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Abstract
As a result of the global pandemic, in the spring of 2020 Madrid experienced a restrictive confinement for over three months. While theaters were forced to close, such measures did not put a stop to cultural initiatives in the city. From May through June, the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) developed a pioneering audiovisual piece, En otro reino extraño, built around different texts about love by Lope de Vega (1562–1635). Carrying out this creative endeavor remotely, director David Boceta ushers actors and audience members into a state of disquieting liminality, a no man’s land straddling utopia and dystopia. The piece succeeds in fostering a communal and self-supportive dialogue around the meaning of love but, at the same time, leads performers and spectators to reassess our understanding of the classics when theater was plunged into survival mode.
Notes
1 On Lope’s exile in Valencia, see Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, 91–94.
2 En otro reino extraño is accessible at the following address: http://teatroclasico.mcu.es/2020/06/04/en-otro-reino-extrano/.
3 What we could call confined theater, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked much debate among professionals regarding the ontological status of theater. Entertaining such a complex examination exceeds the parameters of this article.
4 Simon Murray and John Keefe refer to this phenomenon as “theaters of human absence and of non-physical presence,” exemplified by Edward Gordon Craig's concept of the Übermarionette (“Superpuppet”), Enrico Prampolini's Teatro magnetico, and Giacomo Balla’s actor-less Feu d'artifice (Firework) (264).
5 The same could be said for the opera genre, another performance art with a storied cultural tradition.
6 The architectural and physical conditions of theater production played a significant role for Brander Matthews in order to properly understand prominent Western playwrights from Sophocles to Ibsen (Carlson 1). Matthews’s idea evolved over time, but, to a certain extent, it remains concretized for most traditionalist directors and theater critics.
7 It is important that the CNTC was one of the first national institutions to lead this type of initiative, paving the way for other private and independent companies to create other digital projects. In the global crisis experienced in the wake of COVID-19 if theater has kept afloat, it has been thanks to the collective effort where the companies with less means have had the greatest merit in this artistic struggle for survival.
8 See the “Real Decreto 463/2020, de 14 de marzo, por el que se declara el estado de alarma para la gestión de la situación de crisis sanitaria ocasionada por el COVID-19”.
9 Nonetheless, let’s not forget that while the word confinement has become representative of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also indelibly marks early modern and contemporary Spanish theater. Julio Vélez Sainz points out: “El teatro clásico español no se entiende sin los confinamientos de Segismundo y de doña Ángela, ni el moderno sin el de las mujeres de La casa de Bernarda Alba, ni, ya en términos cómicos, el de don Mendo con su venganza. Las performances de Liddell o de García no se sitúan correctamente sin comprobar sus cuerpos asaltados. Gran parte del teatro del absurdo de Arrabal, de Ionesco, o de Beckett tratan del contagio, de la enfermedad, del confinamiento. No en vano, el teatro nace con la peste que asola Tebas y que Edipo logra curar con su sacrificio.”
10 This artistic recontextualization of classical theater—which was not without risk—is precisely one of the foundational principles of Homar's five-year plan during his term as a director (2019–2024) (Homar).
11 See addendum for a detailed outline of the complete dramaturgy of the piece. I am grateful to Luis Sorolla and David Boceta for sharing the unpublished script and for granting me permission to publish some sections in this article.
12 Originally, these scenes were not thought to be part of the original piece and were added only later to the digital montage (Fernández “En otro”).
13 Trujillo’s choreography is a personal, intimate response to the way he perceives love in sixteenth and seventeenth Spanish plays contextualized within strict heteronormative patterns.
14 In La boda, Lauro and Febo are united by camaraderie, which leads them to a total commitment to each other (Roso Díaz 383). In La prueba, the protagonist Flora, in addition to exhibiting a clear intellectual superiority compared to the rest of the male characters in the play, disguises herself as a man and lures Laura into a bond with an explicit lesbian subtext. David Castillejo has described La prueba as Lope’s greatest lesbian play (83–84), and most critics have been unanimous in framing it as a proto-feminist comedia for endorsing gender equality. See articles by Conxita Domènech, Delys Ostlund, Marcella Salvi, and Julio González Ruiz.
15 See Lillian Von Der Walde Moheno’s article, “Lo esencial y lo arbitrario. Un acercamiento a La vengadora de las mujeres de Lope de Vega.”
16 Sannazaro poem “Arcadia”, a published in Naples in 1504, inspired a plethora of works among which were Lope's Arcadia (1598), a roman a clef alluding to his love affairs and those of the Duke of Alba. In 1620, Lope revisited the Arcadia topos in a homonymous play.
17 There are, indeed, literary precedents where a group of characters withdraws from society to speak of love in the midst of a plague. Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the most illustrative examples. In Spain, María de Zayas experiments with a similar contextual frame in her two collections of short stories Novelas amorosas ejemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647).
18 One of the most shocking and iconic scenes from the movie is when César, the protagonist, runs in the middle of the day through a deserted Gran Vía in Madrid.
19 To recreate En otro reino for the stage, additional members had to join the artistic team: set designer Almudena Bautista, video artist Bruno Paena, light designer Felipe Ramos, and choreographer Edu Cárcamo.
20 To consult the plots or other specific data about the plays cited in this article, see the Arte Lope database: https://artelope.uv.es/bibliotecaDigital/.