaptation proves fast, furious and feisty. Belbel has often referred to Marivaux as one of his favorite playwrights, and the delight with which he stages Les Fausses Confidences suggests that another Marivaux may find a slot in Belbels new TNC regime. A new Josep Benet i Jornet play always has something of an event about it. The elder statesman of Catalan playwritings last offering, the hypnotic Lhabitaci del nen (The Boys Room), played at the Teatre Lliures Grcia venue in an imaginative production by Sergi Belbel in January 2003. Jornets latest work, Salamandra, premieres at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunyas cozy Sala Petita. Connoisseurs of Benet i Jornets work will find

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familiar terrain here: the elliptical narrative marked by the protagonists metaphorical and physical journey; issues of inheritance and the legacy of the past; nationalisms shaping of individual and collective identities; historical memory, and the construction of an elusively unknowable past. There is, however, a shift, for the setting is now a mythical desertlandscape. This is the arid wasteland of Sam Shepards Buried Child and Fool for Love: an arena of isolated homes and derelict trailers where wandering nomads come to find solace and space where humanity negotiates a less hierarchical relationship to nature. This is the fabled frontier of our global century, a Southern Californian landscape where cowboys once roamed, now the space and place of a modern day mythmaker: a commercial film director, Claud (David Selvas) who has escaped the mad/bad Hollywood machine to see the mother that adopted him as a child, Emma (ngels Poch), and attempt to redefine what his new project might be. Here Claud comes face to face with his childhood friend and soul brother, Travis (Julio Manrique), a documentary filmmaker, and Traviss German girlfriend, Hilde (Christina Genebat) who are passing by while working on a new venture. The mens mutual resentment is evident. Although Emma tries to get them to look beyond recent disagreements to shared childhood memories, neither man can lay to rest the competitive anger that bristles around them, or Clauds burgeoning sexual interest in Hilde. As Claud leaves for Idaho to confront the traces of his biological father that remain in the trailer where he drank away his life, Hilde leaves to follow him. They embark on an odyssey that takes them from Milo to Mittenwald and finally to Barcelona where Claud will try and make sense of the untidy scraps of his biological familys life that were scattered through the tumultuous century. This is a hugely adventurous play: conceptually bold and metaphorically sweeping. The relationship between Travis and Claud is presented on one level in entirely human terms as the tussle between two individuals who have pursued different paths with not entirely predictable consequences. These are men bound by a shared history and the pain of a supposed betrayal perceived by each in highly contradictory ways. Two guys, a girl, and a desert. Its the story of the American dream, of borderlands wrought by fratricidal conflicts, of a dream-machine built in the Californian desert that defined the real, of the simulacra that dominates

our world of global advertising and multi-million dollar movies exported across the planet. Not insignificantly, as a fiction director and documentary filmmaker respectively, Claud and Travis are each positioned on conflicting sides of the reality/fiction debate. Their deliberations point to wider issues concerning the function of art and the possibility of any kind of partitioning of the real and the fictive in an age hypnotized by the banalities of reality television. Toni Casares production evolves on Anna Alcubierres panoramic set dominated by a wide screen that projects images of the Santa Rosa desert, Emmas home, and the various European cities visited by Claud and Hilde. The photographs of the Santa Rosa terrain are all colored by the realm of an imagination popularized by Edward Hoppers interiors and exteriors: secluded houses, self-reflective symbolic windows, cropped roofs and frames. The European geography is self-consciously picturepostcard: German spires, grand apartments from the colonialist era that have seen better days, Pariss Pont Neuf, Barcelonas Padr Plaza. The giant screen certainly suggests something of the role of moving pictures in shaping our conception of landscape and identity; its widescreen format also points to the epic qualities of Benet i Jornets play. For in Clauds odyssey is a tale of emigration, mutation and transfiguration, the story of the twentieth-century and its economic and civil conflicts. In weaving its way to Barcelona for the penultimate scene, Benet i Jornet also manages to link Spains Civil War to the wider European struggles that followed. Here, Spain is no longer the distant other on the far side of the Pyrenees, but a part of a European psyche scarred by the trauma of protracted hostilities. Indeed, the brothers conflict prepares the ideological way for the motifs around fratricidal war that emerge in the latter half of Salamandra. The terrors of colonialism rear their ugly head to mark the contemporary struggles of the characters and the landscapes they inhabit. It is a legacy that Claud comes to accept, and one that comes to mark how he proceeds to look towards the future. There is something of Koltss fascination with the American other in Benets writing, but the tone here is more elegiac, romantic, and nostalgic than the French dramatists visceral, vicious language, redefining the relationship between the global and the local. American popular culture has a palpable presence in the work. Manriques Travis is clearly a nod to Harry Dean Stantons Travis in Wim

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Wenderss Paris/Texas (1983), a Europeans contemplation of alien America shot through cinematographer Robby Mllers unforgiving eye. There are also traits of Robert de Niros now perennial outsider, the Travis Bickle of Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976), and the disagreements with Claud suggest something of the two brothers of Shepards True West. Selvas Claud sports a Star Wars t-shirt and dresses in the custom uniform of Banana Republic-cum-Gap. Ry Cooder-like chords punctuate (rather too obviously) poignant moments of the play. Whilst there is a superficial elegance to Casares staging, ultimately the production remains too stilted and overly naturalistic for the broad brushstrokes of Benet i Jornets writing. The performance register traps a play that requires a more forceful aesthetic. David Selvas never entirely convinces as the supposedly successful Hollywood director who has the world at his feet. Although Jorge Manriques Travis has more of an edge, their relationship never quite takes off. Part of it may be to do with the part that Travis is displaced by Hilde around halfway through the play. The relationship between Hilde and Claud never possesses the same passion as the mens. In addition, the details of Casares staging always seemed a little off-target: Travis sporting a super-8 rather than the more portable digital cameras favored by the current wave of documentary wizards; the clean, wholesome wooden New England flooring of Emmas house. The play is dirtier than the production and there is a need for something angrier than the sanitized look shaped by Casares ambling directorial rhythm, and the rather lackluster performances of the subdued cast. Benet i Jornets ending also seems rather too farfetched, lifting the play into the terrain of melodrama that it had hovered around without ever quite occupying. Play and production never seem entirely matched in the TNCs Salamandra. Nevertheless, one cannot help but admire the audacity of a playwright who insists on probing buried histories and hidden chronicles as a way of understanding our tumultuous times. There can be few figures in the contemporary European theatre scene who have polarized the Spanish critical establishment quite as decisively as the Argentine-born writer-director Rodrigo Garca. His productions quirky titles appear provocations in themselves: Haberos quedado en casa, capullos (You Should Have Stayed at Home, Jerks) (2000), Compr una pala en Ikea para cavar mi tumba (I

Bought a Spade in Ikea to Dig My Grave) (2002), La historia de Ronald, el payaso de McDonalds (The Story of Ronald the Clown from McDonalds) (2003). Garca made his long overdue UK debut last summer with La historia de Ronald at the Brighton Festival. A denunciation of our fast food culture as poignantly agitational and brilliantly choreographed as lex Rigolas 2004 staging of St. Joan of the Stockyards [see WES 17.1], this was a consummate lesson in political theatre: ferociously witty, defiantly angry, theatrically thrilling, and always uncompromisingly opinionated. Food, as in the work of Bobby Baker, became more than an onstage weapon, but rather a way of commenting on our post-capitalist consumer practices and the extremes that they provoke. Garca is not afraid to get his hands dirty, a Kantor for the twenty-first century whose La Carnicera Teatro (Butchers Theatre) is as much a nonconformist pariah in Madrids rather complacent theatrical culture as was Kantors Cricot Theatre in communist Cracow. The two monologues seen at Barcelonas Teatre Lliure share much in common with La historia de Ronald: the protracted declarations to the audience that appropriate the confessional mode of reality television towards contrary ends; the fascination with the mythology of advertising and cultural consumption; a performance methodology that owes as much to Pina Bausch and Bob Wilsonverbally referenced in La historia de Ronaldas it does to Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, MTV and Andrei Tarkovsky. For those who admire Forced Entertainment while longing for something of the cruelty and vigor of Goyas grotesquerie, Garca offers a paradigm for engagement that never eschews humor or theatres often forgotten recourses to smell and taste. Borges and Goya each engage contemporary myths: with Borges it is the legacy of the Argentine writer Jorge-Luis Borges, with Goya the allure of Disneyland. Each enacts a process of demystification that asks awkward questions about cultural legacies and artistic responsibilities. Borges was first seen in 1999, a commission to mark the Argentine icons centenary presented at Madrids Casa de Amrica. The writers widow, Mara Kodoma, was, allegedly, not exactly thrilled with the homage conceived by Garca but the piece is as much a reflection on Garcas own adolescence in Buenos Aires as it is a reflection on Borgess literary weight. This is no biographical study (we are given little information on Borgess

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life), rather a contemplation of his times and his capacity to stand aside and remain aloof of the abuses then shaping Argentine society. This is a study of political detachment, of the writer as a figure apart, crucially disengaged from the society in which he lives and works; the poet insignia who never got his hands wet for nobody or nothing. It is also fiercely autobiographical. The Borges devotee who recounts the tale of an adolescent encounter with Borges and Octavio Paz conversing jovially at the citys Caf Tortoni draws on anecdotes from Garcas own life. We recognize the butcher father, greengrocer mother, the voracious reader, and the aspiring writer who goes in search of a pull but finds two literary giants instead. La Carnicera Teatro regular Juan Loriente enacts the alter ago with a distance that prevents easy identification. He moves with the slowest of tai-chi stances on a carpet of green grass adorned with rows of green apples, the perennial fruit of temptation. This is no recognizable human that can be easily traced to Garca, but rather a blue alien with bright orange hair, marked by pointed, Spocklike ears and pointed talons for nails that grip a fluorescent apple, bitten into at the end of the piece. The writing is exquisite, merging the political and

the sexual, the popular and the esoteric in imaginative and quirkily comic configurations. The text has been expanded since 1999 and a video backdrop that juxtaposes the eponymous Borges with a nodding toy dog further serves as a commentary on Garcas text. The video offers a catalogue of abuses ranging from Thatcher crowing over Las Malvinas/The Falklands to reminders of Maradonas football glory days that masked the substance abuse within, or from Bush and Videlas smirking politicians to close-up shots of anal sex that invade the privacy of the moment, stripping it of any semblance of intimacy. Im not sure that Garcas staging entirely works, for all Lorientes technical brilliance it highlights the sophistication of the writing rather than challenges or offers counterpoint it in any way. The intermittent spraying of pesticide into the air, punctuating the language whilst contaminating the apple held by Llorente, appears at once an ecological and a grammatical statement, as well as a potent metaphor for Garcias theatre. Goya, or to give it its full title, Prefiero que me quite el sueo Goya a que lo haga cualquier hijo de puta (Id Rather Goya Kept Me Awake Rather Than Any Other Son of a Bitch) provides a less

Gonzalo Cunill as the Atltico Madrid supporting father in Rodrigo Garca's Goya. Photo courtesy of the Teatre Lliure

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aggressive fusion between text and performance. The production emerges from a grainy video installation that bridges Borges and the second play. This is a poetic meditation of Goyas 1820s Duelo a garrotazos, one of the most celebrated of his black paintings, and a harrowing metaphor for the fratricidal wars that plagued the country through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The various configurations of the battle till the death with clubs that Garca crafts, enacted also by Carlos Saura in his 1963 film Llanto por un bandido (Lament for a Bandit), go beyond the male-on-male warfare of Goyas painting. Here, there are children and women as well as men, who raise their clubs through the soil and mud in a darkened landscape that suggests a Balkan land marked by a secluded corner of shady trees that mask, hide and shelter. As the video fades, the mascot of Atltico de Madrid enters the stage, a giant bear in football gear stripping to Atomic Kittens I Really Want Tonight to Last Forever. Removing his weighty headdress, actor Gonzalo Cunill spins an engaging tale of a blue-collar father of two boys approaching middleage. The father challenges his sons desire for a weekend at Disneyworld with a plan to blow his savings, 5000 euros, on a night at the Prado, looking at Goya in peace. The events leading up to the Goya sleepover at the Prado are planned with meticulous consideration and financial acumen. German philosopher Peter Slterdijk is enticed to Madrid on a promise of cured ham, croquettes, and a good wine ,as well as a hefty fee. Picked up at Madrids Barajas airport by Cunill, his two wily sons, and a contracted taxi driver, the odyssey involves the young boys articulating sophisticated economic statements and pining for Disneyland while their father attempts to pull off the evenings entertainment within the orchestrated budget and without any unforeseen hiccups. Cunills Argentine timbre suggests a links with Borges and a past that is never alluded to. The past that is evoked here is the cultural legacy of Goya, a legacy that Garcas play seems to suggest is under threat from a culture that sees worth in exploiting individuals to wear inhuman costumes for prolonged periods in the service of entertainment. Cunill gives us a wily loser who knows that its safer to contemplate the masters rather than hanker over a Volkswagen he cant pay for. His performance is hypnotic, an alluring blend of humor and candor. Whether regaling the audience with

tales of his sons opinions, biting into a baguette, or plotting the nighttime assault into the Prado, his endearing openness and straightforward nature offers a veritable antidote to the tortured protagonist of Borges. For those who associate Garcas oeuvre with enraged collages, food fights, and a sensory performance language of kinetic exactitude, Goya is a less ferocious, but no less potent deliberation on cultural value, cultural icons, and that elusive something that goes beyond the monetary or cultural commodification. Cultural commodification has also been a prominent motif in the recent work of the Teatre Lliures artistic director lex Rigola. It is perhaps not surprising that the astute Rigola has provided a welcoming Barcelona home for Garcas La Carnicera Teatro and other practitioners/troupes whose work offers a fusion of the avant-garde, choreography, installation, and performance art such as Roger Bernat, Mal Pelo and ngels Margarit. Rigolas also succeeded in programming what is arguably the citys hippest venue. This has been a year of conspicuous sell-out successes (as with Josep Maria Mestres Boston Marriage). There is still a range of high-profile international companies (Ostermeiers Schaubhne, Jan Lauwers NeedCompany, Les Ballets C de la B, Romeo Castelluccis Societas Rafaello Sanzio), as well as the presence of Catalan stalwarts Llus Pasqual, the venues former artistic director, and Albert Boadellas Els Joglars, to look forward to. Rigolas most recent offering as director, Richard III, or as he titles it, Ricard 3er, sees a return to the Bard and, as with his Julius Caesar, Rigola renders a more compact acting version that prunes and crops the text. He dispenses with Act II, scene iii, Act III, scenes iii and vi, Act V, scenes ii and v. What we have is a lean compression, which in Salvador Olivas deftly fluid translation, pulsates along to the rhythm of The Clashs Spanish Guns. After the open, minimalist location of his Julius Caesar, Rigola and his habitual scenographer Bibiana Puigdefbregas opt to situate the action in an altogether more concrete environment. This is a diner-cum-pub/club with more than a touch of the seedy about it. Theres not a window in sight, rather a long red bar dominates the back of the stage; its shelves are piled high with a range of fortified alcoholic beverages. Lurid colors dominate. A ministage tucked in the corner stage-right announces the possibility of musical entertainment. Diner tables stage left and right allow for conspiratorial

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Pere Arquillu as Richard with the two puppet princes in Alex Rigola's Richard III at the Teatre Lliure. Photo: Ros Ribas, courtesy of the Teatre Lliure

reunions. A white fridge suggests ominous possibilities for imprisonment, and a tacky juke box thats seen better days provides a resting place for one of the two prostitutes that adorn the less-thansalubrious establishment. The British origins of the play are alluded to with a print of the Bard carelessly abandoned at the top of the stairs, the haphazardly pinned-up page-three poster girls framed by Union Jacks and the prominent WC sign. This is a modern-day royal court, populated by two warring dynasties. The Houses of York and Lancaster are here mafia families. Although Rigola has located Scorseses Casino, Michael Moores Bowling for Columbine, and HBOs The Sopranos as tangible referents, the costume aesthetic, dominated by Stetsons, cowboy boots, and Dallas-cum-Desperate Housewivess faded glamour, suggests that the USs current royal family may be another palpable influence. There is even something here of Alex de la Iglesias spaghetti Western Perdita Durango and its filtering of a lawless world through the Spanish grotesque or esperpento. In addition, the set evokes the geometric form of Frank Castorfs Gier nach Gold. For those who saw Bieitos Macbeth, Hamlet, and Threepenny Opera, there are evident points of contact: the fast, furious pacing, the Mafioso world where power and prestige justify any and all abuses, and the utilization of musical interludes sung by the characters as a type of Brechtian commentary on the action. Here we have The Beatles Hey Jude, the Rolling Stones Sympathy

for the Devil, Boney Ms By the Rivers of Babylon, and Jacques Brels Ne me quitt pas. Rigola is also, as with Bieito, a forceful moralist. The play opens with a Kant quotation projected on the screen stageright: Man is what education makes of him. Here lies the association with Bowling for Columbine, and in the program notes, Rigolas asserts that we are living in an era defined by as much violence as that of Richard of Gloucesters youth. In an age where images of annihilation dominate our screens and media, and going to war is seen, as Iraq demonstrates, as an everyday occurrence, the production asks searing questions about how we are educating our families and what following by example might mean as politicians lie their way to waging wars whose human casualties are conveniently hidden away. Pere Arquillus Richard is no monstrous aberration but rather the product of a domestic setup where loyalty to the family can only go as far as the bid for economic supremacy will allow. He has watched and learned. This is a family where the women exist as glamorous, virtually interchangeable objects of desire, elderly Barbie dolls, mannequins attired in heels, tight dresses, designer sunglasses, and peroxide wigs that stress the clone-like dimension of their lives. In a world where appearance is all, Arquillus Richard has drawn the short straw. He has a limp, dragging a clubfoot behind him, a nervous tic, bottleneck glasses, bad skin, a propensity to sweat heavily and an incapacitated hand. He is a poor second to the snappy Clarence

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(Norbert Martnez), the dapper Hastings (Ivan Benet) or the tall, angular Buckingham (Joan Carreras). With bad taste in costume jewelry and an uncoordinated dress sense, this is a man who needs to use his wits to avoid falling by the wayside, and this he does with increasing aplomb. His forthright manner and go-getting ways serve as an absolute antidote to the poised posturing of the rest of the court. Arquillus conception of Richard is a tour de force, a wicked delight of refreshing candor, relentless energy, and aggressive plotting. He dispatches his lieutenants with arms waving out like rapidly firing pistols. He issues orders with a rich, husky voice that suggests a smooth aged bourbon, which seduces as it wounds. This is a Richard who swiftly learns that power is seductive and uses his escalating position to win over those who want to remain close to the base of command. His seduction of Ana Ycobalzetas Lady Anne on one knee, with Stetson removed in deference, is a concise lesson in captivating a reluctant love-interest. Watching him mutate from ugly duckling to tawdry swan as he wipes out his opposition, I was reminded of his extraordinary Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and long for a potential Angelo in Measure for Measure, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and possible title roles in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Hes up there with Simon Russell Beale and Gert Voss as one of the most alluring Shakespearean actors of his generation. For those familiar with Rigolas aesthetic, there are clear analogies here with his earlier work: the corrosive political commentary, the recourse to danztheater, the intrusion of popular culture, the amplification with phallic microphones, the debt to Volksbhne director Frank Castorfs video recordings, capturing the actors on film and projecting their images in real time on the large screen. Indeed the inquisitive, roving camera following characters through the hidden corridors of power suggests an exposure of what goes on behind the closed doors of power. Indeed, the toilet is in near-constant use as a venue for plotting, dodgy deals, listening in on whats going on in the bar, or concealment. A red room at the top of the stairs where antagonists are dispatched, and wayward family members disposed of, suggests something of both torture chamber and interrogation suite. Nevertheless, for all its conceptual merits there is something a little too frantic about the production that never quite melds the classicism of

Olivas translation with Rigolas lewd aesthetic. For all the technical brilliance of the choreographed sequences, and the enraged energy of the staging, I longed for Rigola to allow the text to breathe a little more. The productions register veers rather too heavily into farce. For example, the giant line of coke consumed with a comic-like Caixa credit card seems almost gratuitously unnecessary. The conception of the dying Edward IV as an invisible man of sorts wrapped entirely in medicinal bandages and cavorting with prostitutes as the kingdom falls apart beneath him seems rather crudely drawn, and the plethora of Shakespeares that increasingly occupy the stage as the play draws to an end appear a tad repetitive. The production is intelligently self-referential (a framed print of the Bard lies discarded across the stairs; a large book labeled Marlowe acknowledges the Marlowe-ish aesthetic of Shakespeares play), but the saturation of multiple and overlapping actions left me thinking that less might in this case have proved more. There are moments of utter luminosity in the staging, as with the confrontation of Richard and Elizabeth where the weary Elizabeth, Alcia Prez, removes her wig in desperation, facing the all-powerful monarch as a grieving widow and mother seeking to keep hold of her only surviving child. Prez certainly offers the most nuanced female characterization, and this is the productions most moving moment. Chantal Aimes Margaret has a relentless pout and her frequent recourse to the Tarot cards never quite convinces; Ycolbazetas Lady Anne seems to have too many points of contact with her 2004 Cordelia as an article of abuse staggering around the stage in a haze of alcohol or drugs. I missed the vulnerability and vocal dexterity of Rigolas Joanna Dark, urea Mrquez. I admired the quick wit of the production (the young Princes of York, for example, are conceived as Harry Potterlike dummies who never quite grasp the Machiavellian world in which they have been reared) and its uncompromising political stance. Iraq War footage is juxtaposed with the faces of smirking politicians and film clips from Fernando Meirelless City of God that reinforce the productions emphasis on education. There is no doubt that Rigola is building up an admirable ensemble company at the Lliure at a time when the ensemble has too often been abandoned in favor of the allure of the star system. And whilst Richard III is never quite the sum of its parts, the parts are far more stimulating and provocative than the majority of

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Shakespearean offerings at Europes subsidized venues. I have always thought that Pere Arquillu, the backbone of Rigolas ensemble, would have made a terrific Hamlet. We get the next best thing here as he takes on the shady Claudius in Rigolas European HouseHamlets Prologue Without Words, given a public rehearsal at the Lliure before opening at Gironas Temporada Alta in December 2005. Here Rigola provides a hypothetical contemplation of events leading up to the opening of Shakespeares best-known work. This is an infinitely more mundane world than that of Rigolas Richard III. Old Hamlet is a successful businessman. The wake that brings his relations together in the familys three-story suburban house points to a telling and rather sordid sequence of events involving missing documents, modified wills, adolescent angst and sexual dalliances. Bibiana Puigdefbregas provides a delicious box of tricks in her design of a compact family home, complete with gardens and bathrooms. A veritable fourth wall nurtures the spectators most profound voyeuristic instincts. The action evolves in real time as we watch the characters go about their daily business. Two maids prepare for the familys return from the funeral service; Joan Carreras lanky Hamlet leaves his mother and uncle to it as he escapes upstairs to his room, browses through some CDs, undertakes some push-ups and takes a shower; more family and friends turn up knowing not quite what to say, and the living room becomes a cramped hole where bodies stand awkwardly in dangerous physical proximity. This is a delicious, droll sitcom enacted with compelling physical precision and humor; a silent movie of sorts with only the most partial of soundtracks. As Claudius and Polonius lead the dazed, chain-smoking Gertrude through the will, Hamlet and his friends listen to music upstairs. The simultaneous patterns of action comment on each other with smart, sharp panache. There are visual references to Marina Abramovics The House with the Ocean View and Heiner Goebbels Eraritjaritjaka in Puigdefbregas exposed set. The real time pacing suggested something of Forced Entertainment, but this work-in-progress has a freshness that makes it curiously engaging and, in veritable soap opera fashion, it keeps you hooked. Im not sure the opening scene with the two maids tidying up the kitchen in anticipation of the familys arrival quite works, for the action significantly lifts

when Hamlet and his entourage tumble in. The cast is, however, excellent: all writhing bodies, furtive glances, awkward stances, and elusive gestures. Conceptually, I remain to be convinced that the teenage gesticular language of Hamlet and his gang is quite carried off by the twenty-and thirty-something performers. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating experiment: bold, beautiful, and smart fun. Rigola seems to be asking pertinent questions about what constitutes a theatre without words. This is neither mime nor dance, but a silent essay as potent as Brooks earlier reflection on the play, Qui est la? Edward Albees The Goat or Who is Silvia? is not an easy play. At its center lies the tricky premise of a prizewinning architect who falls inexplicably in love with a goat. Its a love story, but also the contemporary tragedy of a man whose life begins to fall apart on hitting his 50th birthday. Martin (Jos Mara Pou) appears to have it all: an elegant, articulate wife Stevie (Marta Angelat), a devoted son, Billy (Pau Roca), a spacious, tastefully decorated New York apartment, the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, and a comfortable income. When his old university friend Ross (Blai Llopis) arrives to interview him for a TV feature, a careless confession that he is involved in an extramarital liaison leads Ross to spill the beans to Martins family. But this is no ordinary affair, for Martin is in love with a goat, a state of events that his wife and son simply cannot come to terms with. Albees play is an absurdist comedy with a bitter aftertaste, a drama of miscomprehension, intolerance, and fear that scratches uneasily beneath a pristine skin of social acceptability and respectability in the cosmopolitan city par excellence. The 2002 New York premiere had Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruhl as the successful couple whose glossy surface cracks as the marital sitcom mutates into a full-blown Greek tragedy. There was a hard, cold element of Clytemnestra in Ruhls impassioned performance that contrasted effectively with Pullmans effortlessly suave Martin. Bill Irwin and Sally Fields, replacing Pullman and Ruhl on Broadway, presented a more suburban couple: more nouveau riche than inherited wealth. The London premiere in 2004 brought the husband and wife team of Jonathan Pryce and Kate Fahy. Although Pryce was able to provide a bemused vulnerability to the role, Fahy never quite rose to the demands of Stevies emotional journey. At the Romea theatre, Jos Mara Pou provides a veritable contrast to Pryces lean, angst-rid-

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den architect. More superficially buoyant, he also has something of the awkwardness of a figure who would rather have his architecture speak for him. The preparations for the interview with Ross leave him somewhat ill at ease, making him easy prey. Ross alludes to their enduring friendship, but what he is after is vengeance from the university contemporary who outstripped him, a hostility that is masked under the veneer of supposedly idealistic intentions. While Llopis Ross seems a rather watery characterization with a somewhat abrupt transition from jocular to vengeful, Pous Martin and Angelats Stevie provide a strong opening with a effortless banter of stylish wordplay that points to a marriage of minds where light reparte and sparkling conversation keep both on their toes. Joaquim Roy provides a spacious room of high ceilings and imposing doors. There is something of the Greek temple in the grand doorway and distant stairway through which the characters enter and exit. The subdued dcor, framed family photograph, grouped paintings, and tastefully arranged bookcases suggest a certain Catalan chic. The dramatic paintings of twisted bridges, barren landscapes, and blank faces foreshadow the damage that is to come. Their aesthetic is also suitably surreal, with a touch of the absurdist. This is New York

reflected through a discerning Catalan eye. Pous translation is sharp, witty and imaginative. His direction is precise and careful, and his conception of Martin majestic: a giant who hunches, crouches and falls in on himself (as much literally as metaphorically) as the action progresses. As Angelats Stevie begins to trash the impeccable apartment, Pous Martin steps cautiously through the discarded books and ripped canvases trying slowly to find a place for items that have been destroyed beyond repair. In many ways, this is a metaphor for their marriage. Although Angelats Stevie never quite manages the crescendo of devastating anger that marked Ruhls brutal killing of the goat, she is able to confront Pous Martin in ways that increasingly take on a more menacing dimension. Pau Rocas Billy is a suitably confused teenager whose collapse seems entirely plausible as the perfect family falls apart. The audience is suitably perplexed by the directions in which Albees text shifts and turns, especially in the ending that builds to a terrible crescendo, only to be followed by a suitably long silence. Two years after premiering Mam quiero ser famoso (Mommy, I Want to be Famous) in Alicante and touring the show across Spain, La Cubana return to their home city. The show comes

Marta Angelat and Jos Mara Pou in the Catalan-language premiere of The Goat or Who is Silvia? Photo courtesy of the Teatre Romea

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not to the companys recent Barcelona venue, the Tvoli, but rather to its sibling establishment, the Novedades across the road. Things have changed since I caught the production on the Madrid leg of its tour [see Simon Bredens review in WES 17.2]. Jordi Miln has imaginatively recast it as a bilingual show that flows from Catalan to Castilian-Spanish. The perceptive comments on the Catalan/Castilian axis come at a time when the right-wing opposition, the Partido Popular party, is questioning the states composition as a web of nations, each with their own governing body and language. The weekend I saw the production witnessed tens of thousands take to the streets of Madrid to question the legitimacy of the constitutions political autonomies. Indeed, La Cubana bring something of the language of the streets to the stage of the Novatats; characters jump from Catalan to Castilian-Spanish, avoiding the monoculturalism that so often dominates stage products in the city. Local products and references have substituted those that referred to Madrid; a new set of interviewees has been captured on celluloid debating, denouncing and/or embracing celebrity. La Cubanas telling indictment of reality television is conceived in the form of a celebrity game show that allows a range of randomly chosen participants to experience fame for a day, bringing them into contact with veterans who share their

experiences of life lived in the bright glare of the camera. From savvy nuns whove swapped their tambourines for electric guitars and set the catechism to rock, to a prostitute who longs to be an agony aunt, or an ambitious mother and father placing their daughter before the cameras as she recovers from appendicitis in a local hospital to entertain viewers with stories of the crown jewels of Europe, to an aging ventriloquist whos thrown out of his wheelchair to boost audience ratings, this is a harsh and brutally funny indictment of our celebrity culture. Those who caught Jordi Milns reworking of La Cubanas legendary 1989 hit Cmeme el coco, negro, Nuts CocoNuts at this years Edinburgh Festival, will appreciate the metatheatrical dimension as a notable characteristic of the companys aesthetic. Mam quiero ser famoso offers conspicuous opportunities for the audience to dress up in the companys array of plumes and participate in one of the shows numerous musical numbers. Joan Vives witty lyrics and bright pastiche music remain a delight. There are few directors who know how to work a chorus quite like Miln. Here his 1970s dance numbers and executed choral sequences remain prototypes of how to deflate and interrogate ideological associations of musical forms. more corrosive potential than any of the tired musical products that are currently on display in London or New York might suggest.

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Zeffirelli Directs Pagliacci at the Acropolis

Marvin Carlson The Theatre of Dionysus, at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis, the founding site for European theatre, rarely sees any sort of public performance today aside from a rare celebratory event. The Roman Odeon of Herod Atticus, also at the base of the Acropolis but further west has, on the other hand, been restored and refitted for modern productions. It regularly offers lyric and dramatic productions, especially for the Athens Summer Festival. On September 24 to 26 of 2005, it witnessed a special production of Leoncavellos I Pagliacci, created by Franco Zeffirelli for the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Festival. The event was a kind of double celebration, since Zeffirelli, now 82, has been a major figure on the Italian scene during this same half-century. The original plan was for Zeffirelli to stage Cherubinis Medea, but when that plan ran into difficulties, Zeffirelli turned to a more familiar, but much less clearly relevant work from the standard repertoire. Leoncavellos verismo classic and highly secular story was surely a less appropriate choice for a performance in a classic space at the heart of Athens than Cherubinis reworking of one of the best known of the Greek myths. However, Zeffirelli insisted that this very incongruity was what inspired his choice. Instead of staging a sacred text in a sacred site, I decided to come up with something entirely different, performing a sacrilege of sorts, he reported in a press interview, adding I decided to show people on the margins of society living among the ancient marbles. Viewed in these terms, this production can be seen as the culmination of an ongoing engagement with this opera that covers almost the entire career of this major director. He himself has reported that I Pagliacci has fascinated him like no other work, although he has directed almost every major opera in the standard repertoire in most of the great opera houses in the world (his monumental Aida in

The Roman Odeon, below the Acropolis. Photo: Joanne Georgulis

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the Verona Arena has been twice reviewed in this journal). Zeffirelli first staged the work in London early in his career, in 1959, in a production that essentially followed conventional interpretations of the piece, with a detailed reconstruction of the rural Italian village at the end of the nineteenth century that is visited by a troupe of traveling actors. His subsequent productions of the opera moved it to more modern times, most notably in a production at La Scala set in a postwar Rome archeological site that was inhabited by the poor and the socially marginalized victims of the recent conflict. This mixture of the squalor of the inhabitants, the crumbling glory of their surroundings, and the gaudy tackiness of the traveling commedia players was very well suited to the aesthetic of Zeffirelli, who, like his countryman Fellini, has always delighted in grandiose effects and extreme contrasts. The Athens production may be considered a variation of that at La Scala, but with the major features, especially those of grotesque contrast, even more strongly emphasized. The setting is completely contemporary, most strikingly in the use of vehicles, which form a kind of visual subtext: bicycles, motorcycles, wagons, carts, Vespas, and of course at the center, the traveling caravan and wagon stage of the comedians themselves. Instead of the formidable but still illusionist setting of the Roman ruins on the La Scala stage, Zeffirelli in Athens was able to place the action of his production in an enormous actual ruin, the Odeon, against whose monumental scenae frons his actors swarm like insects, hanging up lines of laundry and strings of colored lights for the commedia performance. In front of this huge stone backdrop a series of platforms and ramps provides a varied surface for the flow of characters and vehicles. Everything about the production, except the elemental and rustic verismo situation at its core,

is monumental. The cast numbers two hundred and includes acrobats, mimes, jugglers and magicians alongside the actors, singers, and crowds of extras. Even the most intimate scenes take place against a constantly moving background of village life. The large crowd scenes, most notably the arrival of the comedians in the first act and the climactic performance which completes the tragedy, when La comedia e finita, are dazzling, indeed overwhelming in their movement, color, and variety. Even with a crowd of over one hundred actors watching this final performance, Zeffirelli manages to make every participant distinct. He set up a living tapestry which offers fascinating little vignettes of dramatic action wherever one looks, many of which briefly emerge, like a wave in a turbulent sea, to prominence, as when an exuberant group of young men rush to the stage for a closer view of the attractive leading lady. Zeffirelli himself created the colorful setting and the more than two hundred and fifty costumes were the work of Raymonda Gaetani, best known for her setting and costume designs for productions of Eduardo de Filippo. Vocally, the evening was dominated by the beloved Veronica Villarroel, who will be familiar to American audiences for her many appearance at the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, and so on. Her interpretation of Nedda combined an intense sensuality with the theatrical flamboyance of Leoncavellis passionate heroine. The betrayed husband Canio was powerfully interpreted by Alberto Cupido. Canios village rival, Silvio, was performed by Luca Salsi, the foolish servant Taddeo in the commedia was portrayed by Ko Seng-Hyoun, and Peppe/Arlecchino by Mark Milhofer. The orchestra of the Greek National Opera was ably led by Massimiliano Stefanelli.

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Paris Theatre, Fall 2005

Barry Daniels I was in Paris in September for the beginning of the new season and then for a month starting in mid-November. As always, the choices were varied, the quality was excellent and tickets were cheap. Ive divided my notes chronologically. Classical Texts The fall season at the Thtre des Amandiers in Nanterre opened with a much- anticipated production of Richard III, staring Philippe Torreton and directed by Philippe Calvario. In the past I have praised Calvarios work, but I was somewhat disappointed with this production in which his scenic and costume choices seemed arbitrary and un-interesting. Karen Serres set consisted of a large raked platform placed in the open space of the main stage theatre. A large banner with a rose dripping blood hung to the left of the platform, which had moveable elements that allowed it to be variously configured. One element could be raised to form the ceiling of the cell in the Tower of London. The space was neutral and efficient. Aurore Popineaus costumes were more of a problem. T he majority of the men wore Samuri gear, which was not a disastrous choice in and of itself, but one that was not carried through in the rest of the production elements. The women wore simple, elegant, white, red or black gowns. Although the color imagery of the warring houses got confused at times. The hired assassins wore black modern suits and dark glasses. Although such mixing of styles is characteristic of Calvarios work, in this production neither the scenery nor costumes seemed rooted in action and character. One of Calvarios greatest strengths is his sure grasp of a plays dramatic action. His Richard III was always clear and characters were sharply delineated. It was not a production that paused for reflection; it played like a fast-paced melodrama with a startling villain at its center. The acting was generally good, although somewhat broad. Torreton was exceptional in the title role. He limped through the house delivering the opening monologue, alternately sly and vicious. His body was deformed and on his left hand he wore a glove which was attached just to the right of his crotch. A mixture of obse-

Yann Burlot, Regis LaRoche and Maximilien Muller in Calvarios production of Richard III at the Thtre des Amandiers. Photo: Pascal Gely, Agence Bernand

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quiousness mixed with assurance dominated the scene in which he woos LadyAnne. Throughout, he created a monster who was absolutely fascinating. In tandem with Richard III, the Thtre des Amandiers also produced Jean-Franois Sivandiers staging of Buchners Dantons Death. This was one of the few critically well-received productions at the Avignon Festival this summer, and it proved to be solid, if not compelling, staging of Buchners drama. The production design (by Sivandier and Christian Tirole) involved a series of moving platforms that created a variety of different locations within the wide space of the theatre. Virginie Gervais clothed the actors in modern dress, to which they added period elements and wigs for the various characters they played. A table was placed against the wall stage left for actors to change wigs and costume elements. As the audience entered the theatre, actors were milling about the stage. To begin the performance they lined up across the front of the stage and recited what seemed to be an improvised prologue that used statements beginning with the phrase There ought to be, and including references to the contemporary world. The staging was generally effective. Nicolas Bernard was a solid and fervent Danton, and Vincent Gudon was a wiry, intense and edgy Desmoulins. Sivandier was excellent as Robespierre in the climatic confrontation with Danton. For the final scene, Sivandier had the imprisoned men running in circles around the platforms, now configured as a raked stage. They were

slowly dusted with flour so that when they froze at the plays end they looked like statues. The only element missing in Sivandiers staging was a sense of the common people. Jean-Baptiste Sastres staging of Marivauxs The Surprise of Love, in the small theatre at the TNP Chaillot, is a good example of how postmodernism has become a style that directors adopt to seem hip, even though they dont really understand the principles of postmodernism. Sastre made no attempt to deconstruct the text; he simply mixed eclectically a variety of disparate visual elements. Thus we had a plastic curtain downstage left, a landscape backdrop behind a scrim, a fragment of an eighteenth century nude painting upstage left, and plastic chairs scattered about the space (the scenery was credited to the director, Daniel Jeanneteau and Mammar Benranou.) Christian Gasc provided hideous costumes that mixed period style with modern elements. They were made of plastic, with the result that they made noise every time an actor moved. There were innumerable, and senseless, costume changes. All this visual clutter did nothing for Marivauxs charming comedy, in which Llio, who has fled to the country after an unhappy love affair and has vowed to renounce all women, meets a Countess, who has renounced relations with men. Of course, after a series of misunderstandings, they fall in love. In a less tedious environment, Julie Vidit and Vincent Dissez might have been very good as the lovers. In a casting twist, Sastre cast veteran actors Simon Eine and lonore Hirt as the servants Harlequin and Columbine. Neither had the liveli-

Platanov, part of a Chekhov series at the Thtre de la Colline. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand

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The Brigands Companys Toi cest moi, directed by Stphan Druet. Photo: Pascal Gely, Agence Bernand

ness associated with these traditionally comic roles. Marivaux is one of the greatest writers of the eighteenth century, and his insight into the psychology of love remains both accurate and amusing. His language is refined and elegant. Unfortunately this Surpise of Love was drowned in directorial effects and drained of its human qualities as well as of its humor. The Director of the Comdie-Franaise Library, Jol Huthwohl, has created a new series of readings, The Past Recovered, performed in the Studio-Thtre in the Carrousel of the Louvre. On December 5, Jacqueline Razgonikoff, a librarian at the Comdie-Francaise, presented selections from Alexandre Dumas Caligula, created at the Comdie-Franaise in 1837. Costumes and scenery for the original production of this spectacular historical melodrama were projected on a screen behind the four actors who read scenes from the play, while Razgonnikoff provided commentary on the staging. Dominque Constanza was suitably haughty as Messalina and Mathieu Genet was an energetic young Caligula. Christian Gonon and Clothilde de Bayser were fine as the doomed lovers Aquila and Stella. These programs are a lively way to promote interest in the history of the theatre and

in the collections housed in the Library at the Comdie-Franaise. By far the most exciting production from the classical repertory that I saw this fall in Paris was Hamlet: Rehearsal by the Companhia dos Atores from Rio de Janeiro. Directed by Enrique Diaz, it was performed at the Cit Internationale under the sponsorship of the Autumn Festival. A company of six actors, who frequently changed roles, rehearsed scenes from Hamlet. At one point the actor playing Laertes became Ophelia. Three actors performed Hamlets famous soliloquy. Rozencrantz and Guildenstern first appear as inflatable action figures, and a recording of Cry Me a River was used late in the performance. Although this sounds like a freewheeling, hit-or-miss approach, the play was, in fact, taken seriously. The youthful energy of the cast and the imaginative staging choices made for a fine evening of theatre. The Modern Repertory Platanov, directed by Alain Franon, is part of an ongoing series of Chekhov plays produced at the Thtre de la Colline. Franon chose to open the performance with Swan Song, a dramatic monologue featuring veteran actor Jean-Paul

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Roussilon . It was an odd choice to add this monologue which contributed nothing to the main play and extended the running time to over four hours. Franon staged Swan Song mostly in the dark, which was not terribly effective. When he finally introduced some light it was so dim that I strained to see. For Platanov, Franon worked from the premise, cited in the program, that society is a dunghill and the characters are worms burrowing in it. This thesis, although valid, made for a rather unrelenting evening that lacked variety. Unlike Jacques Lasalles recent production of the play at the Comdie-Franaise, where the female characters had a certain grace, Franons vision reduced all the characters to the same level of vulgarity. That said, ric Elmosnino gave a virtuoso performance in the title role, often delivering his lines with the rapidity and fire of a machine gun. He had been an excellent Peer Gynt at the Odon last season and is clearly an actor to be watched. Evguni Schwartz was a successful author of childrens plays in the Soviet Union, where he worked until his death in 1954. One of his adult plays, The Naked King, was brought to the Athne Theatre in a production by Laurent Pelly. The play was written in 1934 and banned by the government. It merges several H. C. Andersen tales, including The Princess and the Pea and The Emperors New Clothes. What is interesting in the work is its

sinister portrait of facist government as represented by the state where the princess, who has fallen in love with a swineherd, is sent to be married to the King. The play combines poetry and satire in an original way, and Pellys production was colorful and imaginative. Audrey Fleurot and Karim Oayoun were charming as the princess and her lover. The rest of the characters were exaggerated types performed with comic skill by the rest of the cast. For its holiday production this year the Athne Theatre has revived the 1934 musical comedy, Toi cest moi (You are Me) by Mose Simons, text by Henri Duvernois and lyrics by Albert Willemetz , Bertal-Maubon and Champfleury. This production was performed by the Brigands Company and was directed by Stphan Druet, with musical direction by Benjamin Lvy. This same team was responsible for last seasons hit revival of Your Mouth, another musical from the 1930s. Toi cest moi is pure 1930s silliness that recalls the American musicals of the same period. The plot involes a pair of dandies, Bob and Pat, who lead a dissolute life in Paris. Bobs rich aunt Honorine decides to send him to one of her Caribbean plantations to toughen him up. He convinces Pat to accompany him and switch identities. The result is that Pat (pretending to be Bob) is put to work by the plantation master, Pedro Hernandez, while Bob (pretending to be Pat, a doctor) leads the

Brechts Mother Carrars Rifles, directed by Antoine Caubet. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand

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easy life and courts Maricosa, Hernandezs daughter, who has been living isolated from white men on the plantation. The islands governor, Robinet, arrives with his fortune-hunting daughter Viviane, who pursues Pat, thinking he is the rich heir, Bob. Complications ensue, but all is resolved after the arrival of Honorine and the revelation of the real identities of the two men. All of this was lightly done and had a certain charm that was enhanced by Simons lovely score, which made adroit use of tropical rhythms. Unfortunately, the production was uneven. Florence Evrards sets and Elizabeth de Sauverzacs costumes were definitely low-budget. Most of the singers were classically trained, and, with the exception of Loc Boissier (Pat), they did really not have the right kind of voices for pop music. Carl Ghazarossian, who alternated in the role of Bob, had a sweet tenor that hardly carried over the small orchestra. As an American used to the highly polished work on Broadway or at the Encores! series, I was somewhat disappointed by the lackluster quality of this revival. Brecht wrote Mother Carrars Rifles in 1936, to protest the Wests refusal to intervene in the Spanish Civil War. The play portrays the refusal of a woman, whose husband has died in the conflict, to give his guns to her brother so that he can join the republican army. Her younger son Jos wants to join as well. When her older son is brutally mur-

dered by the fascists while in his fishing boat, she changes her position and hands off the guns to her brother. Director Antoine Caubet, in his arresting production at the Grard Philipe Theatre in SaintDenis, chose to focus on Teresa Carrars inner dilemma. Elizabeth Moreau in the title role gave an intense, emotional performance. She eloquently portrayed Carrars pacifism and her motherly urge to protect her children. The shift of position at the end of the play was performed as a futile act of rage and despair. By humanizing the work, Caubet successfully diminished its agit-prop nature. Caubet framed the tragic human story in a highly stylized staging that recalled the work of Robert Wilson. Isabelle Rousseau, who also designed the costumes, provided a kind of abstract interior set of white walls. An opening up stage right that allowed light to flood across the back of the set. Actors often performed in silhouette downstage, and other times moved in and out of bands of light. Pictorially, the effect was quite beautiful and acted as a counterpoint to the intensity of the emotions portrayed by the actors. Director Julie Brochen has received much praise for her staging of Yukio Mishimas Hanjo, at the Aquarium Theatre at the Cartoucherie in Vincennes. One of Mishimas Five Modern Noh Plays, Hanjo tells the story of Hanako, a young geisha who fell in love with a young man, Yoshio.

Enrico Baradel as Hanjo in Mishimas play of the same name, directed by Julie Brochen. Photo: Pascal Gely, Agence Bernand

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Nichets adept production of Dario Fos Cant Pay? Wont Pay! at the Amandiers. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand

When they parted he gave her the fan of a famous sixteenth century geisha, Hanjo, and promised her that he would return. Hanako is adopted by a woman, Jitsuko, a painter who has become obsessed with painting nude portraits of the girl. After several years, Hanako becomes unhinged with grief at her lovers failure to return. She spends her days waiting at the railroad station. When Yushio finally returns, Jitsuko tries to prevent his meeting Hanako, but when the latter enters the room, her madness is such that she cannot accept that Yushio is the man who left her. The play is an elegant, poignant portrayal of obsession and madness. Brochen tricked out the production with a variety of effects that overwhelm the delicate beauty of the text. She started the evening by placing the plays climatic confrontation between Yushio and Hanako at the beginning, as a kind of prologue, then repeating in its original place at the end of the play. A mime character representing Hanjo (Enrico Baradel)was added, swathed in newspapers that were gradually unwound and laid out the length of the stage. This presence was mystifying, albeit visually interesting. Her several appearances, however, destroyed the tight structure of the play. Julie Terrazzoni and Enrico Baradels set consisted of two long platforms with an empty

space between them. In this space was an eight foot platform that could be moved to various positions along the passageway between the two long platforms. Visible stagehands dressed in black ran the crank that moved this platform and placed various props about the stage as needed. The audience was placed on opposite sides of the elongated stage. The actors were generally convincing and often moving in creating the characters. This was especially true of Julie Denisse as Hanako and Muriel Amat as Jitsuko. Francois Lorient played Yoshio and also created a haunting score for the production, which he performed at an offstage piano. Hanjos fan was replaced by an accordion which allowed for an interesting musical dialogue between Hanako and Yoshio, although, again, I feel this was a somewhat arbitrary effect. The Athne Theatre opened its fall season with Albert Camus adaptation of William Faulkners Requiem for a Nun (1956), a fascinating text and a very modern one in its portrayal of the profound rift between sexual nature and social convention. Temple Drakes story and the murder of her child are gradually revealed to the audience in a structure that borrows from Greek tragedy. Temples strength of will and her carnality contrast with the weakness and social conventionality of her

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husband and her brother-in-law, the lawyer who represents her in the trial to prosecute her black maid, Nancy Mannigoe, for the murder of the child. Jacques Lasalles staging of the play was a disappointment. It was full of Lasalles tics: a virtually bare stage, minimal period props, and elegant period costumes (the scenery was by Graldine Allier and the costumes by Florence Sadaune). A wall projected on the backdrop was reflected in mirrored surfaces at the sides of the raked stage. The walls dripped with blood as the play drew to its conclusion. All of Lasalles choices seemed perfunctory as he never seemed to get to the heart of the action. He never succeeded in conveying the idea of an oppressive conservative society which forces Temple to be an outsider. Lasalle played the lawyer Gavin Stevens and was quite good in the role as was Scali Delpeyrat as Gowan Stevens. Martine Maximum was suitably inscrutable as the ex-prostute and maid, Nancy Mannigoe, but Marie-Jose Croze was less successful in the key role of Temple Drake. She never seemed to understand the character; she was too refined and never conveyed the sensuality so important to the role. Nevertheless, Requiem for a Nun is a wonderful text and it is per-

fectly clear why Camus was attracted to it. One of the best productions I saw was Dario Fos 1974 Cant Pay? Wont Pay! at the Thtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. This production couldnt have been more timely, opening in November during the riots in the Parisian suburbs. The plays action begins, in fact, with a riot in a working class neighborhoods supermarket, when woman begin to protest rising prices. The police search for the stolen groceries that ensues involves two couples. Antonia has stolen food during the riot, but must hide this from her strict and moral socialist husband Giovanni. She enlists the aid of her friend Margerita, who helps her by stuffing the goods under her raincoat and pretending to be pregnant, much to the surprise of her husband Luigi. Antonias various schemes to hide the food become increasingly convoluted as a variety of police officers enter the scene. In addition, Luigi arrives, announcing that the factory will be laying off a good number of its workers, including him and Giovanni. The play concludes with a general riot in the making. Fos genius in this play is to bring vividly to life serious political issues concerning the plight

Francois Clavier and Claude Guyonnet in My Dinner with Andr. Photo: Pascal Gely, Agence Bernand

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of the working classes in a context that is pure farce. The play is often like an extended sketch on the Lucille Ball show and it is very funny. Jacques Nichet directed the production in Nanterre with sure sense of farce: fast-paced, brightly colored and often riotously funny. He punctuated the action with lively, Fellini-esque music, played by three musicians at the right of the stage. Marie-Christine Orry dominated the action as Antonia, alternately quick-thinking and hysterical. Agathe Molire as the slim, subdued Margherita was a nice complement to Orrys comic frenzy. Dominque Parent was equally good as the hard line socialist, Giovanni, reduced to eating bird seed soup and dog food pat, and Pierre Baux managed distinct comic turns in each of the different roles of police officers. Contemporary Plays The Bastille Theatre, in conjunction with the Autumn Festival, commissioned a series of productions by the Antwerp based company Tg STAN. I was able to see three of these productions by this company whose work I have often admired. Adapted from Louis Malles film, My Dinner with Andr featured Tg STAN actor Damiaan De Schrijver as Wallace Shawn and Koe

Company actor Peter Van den Eede as Andr Gregory. As is the norm with this company, the stage was open to its side and back walls. Several TV monitors were placed around the stage. A restaurant table and chairs was placed stage right and up left against the back wall was a working kitchen. In this kitchen each night different celebrity guests would prepare the multi-course meal served to the two actors. The production began with video of De Schrijver playing Shawn preparing to meet Gregory in a fancy restaurant. The ensuing action is the dialogue between these two very different artists over the course of an evening. De Schrijver was a bearish, skeptical Shawn, and Van den Eede a slim and aristocratic Gregory. Neither actor seemed to take his character very seriously; both strove to earn easy laughs. I found their work failed to find the substance in the meeting between the two men. At three intermissionless hours, the production seemed overlong and a bit self-indulgent. It was, however, a great popular success with Parisian audiences. I was also disappointed in in Tg STANs second production, The Advantage of a Doubt. This collective creation used texts from a variety of sources as well as material created by the ten actors

Jean Christophe Baillys site-specific A Night in the Library. Photo: Ramon Senera, Agence Bernand

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who performed the work. It was composed of sketches and monologues that often touched on contemporary issues. It reminded me a lot of the work of the Open Theatre in the 1970s, but without the technical rigor of that group. The young actors were engaging, but, as in My Dinner with Andr, the goal seemed to be to arouse easy laughter. I found Tg STANs Anathema to be the most successful of their three productions I saw. The troupe commissioned the text from a young Portuguese novelist, Jos Luis Peixoto. It was a short play about a woman and her boyfriend, who may be plotting an act of terrorism. Jolente De Keersmaeker played the woman, first seen sitting in front of a video camera that projects her opening monologue on a number of video monitors around the space, as well as on a large screen at the rear. Tiego Rodriguez played the man. References to Romeo and Juliet indicated that the couple might be from warring factions. The text was literary, but not uninteresting. In a long monologue towards the end of the play, the man describes hiding as a boy in an armoire while soldiers raped his grandmother. The piece finally seemed to be asking us to consider the reasons that might drive someone to want to commit terrorist acts. Jean Cristophe Baillys A Night in the Library is a site-specific work that was originally created in 1999 at the Palatine Library in Parma, Italy, and recreated in Dijon, France. The most recent version of the text was performed in Paris as

part of the Autumn Festival at the Historical Library of the City of Paris, an early-seventeenth century building in the heart of the Marais. It is a brief work (only 70 minutes) in which four actors represent books which wander about the empty library at night. Although Baillys poetic reverie is slight, the staging by Gilberte Tsa made for a fine evening of theatre. The audience was seated at the long tables of the librarys reading room, a grand hall with painted ceiling beams and large windows opening on one side into a garden and on the other into the courtyard. Spotlights in the courtyard directed light (moonlight) through the windows. Actors also used flashlights as they moved about the space. They performed on the tables, in the aisles, on the large window sills, and on library ladders. Close to the end of the play, one of the characters says, aptly summing up this delightful performance: here, everything is dream and vision. The Rond-Point Theatre devotes its entire season to contemporary work. In the small Jean Tardieu space, I saw Chantal Thomas The Queens Palace, which was staged and designed by wellknown Argentine director, Arias. Arias also played the shy man who is protagonist of the drama. In an attempt to flee his domineering mother, he asks a somewhat desperate waitress to marry him, but of course his mother continues to exert her control. Arias was quite amusing as the man, but Marilu Marini who played both the mother and the waitress

Jean-Michel Ribes Museum, Upstairs/Downstairs, at the Rond-Point. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand

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stole the show. Her ferocious portrayal of the mother was truly and terrifyingly funny. On the main stage at the Rond-Point, Artistic Director Jean-Michel Ribes chose to open the Fall season with a revival of his hugely successful play from last season, Museum, Upstairs/Downstairs. As the title suggests, this play, in a series of satirical sketches, deals with museum goers and museum staff. Ribes has staged his play with a company of twelve actors, each of whom play a number of roles, and twelve young

extras who play groups of museum-going tourists. Patrick Dutertre provided a series of white walls that could easily reconfigure to create different galleries in a museum (all paintings had to be imagined, as the walls were bare). The costumes designed by Juliette Chanaud were in suitably bright comic book colors. Although the play is hardly profound, it was constantly amusing and adroitly performed by the engaging cast.

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American Countercultures on London Stages

Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck As Americans who relocated to the UK just prior to the last presidential election, we often find ourselves particularly aware of our nationality. Despite the two governments special relationship, public opinion regarding the US responses to terror and the state of the world are not nearly as divided as in the States. Although Blair is perhaps not an ideal PM for those on the left, the last parliamentary election in May showed how far to the left of the US the nature of political discourse is in the UK: all three major partiesLabour, Liberal Democrat, and Conservativepresented positions predicated on an understanding of government as having a series of strong responsibilities to the people, and a willingness to tax in order to provide these services. Indeed, just this week, the newly minted leader of the Tory party, David Cameron, has clearly stated that he is the true heir to Blairs New Labour politics. Blair may have been 1997 Britains version of Clintona young, moderate, well-spoken, staunchly free-market liberalbut the terms of political discussion are different in the UK than in the US. The staunch individualism which underlies most politics in the US never really became the modus operandi in the UK, despite Thatchers attempted revolution and famous remark that there is no society. As quiet Americans living a daily life in Britain, quite often on the street over the past year and a half, we have heard expressions of shock and dismay about the US governmental situation, the politics of the Iraq war and the questions of terrorism and Western (US) imperialism. On a recent autumn weekend, we had the opportunity to see back-to-back performances of two peculiarly canonical pieces of American theatre, both of which trace a history of American protest and countercultural performance to at least the late 1960s. The tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill staged the classic anti-war musical Hair, while Covent Gardens Donmar Warehouse presented Sam Shepards most recent drama, The God of Hell. There has been a spate of Shepard productions in the UK recently, most notably perhaps the Nationals Buried Child starring Lauren Ambrose, Elisabeth Franz, and M. Emmet Walsh. As a US playwright on the London stage, Shepard seems perhaps the heir to Williams; his disavowed loners and mythos of the American heartland perform an America in which one can see, at a remove, the individualism and vigilante nature which have been so conscripted by the current administration. And yet his plays have always contained within them a challenge to authority, a distrust of the powers that be. Shepard is an icon of Americana as both playwright and craggy performer; this is perhaps most easy to see outside the states. The God of Hell, which premiered in New York just prior to the 2004 election, seems a bit hasty, more of a sketch about what Shepard initially called a take-off on Republican fascism than a fully fleshed-out play. The play, running just over an hour in Kathy Burkes crisp production, seems a cross between Albee and Shepard, although the author has stated that he envisioned a black Orton farce in writing it. Midwestern dairy farmer Frank (Stuart McQuarrie) and his wife, the compulsive plant-watering Emma (Lesley Sharp) might, in another era, have been waiting for Mrs. Barkers delivery of a bumble. Here there are two visitors

Ewen Bremner as Mr. Haymes of The God of Hell. Photo: Tristram Kenton

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who bring into play the complexity of the American dream: the twitchy Mr. Haynes (Ewen Bremner), a runaway from some government lab, and the smiling government salesperson/agent Mr. Welch, played to smarmy Patriot Act glory by Ben Daniels. The set, by John Fensom, might be any Midwestern farmhouse; its very simple realism only hints at the plays absurdity with a plethora of houseplants, which Emma obsessively waters throughout. This desperate attempt to keep life green through bleak Wisconsin winters as well as Franks obsession with his heifers as one of the few remaining small family farmers in an industry now dominated by huge agribusiness conglomerates, hint at an accepted abandonment of the American dream. The broad and overly flat accents of the cast and the simple, clean choices made by cast and director perfectly capture, almost to a point of distraction, a classic and rural Americana. But the seeming tranquillity of life on this farm is shattered by their two guests. The scab-covered, twitching Haynesthere is some debate within the play about what is real name isbrings with him a past of secrecy that may be about the development of weapons systems at a secret government base in Colorado. The touch of his hand produces an electric shock, and he is hiding in the basement; why he has run here and what his past is are never truly made clear. When Mr. Welch enters, bringing American-flag iced cookies and Pat Boone CDs, the thrust of the play becomes all too obvious and evident. Here is a neo-con salesman-cum-interrogator. His survey techniques and pasted on smile draw broad strokes between politicians and the torturers at Abu Ghraib. While implicit at first, this becomes more and more explicit over the course of the play, culminating in his pulling Haynes out of the basement with electrodes attached to his testicles and marching both Haynes and Frank around the room like show ponies. A bit too obvious at times, the overtness and simplicity of the choices here do not always work effectively. The audience watches as Welch caricatures America on stage; after Emma refuses to buy the patriotic bunting he offers to sell her, he takes the opportunity to staple it up all over the room and as a skirt around the table, turning this stock American living space into a cut-rate Fourth of July/Homecoming float festooned with dime store decorations. Not content to stop there, he runs roughshod over the Constitution, somehow persuading Frank to sell his beloved heifers and the house

to him in order to run a key government think tank. Shepard attempts to trouble here the wholesale purchase of American iconography by the rightthe house in which Emma was born, the very carpet on which both her mother and countless heifers have given birth, is easily given up to appease a government which, in the views staged here, will stop at nothing to control the modes of representation. Although it is easy to wonder at the relevance of this production, which seems to do little more than preach at the converted, Shepards body and depth of work has provided a nagging counterbalance. So over-the-top in its writing and imagination, but played at such pitch-perfect realism, the production ends up seeming a bit hollow, perhaps intentionally so. Shepard is at his strongest when hes raising questions and showing the complexity of Americana, here the complexity is lost, boiled down too cleanly and simplistically, but perhaps this is his point. This sketchy caricature of America might just be a blatant attack on contemporary political and social amnesia, a real look at what happens when we forget our history, let ourselves be bullied by corporate powers, and let symbols of power stand in for intelligent discussion. For those of us largely in agreement with Shepard over the state of the current American regime, the emptiness within the production was disquieting. Perhaps this was Shepards intent. Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt Macdermots 1967 Hair is one of the most iconic of American musicals. The first Broadway smash hit rock musical and the first performance in what has remained since then one of downtown New Yorks most important theatre spaces, the Public Theaters Astor Library Building, Hair defined a generation. While it did not produce immediate and wide-ranging changes in the American musical theatre, its place in the canon is assured, largely as an expression of its era. Daniel Kramer, a very young American director who has lived in the UK for the past few years and is Associate Director of the 65seat Gate has chosen to remount adapt it for the current moment, a seemingly tricky proposition. The play is predicated on the draft (which despite the current quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, has not yet been reinstated), and the free love, LSD-fueled late 1960s seem a far cry from the neo-con, religious right resurgence of the contemporary moment. Kramer has decided to set the play along the length of the Gate, so a very shallow but wide seating array mirrors the stage layout, where a shimmering cur-

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tain with the Coca-Cola script on it is split in two into his ears and his tuning-out drug of choice is and snakes along the stage in Soutra Gilmours prozacalthough the choice lies with his psychiaclever design. A small band, visible off stage right, trist. An NYU student lost in a world of overmedratchets up the score, undergirding it with driving ication and MP3s, the Hamlet references of the secbass that replaces the 60s flower power with more ond act seem to have shaped the choices of who this of a power rock sound. character is throughout. As he fades into a prozac The opening scene quickly sets the tone as haze after his introduction and before Air, Jeanie a boxer-brief clad Berger (Kevin Wathen) enters places an oversized plastic smile into his mouth and from a seeming sleep and leads the cast in a rollickwipes away the drool that ensues. Into his dreaming Age of Aquarius, which makes it clear we are state walk the characters Dubya, Condi, and in a contemporary New York. The Tribe seem to be Rummy. Two six guns at his side, Graham Tudors a Greek chorus for this opening number, with all but Bush and his smarmy sidekicks cajole, proselytize the leads clad in long, judge-like robes with transluand threaten the audience. Much like Welch in The cent masks and fantastical plastic hairdos (by Vidal God of Hell, these caricatures are there in part to be Sassoon). Their mouths are stuffed full of cell ridiculed; their over-the-top presentation and carphones and junk food wrappers, the detritus of contoonish appearance presenting a frighteningly poltemporary civilization. One can see in this moment ished America imagined as happy-go-lucky Wild Kramers internship with Richard Foreman mixed Wild Western multicultural Christian warrior-state with an echo of the barroom characters from Star coming into conflict with the laissez-faire attitudes Wars and WTO protesters. These characters reapof Generation-Y. pear throughout the play, commenting clearly on the I Got Life is a high point early in this dominance of an American model of corporate capproduction, reimagined incredibly through a lens of italism, and its production of disaffected individuals Paul McCarthy (who coincidentally had a recent solely as generic consumers. It is clear that we are exhibition open at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in a contemporary New York as this chorus mingles shortly after the production opened). The three sets with the leads while they get dressed, and work their of parents include one who are simply speaker ways through a post-9/11 frenetic rush hour subway cones as mouthpieces turned into robotic figures, scene. Kramers imagination is incredibly fertile and one who are caricatures of 1990s crass comand he plays with both New York and the audiences mercialism meeting 1950s stereotype: dad with a expectations, giving Berger a megaphone at one grotesque beer belly of food packaging and mom point to harangue passers-by and, at another (in a with a full Astroturf skirt with a windowpane and moment of metatheatrical direct address), to moon red and white checkered curtains at her crotch. the audience and tell them that while he knows they They give him his maila marketing brochure for all came for the nudity, most of that is in the secthe militaryand his immediate violent response ond act. One by one, we are introduced to the rest includes a stripping down to his briefs and smearing of the cast. A strikingly muscular Gary Ames as himself with the meatloaf mix, ketchup and mustard Woof, complete with H.I.V.I.P. tattooed in six of the family dinner. Echoing McCarthys ketchupinch high letters across his chest, graphically enjoys the pleasures of Sodomy with only his upper body sticking out from a huge latex sheet which covers another man on the stage floor stands out. Free love is no longer truly so free. Claude (Charles Aitken) enters with bleached blond curls (tightly hugging his head) as a lost child of the twenty-first centuryiPod headphones firmly plugged Daniel Kramers reimagined Hair at the Gate. Photo: Tristram Kenton

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blood, chocolate-shit, and mayonnaise-semen, Claude is seeking reality within his distanced world; that this is at the cost of the lost family dinner as ritual speaks to a different disaffection than that of the 1960s. As an audience member, this scene was incredibly visceralfrom the violence of the act to the intense sweet smell of dry dog food mixed with water that stood in for the meatloaf. In seeking an answer and a connection, Claude here decides to join the armyperhaps the reality of that experience will fill the void of connection that he seems to seek throughout. Kramer truly allows the play to be reimagined for the twenty-first century; particularly jarring is the use of nudity (and the audiences expectations of it.) The end of the first act, historically a rollicking, joyous shedding of clothes, becomes here a candlelight vigil, a choice, which while not obvious in a play so often treated as a period piece, makes perfect sense alongside Claudes confused soliloquy Where Do I Go? These shifts, from a hippiedepoliticized political imagining to a contemporary, post-Vietnam, post-9/11, Iraq-informed political disempowerment; from a celebratory, orgiastic rebellion to a mournful powerlessness, lie at the heart of the Gates production. When nude bodies appear in the second act, they are at first behind a scrim, the audience seeing simply bits and parts. As the lights change the tribe, heads hooded a la Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, becomes visible, and the point of this nudity is shocking. Forming human pyramids and chains here is no longer about fun and free love, but a damning comment on the American military. Claudes death at the end of the play is a beautiful coup de thtre, using the small space of the Gate to full advantage as his coffin comes out of the wall, draped in a flag, echoing images of so many thousands of other nameless US soldiers. Many in the audience on the day we saw it were incredibly moved and the reception was both stunned and stunning. One thing that Kramer has crucially done, however, is not to allow the production to become solely mired in the violence and bleakness of such images. Such numbers as Black Boys and White Boys are allowed to be pure fun, sung exquisitely and with a youthful vitality and exuberance that completely takes over the tiny house. Rather than tourists asking what is the point of all this Hair, the title number itself is sung to Oprah (the same

actress who plays Condi) as an explanation that the tribe is not composed of neo-hippies, but disaffected youth of today. Oprah one-ups them all, however, stripping to a bikini and letting her own hair down at the end of the song. Certain elements dont seem to quite fit; Sheilas (Joanna Ampil) Good Morning Starshine as a lullaby to the tribe is a song which does seem to only work as nostalgia here, but the overall impact of this production is one of incredible power and vitality from a young and extremely energetic cast. While rumors of a transfer to other London spaces do not seem to be panning out, there is discussion of a New York transfer, which, if it happens, should prove to be a hot ticket. Significant especially for us as New Yorkers are the post-9/11 references throughout the piece. Candlelight vigils immediately reference the many in held in New York in the weeks following 9/11. Similarly, the lyrics I met a boy called Frank Mills on September 12, right hereI lost his address, hung heavily in the room as images of many searching for loved ones in the wake of the building collapses haunted our memories. Since changes and updates were made throughout, the team could have made a few more significant changes, such as turning September 12 into the 9th and replacing Hare Krishna at the vigil with a folk song, as well as making a few more cuts, such as the relatively unfamiliar song, (which was cut for the film) Going Down, which still doesnt work in production. In London today, there is never a dearth of American plays and productions; these two, however, both seek to grapple with contemporary American imperialism and the responsibility of the individual. From the corn-fed American optimism slowly destroyed and undermined by government interests in The God of Hell to the search for connection and change of Hair, these plays critique the current US administration in ways both accepted and provocative. Seeing the two in rapid succession, one questions the given-ness of the feelings of anti-Americanness in the world and in the UK in particular. The complexity and stylization of Kramers Hair is more provocative and asks more of its audience than Burkes realistic production of Shepards absurdist sketch, which assumes a uniformity of response and opinion from a UK audience today.

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Old Wine in New Bottles: The UN Inspector and The Philanthropist in London
Marvin Carlson Two innovative adaptations of major classic plays were among the most popular offerings of the fall season in LondonDavid Farrs The UN Inspector, based on Gogols The Inspector General at the National and Christopher Hamptons The Philanthropist, created in 1969 as a kind of comic counter-play to Molires Misanthrope, in a major revival at the Donmar Warehouse. Both plays move their action to contemporary times, and are full of contemporary references. Both, however, closely follow the dramatic shape of the original while making significant changes, resulting in a piece with a rather more complex action and darker tonality. The UN Inspector, staged in the huge Olivier Theatre, was set primarily in the large, elegant reception room of the presidential palace in some Ukraine-like former part of the Soviet Union. The designer, Ti Gren, created a wonderful, overthe-top baroque confection of a room. The modest hotel room of Martin Gammon (Michael Sheen), the nonentity Englishman mistaken for a dreaded inspector from the UN checking the country on behalf of the International Monetary Fund, is done as an inset scene, its modest functional sterility accentuated by its contrast with the palace. The production begins with a filmic introduction. On a central screen, a Russian hammer and sickle are replaced by clips of toppling statues, turbulent and exultant crowds, and repeated flashes of the word FREEDOM, and the date, 1991. Then the legend, 15 years later brings us into a present of unfulfilled promise, with corrupt and venial bureaucrats, many of them left over from the old regime, lining their pockets and oppressing the populace through a ruthless secret police force. Money from the IMF has been hijacked and squandered. A review by an inspector from the UN is rightly viewed with horror. The action closely follows that of the original, though it is cleverly and effectively updated to a word of laptops, cell phones, MacDonalds, and Starbucks. The President is alerted to the impending visit by an email from a cousin in America. Those foolish clowns Robchinsky and Dobchinsky, here with Mafia connections, set off the comedy of confusion by spotting the assumed inspector at the Marriott hotel where they have gone for a decent cappuccino. The plays most significant departures from the original give it a much darker undertone. Central to this change is the quietly menacing chief of police (Mark Leadbetter), who stands apart from the more traditionally cartoonish political leaders, hovering darkly in the background and only briefly taking center stage from time to time to carry out, quietly but efficiently, the more unpleasant business of the administration. He is central to the plays three darkest and also most original sequences. The first of these is the most complex in its tonality. Told to silence a dissident woman journalist whom he has been interrogating, he obligingly brings her severed tongue to the President. The befuddled head of Intelligence (Geoffrey Beavers), clearly the stupidest of the ministers, is given the tongue, and he inadvertently hands it to Gammon instead of the bribe which he put in a different pocket. Gammon then assumes the tongue is some sort of plastic practical joke object and he taunts everyone with it until it is finally seized by the ruthless ex-KGB Minister of Finance (Elizabeth Bell) who, in a show-stopping sequence, slowly and deliberately eats it. A second sequence, briefer and much less shot-through with black humor, occurs when the discontented people outside attempt to storm the palace. A few, including the mother of an arrested journalist, manage to lay their complaints before the confused Gammon, who forgets them as soon as the people are forced out. Others, more menacing, appear in silhouette outside as if attempting to scale the temporarily translucent walls of the palace, but a few bursts of gunfire ordered by the chief of police soon restores order. Finally, Gammon, his companion Sammy (Nicolas Tennent), and the Presidents daughter (Daisy Haggard), who has agreed to marry the assumed inspector, leave the palace, not in a coach, as in Gogol, but in a presidential helicopter. Escape today, however, is not so easy. Before they leave the countrys airspace, the helicopters fatal crash is brought about by the efficient chief of police at the order of the President, who has finally realized his mistake. Immediately thereafter, we return to Gogols ending and the arrival of the real inspector, which, under these circumstances, takes on an even

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Michael Sheen plays Martin Gammon, The UN Inspector, at the National Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan

greater and more cruel ironic edge. It might seem that these changes would considerably lessen the overall comic effect, but, as in much of the dark humor of the late twentieth century, they in fact deepen the plays power, as well as its relevance. This is unquestionably the funniest version of The Inspector General I have ever seen. The credit, however, goes not only to Farr for his darkly hilarious reworking and his own deft direction of it, but also to the great comic cast he has assembled. At the end of this cast, the delightful Kenneth Graham, whose pompous and desperate President shares with Michael Sheens Gammon the leading honors of a brilliant ensemble. Aside from the others already mentioned, the chain-smoking Minister of Health, Michael Gould, the cadaverous Minister of Education Sam Cox, the corpulent Minister for Justice David Ryall ,and the formidable Presidents wife, Geraldine James, all contribute significantly to this powerfully contemporary political satire. Christopher Hamptons The Philanthropist closely echoes Molires The Misanthrope in a number of sequences and character relationships. However, it is really a kind of counter-play, illus-

trating that the well-meaning, feckless university don of its title, though scrupulously avoiding giving offense to anyone, proves ultimately as unsuccessful and destructive in his social relationships and love affairs as Molires more acerbic and opinionated protagonist. Simon Russell Beale, one of Britains most lauded contemporary actors, is at the top of his comic form as the well-meaning but ill-fated philanthropist Philip, whose approach to life is summed up in one of the plays many witty, almost Oscar-Wilde-like observations: Im a man of no convictionsat least I think I am,a line Tom Stoppard later quoted as one of his personal favorites. Beale makes the most of his pliant, easygoing, introverted lover of anagrams, drawing comic power not only from his own actions but from the impact of others upon him. One of the most delightful scenes in the production is when having allowed, indeed encouraged his fianc Celia (Ann Madeley) to depart with the pompous and overbearing critic Braham (Simon Day), who obviously has designs on her, Philip finds himself alone with Araminta (Siobhan Hewlett), who equally obviously has designs on him. She amorously ruf-

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fles his hair, leaving him looking rather like a helpless puppy caught in a windstorm, and then leads him off to a sexual encounter he obviously does not want but cannot think of a polite way to refuse. His look, like a sacrificial calf, as he heads for the bedroom makes a memorable comic moment. The central interpersonal scenes of the play are admirably performed by these actors and also by Dany Webb as Philips colleague Donald, and Bernadette Russell as Elizabeth, who manages to make a deft comic contribution while never uttering a single word through her perfectly times taking of the hors doeuvres on the central table. Much less successful, it seems to me, was the presentation of the odd events that surround these more personal negotiations. First, there is the theatrically striking but ultimately not clearly justified opening scene, rather like the opening coup de thtre of Stoppardss The Real Thing. Here, a troubled young writer John (Simon Bubb) reads the story of a suicide and then recreates it by blowing his brains out in the presence of the astonished Philip and Donald. Then there is reportage of bizarre political events taking place in the world outside: the assassination of the Prime Minister and the entire cabinet along

with serial murders of leading English writers. The characters indifference to these catastrophic events makes a kind of dramatic point, but it adds a surrealistic note to the whole that I found less than effective (subsequent political events, however, have caused many critics to remark on the prescience of this 1970 play in respect to the growth of political terrorism). I was also not particularly impressed by the director Davis Grindleys decision, or designer Tin Shortalls, to begin each scene with a series of apparently random letters across the top of the set, doubtless a reference to Philips love of anagrams. For each scene, these flickered and ended with the spelling out of one of the deadly sins: lust, for example, or greed. This device, not suggested in the authors text, seemed forced and arbitrary, particularly since the connection between any particular sin and the scene it accompanied was rarely clear. At the center of the play, however, is the inter-relationships of the characters, and these shifting dynamics were admirably rendered by a very effective ensemble, making this production, despite some flaws in both text and staging, a powerful and memorable evening of theatre.

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The UN Inspector, at the National Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan

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Contributors
JOSHUA ABRAMS is Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, while working on his dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center. His essays have appeared in Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Journal, and Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, among other publications. 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). MARIA JOO BRILHANTE is currently the Director of the Center for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon, and a member of the Consultant Board of the journal Sinais de cena (Theatre Signs). She has published several articles on French and Portuguese theatre and translated classical French plays for the stage. MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. In 2005 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. PAULO EDUARDO CARVALHO is a Lecturer at the University of Porto, where he also serves as a researcher at the Margarida Losa Institute for Comparative Literature. He serves on the board of the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics, the International Association of Theatre Critics Executive Committee, and the Editorial Board of Sinais de cena. His publications include journal articles and essays, translations of plays, and most recently, a monograph of Ricardo Pais entitled Actos de variedades, forthcoming from Campo das Letras. 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-Franaise, 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. SEBASTIANA FADDA is a researcher at the Center for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon, specializing in Portuguese and Italian theatre. She has translated several Portuguese plays into Italian, and has organized sever editions of the work of contemporary Portuguese playwrights. CANDYCE LEONARD is 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. She has written extensively on contemporary Spanish theatre, in addition to co-editing five volumes of Spanish plays since 1950.

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JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University. She has published essays in The Wooster Group and its Traditions, Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, and the forthcoming Performance and Place and Live Movies, as well as a variety of journals. MARIA HELENA SERDIO is Professor at the University of Lisbon and a member of the Center for Theatre Studies there, as director of CETbase: an on-line database of Portuguese theatre. She has published widely on English and Portuguese Drama, Comparative Studies and Theatre Studies, and published three books on theatre. She directs the journal Sinais de Cena, and since 2003 has served as President of the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics. CHRISTINE ZURBACH, Professor at the University of vora, is an expert in French Literature, Theatre and Translation Studies. A member of the Editorial Board of the journal Adgio and of the Consultant Board for Sinais de cena, she has published many articles on translation studies, drama, and theatre. For Cendrev, she has translated many plays and worked as resident dramaturg.

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