Thursday, 22 September 2011

El Maleficio de la Mariposa - The Butterfly's Evil Spell

This is one of Lorca's "puppet plays" and one of my favourites. I translated it once and directed it for Forbidden Theatre Company's "Script in Hand Performances', round about the year 1999. I never dared produce it as a full show. The cast is large; the language is not straightforward; the design concept needs to be incredible as the cast is made up of cockroaches and other insects. Nothing literal will do, although I can't resist the temptation to share a photo from the original production, taken from http://margaritaxirgu.es/


The play is beautiful, wrapped in an innocence characteristic of Lorca's - but to an audience not used to dealing with parables and metaphors, it might look like a story for children. Far from it. 
So I take my hat off to Hip Pocket Theatre in the USA, for staging what looks, from the reviews, to be a very succesful production. (I am a little bit jealous that I didn't have the guts....)

Good luck with it from the other side of the pond. 

(I would have liked to post this earlier to raise a bit of awareness but haven't been able to.)