'The author': a theatrical challenge

Here is a play that is a challenge both for the audience and for the British playwright Ella Hickson when she was commissioned by the Almeida Theatre in London to write a play with total freedom. Hickson took it very seriously, letting out the conflicts that, as a playwright, she has to face in a British theatrical system increasingly focused on profitable proposals that have little or no impact on the real world.

The author talks about theatre. What is it for? Why is it done? About the need to make box office. About how it is dominated by male chauvinist relationships. And she does it by starting in a theatre where the performance has ended. The technicians are clearing away part of the set. A young spectator (Ravina Raventós) who has forgotten her bag bursts onto the stage and finds herself in a tense verbal confrontation with a director and producer (Javier Beltrán). The young woman passionately defends a theatre that impacts the real world to change it, and the producer displays the male chauvinist and commercial tics of the theatrical system. It is a magnificent first scene that, in the end, will remain the best part of this show. The author challenges the audience as much as she challenges dramaturgical logic, but it can provoke good conversations on the street.

The audience, therefore, navigates from the powerful dramatic tension of that first scene (with a furious performance by Ravina Raventós) towards an ironic post-performance that makes it clear who is who in the theatrical system; it continues with a satirical domestic scene of bourgeois theatre; then it witnesses the author's metaphorical escape to a fantastic forest in a monologue as out of place as the performance by Nausicaa Bonnín is excellent, and it ends with another domestic scene that ridicules the archetypes of power in a lesbian relationship between the author and a compliant young woman. Anna Serrano's production has respected the radicality of the work with good direction of the performers and a staging well supported by Judith Colomer's changing set design and Marc Salicrú's lighting.