In Barcelona

 Josep Benet i Jornet was once one of the angry young dramatists of the Franco era whose acerbic, metaphoric works succeeded in working around the restrictive censorship regulations of the dictatorship. He is now the grand old man of Spanish playwriting - a mantle he arguably inherited from Buero Vallejo on the latter's death in 2000, and his works display a refreshing eclecticism, moving from minimalist studies of miscommunication to angst-ridden domestic dramas exploring families at war.

  His latest play, Dues dones que ballen (Two Dancing Women) premiered at the Teatre Lliure in a solid production by Xavier Alberti, details the burgeoning relationship between a woman with Alzheimer's (Ana Lizaran) and the carer (Alicia Perez) brought in by her family to assist her at home. Both remain unnamed throughout the duration of the piece, and both mask a series of insecurities, past traumas and present-day hang-ups that gradually allow them to find solace in each other's company.

   Lizaran is cantankerous, opinionated and difficult and suspicious of the industrious Perez,  often seen sweeping, clearing up and ironing. Each woman makes some traumatic revelations in the piece and their solution to the woes suffered -  a joint suicide pact - doesn't quite come off, despite the wondrous black humour with which Lizaran infuses her performance.

   This is certainly a production that doesn't opt for easy audience empathy, but it's also a rather clinical piece where the episodic scenes don't quite add up to a fully realised play. Benet's ear for dialogue renders the language credible and the performances are deft but the narrative is perhaps too keen to provide balance and closure.

  Lizaran likes Frank Sinatra, Perez prefers Robbie Williams. Lizaran  announces that she has bought Perez a much dreamed-of trip to Paris; Perez purchases the missing item that will allow Lizaran to complete her collection of comics, displayed on one of shelves in the tired cupboard at the back of the stage.

  Lloren Corbella creates a set of faded wooden balcony doors that look out enticingly to the world beyond. Tall windows indicate a realm that remains tantalisingly out of reach. Heavy wooden furniture and an antiquated radio points to a place where time has stood still. Lizaran's flat looks in need of a lick of paint  -  the walls have evident cracks and the wallpaper's seen better days, and embodies something of her own rickety state of mind. Lizaran gives a variation of the crabby old woman that she has made a specialism of recent years,  as with August Osage County and Forasters (Outsiders) both at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. Perez has a steely determinism that has been employed to powerful effect by Alex Rigola in Julius Caesar and Richard III. Lizaran is knowingly conspiratorial with the audience and her impeccable sense of comic timing helps to maintain a degree of momentum.

  Ultimately, however, the play, for all its pursuit of themes like the mourning of a dead child, unfulfilled dreams, fractured family relations,  realised in Benet's earlier works, remains in the shadows of Marsha Norman's 'night Mother.

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Eleven years on from its Catalan-language premiere, Conor McPherson's The Weir (here translated as La presa) is given a compelling production steeped in ghostly atmospherics by Ferran Utzet for La Perla at the Gothic Naves of the Biblioteca de Catalunya.

  Sebastia Brosa creates a rough and ready rural Irish pub through which the audience have to enter to take their seats in the auditoria; they effectively become part of the ghostly world of the isolated pub. The wind howls through the venue, offering a spooky feel to the sparsely-furnished space and the sound of rain offers a musical accompaniment that complements that of the musical motifs offered by McPherson and Utzet. The pub's expansive interior often allows for a palpable gulf to be created between the characters, each entrapped in their own poignant loneliness.

   Ramon Vila's Jack darts from place to place as if afraid of standing still. Armand Villa's Brendan has an air of resignation about him. Montse German's Valerie possesses both openness and reserve, to a degree that evidently fascinates the locals. Jordi Coronima?s Finbar exudes a confidence born of material comfort. Oscar Intente's Jim has something of the Teddy Boy that never grew up, proffering a delicate humour that never feels forced.

    The decor has some lovely touches. Well-worn bar stools and an aged bar testify to the place's age. Grubby taps offer the slim choice of Guinness or Harp. The clock doesn't keep time. Indeed, a sense of the suspension of time functions as one of the key motifs of the piece......

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It's hard to trump Stephen Daldry's production of Priestley's An Inspector Calls and Josep Maria Pou steers defiantly clear of the expressionism that was such a hallmark of Daldry's revelatory reading of the play in 1992 for London's National Theatre. In his staging for the Goya theatre, Pou opts for Priestley's original 1912 Edwardian location in a Catalan-language reading where a surface of seeming perfection soon displays its ominous cracks, threatening to bring down the whole edifice of a society built on wilful individualism and greed.

    Joan Sellent offers an idiomatic translation that manages to capture the formal language of the piece without ever allowing it to feel dated. Pou shaves and prunes the play, condensing the action into a compact narrative kernel. Pep Duran?s set offers a dining room weighed down by the accoutrements of middle-class affluence. An opulent chandelier hangs ominously over the Birling family at dinner, its increasingly bright light illuminating even the darkest corners of the room. A landscape of the English countryside hangs on the back wall  -  a pastoral idyll far removed from the corrupt urban intrigues of the Birling family. The drinks table presents an array of beverages and the expansive bourgeois dinner table an image of consumption.

   The front door is prominent at the back of the stage, a knowing sign that the audience can expect to bring in the wind of change that the mysterious Inspector signals. Indeed, Pou's entrance as Inspector Goole plays to these expectations. The door opens in a ghostly manner and there is a second-long pause before he enters a space weighed down by the family's material goods. In contrast to the monochrome colour scheme of the Birling family, Pou's Goole is dressed in brown -- the more modern cut of his clothes offering a premonition of what the future holds for this antiquated family. The corpulent Carles Canut proffers a smug and secure Arthur Birling, increasingly reliant on the drinks cabinet to see him through the night. David Marc's Eric Birling becomes progressively more dishevelled as the evening progresses. Even Victoria Pages's composed Sybil can't keep it together as the family's facades crack at the clinical questioning of Pou's persistent Inspector.

  The staging is able to provide a register that juggles both a surface realism and a spectral quality, highlighted in Albert Faura?s effective lighting. By the end of the play, the shadows of the room have disappeared and the chandelier's brutal glow leaves nowhere for the family to hide. .....

JOHN FREEDMAN

In Moscow

Yury Butusov's production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull is the most voluminous I have ever seen of this play not because it runs nearly five hours, but because in this director's hands the text expands to proportions I had never imagined. Butusov made it seem as if Chekhov words are being written, or rewritten, right there on the spot. Butusov shuffled scenes around; he shuffled actors around, allowing five different performers to take on the role of the frustrated young writer Treplev in Act Four; he entirely re-imagined several characters, especially the estate manager Shamrayev, who here is a flamboyant wannabe comedian played by the same actor who plays Shamrayev's son-in-law.

   Butusov himself takes the stage several times to lead dances, manipulate stage props or unleash a passionate cri de coeur when, for a moment, he assumes the role of Treplev. The Seagull is a play about art and artists. Treplev (Timofei Tribuntsev) imagines himself an innovative writer who, in the famous formula, is seeking 'new forms'. His mother Arkadina (Polina Raikina) is a provincial actress who brooks no competition for the attention she demands. Her beau and Treplev's rival Trigorin (Denis Sukhanov) is a well-known writer who, as he implies, writes well though Turgenev writes better. Nina Zarechnaya (Agrippina Steklova), the neighbour girl from across the lake, has it in mind to be an actress, but does she have what it takes? Even Arkadina's brother Pyotr Sorin (Vladimir Bolshov) wanted to be a writer in his younger days, although he never became one.

   As noted, Shamrayev (Anton Kuznetsov) here is something of an itinerant clown. The caustic family doctor Dorn (Artyom Osipov) famously declares at one point, 'How nervous everyone is! And how much love there is!' But what really fills Butusov's version of this play are the thunder and lightning that explode from the constant flow of creative juices and artistic egos. Even those not involved in the making of art are defined by it. Chekhov's melancholy Masha, who hates her father, pines for Treplev, but marries a local school teacher, is played here by Maryana Spivak as a tough, intelligent woman who is grudgingly willing to play the muse for artists who might be inspired by her.

  These characters are in the process of creating their lives,  or of watching them fall apart, which just may be a closely related activity. Designer Alexander Shishkin suggested that visually by building a set that looks like the chaotic space of an artist's workshop. At various times the stage is strewn with ropes, flowers, crosses, stand-alone door frames, crude drawings done live on a paper wall, and a table full of fruit that suggests an extraordinarily luxurious still-life painting. Chekhov?s tale about the jealousies, rivalries and ambitions among Arkadina, Treplev, Trigorin and Nina Zarechnaya remains intact. But it now slips into the shadow of this production?s main thrust  -  an attempt to discern what art is, how is it made, who makes it, and why do they do it? Butusov eliminates the consideration of 'success' and 'failure' in art. This is an exploration of a process, and that process is the only thing that has meaning.

    This is visible clearly in Act Four when numerous actors share segments of the dialogue between Treplev and Zarechnaya. By this time both have had success  -  he at writing, she on stage  - but both are still wracked by doubts. By shuffling actors who have played Arkadina, Trigorin, Masha and others into this scene, Butusov creates something of a quadraphonic portrait of the creative personality. He demonstrates that greatness is precariously close to mediocrity while suggesting that the opposite is also true. As for the price one pays and the rewards one reaps for committing oneself to a life in art, Butusov?s final image provides a stunning answer. A dancing girl (Marina Drovosekova), a character Butusov added to the cast, weeps tears of diamonds.

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One of the great things about art is that it embraces the impossible. The latest proof of that for me is Teatr.doc's Light My Fire, written by Sasha Denisova and directed by Yury Muravitsky. There is simply no way that a Russian production purporting to tell the stories of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix should work. I frankly went to this show shaking and trembling in anticipation of an unbearable two hours. Within moments my snobbery had been knocked off its self-erected pedestal. By the third of this production's two dozen brief scenes I was enthralled.

    Light My Fire is an innovative, moving performance that manages to spoof and revere its characters simultaneously. But that is only the beginning. It merges cultures and travels through warps in time, making the past present and vice versa. The genius in the telling of this tale is that no one seeks to present anything even vaguely resembling a ?real? picture of these famous musicians, their short lives and their early deaths. All are offered up as mythological emblems of outcasts, rebellious youths and frustrated talents. These are people,  not legends,  who live in a society that does not understand them, and which they do not accept.

    The cleverest twist is that each musician is, in some way, Russian. They reminisce about performing in various Moscow theatres, about travelling to the Volga or about growing up in Vologda. They are interviewed by Russian TV personalities on Russian TV (with footage of American talk show host Dick Cavett projected on the wall). The implied setting is often a Russian school room,  the characters carry around the kinds of notebooks that Russian school kids do their lessons in. At the same time cultural and historical references are pulled in from all over  -  hurricane Katrina stands alongside the movies of Oliver Stone. Jimi Hendrix is from Uzbekistan.

   Light My Fire is what a Jewish scholar might call a midrash. It is a fantasy on the theme of artists bucking a society that bucks them. It is a universal story and it is the universality which this company holds to the forefront at every moment. Six actors share the roles of the three musicians, their families, their colleagues and band members. This lends a fluidity to the performance that repeatedly discourages us from seeing anything strictly biographical in what is portrayed. Yet many famous incidents are familiar  -  Jim arrested on charges of indecent exposure ('I just wanted to help people' he tells a furious policeman over and over); Janice agonising about what she perceives to be her lack of beauty; Jimi playing an incendiary 'Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock.

    Muravitsky's use here of music is clever and convincing. There is a hilarious scene of Jim Morrison (Ilyas Tamayev) disappearing during a concert performance of 'Light My Fire', while lead guitarist Robbie Krieger (Alexei Yudnikov), keyboardist Ray Manzarek (Talgat Batalov) and drummer John Densmore (Mikhail Yefimov) soldier on hoping against hope that the singer returns for the final verse. Janice (Arina Marakulina) becomes locked in a comic battle with her lead-guitarist while performing 'Summertime'. He constantly wants to overwhelm her with volume and notes; she repeatedly tries to outwit and outshout him. In both cases the actors don't pretend to play music so much as they perform skits about what it might be like to play this music. It?s a subtle but crucial difference that keeps intact this show?s balancing act between reality and make-believe. The performance?s prologue immediately reveals Muravitsky?s knowledge and understanding of his topic. The entire cast, including the enigmatic Anna Yegorova, at moments a dead ringer for Janice, bounces out on stage to do a wild Hippie dance to a recording of Jim Morrison singing a song not by The Doors, but by another Morrison - Van Morrison's proto-punk classic 'Gloria'. From this sleight of hand  Light My Fire proceeds to play tricks and throw surprises at us for two glorious hours.

ON IN MOSCOW

Anne and Helga: I'll Say Good-bye Just in Case, Joseph Beuys Theatre; Brother Ivan Fyodorovich after Dostoevsky, Studio of Theatre Art; Buddenbrooks after Thomas Mann, National Youth Theatre; Comedy by Ivan Vyrypaev, Praktika; The Diary of a Madman by Gogol, Young Spectator Theatre; Enemies: A Love Story after Singer, Sovremennik Theatre; Era of Protest after Andre Roussin, Theatre Near the Stanislavsky House; A Family Affair by Andrei Platonov, Meyerhold Centre; The Field by Pavel Pryazhko, Contemporary Play School; Gerontophobia by Vadim Levanov, Winzavod; I Am the Machine Gunner by Yury Klavdiev, SounDrama Studio; I Don't Believe by Mikhail Durnenkov after Konstantin Stanislavsky, Stanislavsky Theatre; The Imaginary Operetta by Novarina, School of Dramatic Art; Iwona, Princess of Burgundy by Gombrowicz, Vakhtangov Theatre; Katya, Sonya, Polya, Galya, Vera, Olya, Tanya after Bunin, School of Dramatic Art; Killer by Alexander Molchanov, Young Spectator Theatre; Light My Fire by Denisova, Teatr.doc; Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, Pushkin Theatre; Music for the Fat by Pyotr Gladilin, Drugoi Theatre; One Hour Eighteen by Yelena Gremina, Teatr.doc; The Overcoat after Gogol, Moscow Art Theatre; Peer Gynt by Ibsen, Lenkom Theatre; Schooling of Bento Bonchev by Maksym Kurochkin, Playwright and Director Centre; The Seagull by Chekhov, Satirikon Theatre; Seryozha after Chekhov, Sovremennik Theatre; Seven Days before the Flood by Presnyakov brothers, Stanislavsky Theatre; The Snowstorm by Vladimir Sorokin, Nikitsky Gates Theatre; A Stalemate Lasts But a Moment after Meras, National Youth Theatre; The Tempest by Shakespeare, Et Cetera Theatre; A Time of Women by Yelena Chizhova, Sovremennik Theatre; Yevgenia?s Dreams by Alexei Kazantsev, Playwright and Director Centre. Plays International also regularly report from Dublin (Daniele Byrne), Paris (Barry Daniels), Berlin (Hans-Jurgen Bartsch)and Vienna (Dana Rufolo).