This show finished on Saturday 29 March 2025, and this page is being kept for archival purposes only.
The Spanish Society presents: Lorca’s “impossible” play.
Thursday 27 March - Saturday 29 March 2025
£7 SpanSoc Members / £8 Concession / £10 Standard
Show time: 7:30pm - 8:50pm
Todo el teatro sale de las humedades confinadas.
Todo el teatro verdadero tiene un profundo hedor de luna pasada.
All the theatre comes from damp places
All the true theatre stinks of a rotten moon.
A Theatre Director, Enrique, loves a man, Gonzalo. After staging a disastrous Romeo & Juliet with two men as the leads, a riot forms outside, demanding the Director’s death. Thus, Enrique and Gonzalo test the limits of their love, as society’s tolerance, and theatrical poetics are pushed into extremes.
Lorca’s late surrealist masterpiece is his most audacious, experimental and sacrilegious. It’s a torrent of surrealistic images including wailing horses, dancing vines and bells, a Roman Emperor, a magician, and a stage manager turned Idiot Shepherd. An explosive series of brilliant sequences and contradictions that force its audiences to feel rather than comprehend them. A never-ending riddle with paradoxical answers. A quasi-religious text about the purification of the body, love, and of the theatre itself.
Edited and translated in a new version by Salvador Kent, designed for a multi-roling cast, with an emphasis on the surrealistic excesses of the play; the Spanish Society’s production of El Público is an outrageously unique theatrical event. Developed alongside the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, it’s a rare chance to see this great, underperformed work brought to life.
27 / 28 / 29 March 7.30pm
£7 SpanSoc Members / £8 Concession / £10 Full Price
Performed in Spanish with English captions.
Please note the view of the captions is restricted in rows A and B, only.
Tickets available here
Content warnings: This show is a 16+ This show contains strobing lights, loud noises and scenes that could be distressing for younger audiences.
Actor - Elena of Troy / other roles Anya McChristie
Actor - Enrique (El Director) Sam Gearing
Actor - Hombre 1 (Gonzalo) Noah Sarvesvaran
Actor - Horse / Old Woman / other roles Mathilde Thorens
Actor - Horse / Pierrot / other roles Isaline Bernard
Assistant Stage Manager Cal Hind
Director / Editor / Translator Salvador Kent
Intimacy Consultant Rebecca Mahar
Set Assistant Non Steel
Set Assistant Tea Milano
Stage Manager / Set Designer Em Leites McPherson
Tech Manager Darja Prudcenko
Friday 11 April - By Aiden Crawley for The Student
Any play which begins with white figures in cubic horse masks whistling loudly in anguish down kazoos is bound, at first, to be somewhat bombarding and confusing, especially if you are, as myself, versed neither in El Público’s language of delivery nor its surrealist medium. It is this kind of throughout-laden spectacle, however, compellingly executed by the cast and crew of Salvador Kent’s recent production, which brings to the fore the question, “What meaning does all of this hold?”
Knowing that its author, Frederico García Lorca, comes from the same tradition as the likes of Dalí, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that you won’t find meaning in El Público in the traditional sense; there is no obvious moral of the story. In fact, although it may have a narrative, it doesn’t particularly want to be a story at all, taking the shape more of a series of related but independent frames, rather than a full reel of film. This fragmented format allows for the diverse exposition of repression, insecurity, and sexuality within the tormented mind that the play takes place in. It is certainly strange to find oneself at one moment in a theatre within a theatre, another in a hospital, and sometimes in completely opaque spaces, all with very little explanation. But, between the bedlam, we are made to focus keenly on the complex range of emotions performed. We see, for example, in quite brutal terms, both sides of internal conflicts between dominance and submission. In such scenes, the contrast between anguish and smugness is not only laid bare, it is transferred to us as we recall and relate our own moments of turmoil to the scenes on stage.
None of this emotional exploration is without context, however. The power dynamics between battling personalities can be taken as self-reflections on Lorca’s behalf; to say the least, he had a complex relationship with sexuality, but taking one step further, we begin to see how these personalities may, to some extent, have been informed by the social and political atmosphere of the time. The character of the Emperor in particular, whose domineering presence on stage is felt deeply, seems to marry up quite nicely with the surge of conservatism in Spain at the time Lorca was writing in the 20s and 30s, if not specifically with its nationalist leader Primo de Rivera. In this way, El Público doesn’t just display feelings, it holds that display up to us as a mirror, which in turn provokes an awareness of how easily the winds of our time can subconsciously seep into aspects of our being. The meaning of this surrealist play can then be found contradictorily in an egalitarian moral about the power we hold within to choose which aspects of ourselves we allow to be influenced, and which we decide to precede.