Theatre as alchemy: On politics, culture and running a theatre company for over 40 years

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. For more information about Els Joglars and Albert Boadella see the company's webpage www.elsjoglars.com.

2. 2006 saw the restaging of the piece under the title of La torna de La torna. The revisions included a framing of the original production whereby the now senile perpetrators of the play's horrific deeds – members of Franco's Guardia Civil – were made to witness their own actions. See Simon Breden, ‘La torna de La torna by Els Joglars: History and Production’, Gestos, 21:42 (2006), 148–157, and Maria M. Delgado, ‘La Torna Returns’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 15:3 (August 2005), 372–374.

3. See Oriol Malló, El cas Boadella. Desventures d'un joglar en temps de transició (Barcelona: Flor del Vent, 1998).

4. Jordi Pujol – leader of the centre-right nationalist party Convergència i Unió – was President of Catalonia's regional government from 1980 to 2003. Pujol was himself targeted directly by two of Els Joglars' pieces, Operació Ubú (1981) and Ubú President (1995), in which he was portrayed as a megalomaniac and a corrupt, power-thirsty politician.

5. Boadella was an activist within Spain's socialist party (PSOE-Partido Socialista Obrero Español). More recently the director has been involved in the creation of a new political party – Ciutadans de Catalunya (Citizens of Catalonia) – which supports the rights of left-wing voters to be represented by a non-nationalist party, since it is the party's belief that Catalonia's main left-wing parties – PSC (Partit Socialista de Catalunya), IC (Iniciativa per Catalunya) and ER (Esquerra Republicana) – have adopted a nationalist discourse. See www.ciutadansdecatalunya.com.

6. Els Joglars have also produced two feature films directed by Albert Boadella, and further audiovisual work. More information can be found on the company's official webpage www.elsjoglars.com.

7. Albert Boadella, Memòries d'un bufó (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2001), pp. 57–58.

8. The Manifest was a document created by a group of Catalan intellectuals with the objective of finding out whether the Catalan people believed the birth of a new political party – placed to the left and with a non-nationalist agenda – was necessary. For more information on this issue see www.ciutadansdecatalunya.org.

9. In 2006 Albert Boadella was taken to court by some of the members that were part of the original cast of La torna. The actors accused the director of having breached copyright laws regarding the authorship of the play. Boadella, they claimed, had no right to restage the play again without their consent since it had been the result of a collective staging process. Boadella claimed that the work of the actors had not involved authorship of the production and he eventually won the court case.

10. Esperpento is a dramatic term created by the Spanish writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, expounded by the author in his play Luces de bohemia (Bohemian Lights, 1924). Maria M. Delgado explains the term by relating it to the theory of the grotesque and as ‘part of the tradition of deformation evident previously in the paintings of Velázquez and Goya which perturbs and disturbs the reader/spectator but is at the same time beautiful in the mathematical precision of its distortion’. See Delgado, ‘Introduction’, in Valle-Inclán: Plays One (London: Methuen Drama, 1993), pp. xiii–xlii (p. xxxiii).