Burundanga

Country: Spain
Company/ Theatre: Sala FlyHard, Barcelona
Language: Catalan/ Spanish
Author: Jordi Galceran
Director: Jordi Casanovas

seen on the 15.06.12 in Wiesbaden "New Plays from Europe" festival

Description: Life could be so simple, if only people didn’t lie. Far from it! Nothing other than a truth serum causes things in this offbeat political comedy to get out of control. Berta just wanted to find out whether her boyfriend was cheating. She never dreamed that he would reveal his militant underground life and the organisational structure of ETA, the Basque separatist movement. For the next 90 minutes, five Spaniards speaking different native languages desperately try to spread a protective mantle of lies back over the facts. If only they could make sense of each other…

what I liked: It´s a comedy, it portrays fairly normal people, there´s nothing arty or overly intellectual about it. The way it deals with the ETA in a humourous way was clever and refreshing.

what I disliked: The play was fine, my receiver for the simultaneous translation was dodgy though and kept turning itself off. Still managed to miss not too much. Strangely, even the language didn´t annoy me as much as I expected (note: I´m one of the few people who absolutely cannot stand the sound of the Spanish language) though I found the Catalan more pleasant to listen to. What I was missing a bit was background informations about how much the (Catalan) characters understood of what the Spanish one said on stage so the contrast of the two languages got lost in the translation.

verdict: A funny and easy-going comedy with good (looking) actors and without any lenghts that probably will never become a timeless classic but entertains well right here and now. I found it deeply exhilarating to see something funny and conventional again embedded in the all the festivals abstractness and avant-garde.