XIV Obrador d'estiu

Ten years ago, I ran my first International Workshop at Sala Beckett’s Obrador d’estiu. I have been back every year for the past decade. Each year I choose a question to focus my work around. Ten years ago the question asked if the playwrights were facing “The End of Europe.”[...]

Are all plays about death? Whether we’re aware of it or not? For as long as art has existed, it has battled with our mortality. Trumping every conceivable difference we may have or believe to have with each other, the fact that all of us have a limited time on[...]

For the last thirteen years the Sala Beckett has organised, within the framework of its Obrador d’estiu, an international meeting-workshop of emerging playwrights from around the world. Recommended by theatres, centres for creation, institutes of culture and festivals in their respective countries of origin, they come to Barcelona to take[...]

Every year we invite a group of young writers from different countries to work during l’Obrador d’estiu with an experienced playwright. This year, for the first time this playwright is Alistair McDowall, who has proposed to work on the subject The End: Drama in the Face of Death. From this[...]

Like bodies of water, the words and images that Thomas Köck creates in the first part of his Climate Trilogy close in upon us. Are they floods from paradise rolling up here as a curse, revenge or a blessing for the earth? Or is it earthly paradise itself that is[...]

Like a Barcelona version of Hyde Park, this year’s Obrador d’estiu includes once more its own Speakers’ Corner, for anyone who wants to make their texts or dramatic scenes public and share them with the other participants. In an informal atmosphere, without any pressure of the “what will people say?” kind,[...]

La finestra by Ayşe Bayramoğlu La finestra [Windows] is a dark story about the denied and betrayed innocence of two teenagers, Esme and Huso, who live in a very small village where everyone knows each other. During the play they will take shelter in each other and begin telling fairy[...]

He calls himself Vandam. As Jean-Claude van Damme. He’s a hero. A warrior. Continental. He knows all about the battles. In both personal and historical sense. He has an opinion about everything. Politics. Women. The world. In the curial year of 1989, he stood in Prague on the National Avenue,[...]

Dominic is an elderly pensioner, living alone in a small flat. None of his neighbours know who he really is: during Ceausescu’s dictatorship, he used to be one of the Romanian secret service’s high-ranking officers, a cold-blooded torturer. Dominic has no remorse, since he considers those deeds patriotic acts. He[...]