SpanSoc - El Público

The Spanish Society presents: Lorca’s “impossible” play.

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.