1 - Belbel the Playwright

Summary

A striking feature of Belbel’s plays is that they defy easy categorisation, for he has written in a number of different dramatic forms. Some of these belong to what one might term popular theatre or paratheatre, including the student review, the musical, television soap and crime drama. He often parodies these and other forms, while, in his sometimes stylised versions of them, he belongs to an avant-garde tradition whose most obvious exponent in twentieth-century Spain is Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and in Catalonia, Joan Brossa. Neither can his plays be categorised easily as comedies or tragedies, and he frequently moves between the comic and the serious, often within individual plays. Xavier Puchades terms the process the ‘constant struggle between the comic Belbel and the tragic Belbel; the playful Belbel and the social Belbel’, a combination appreciated by German reviewers of his plays. Simon Boberg, Belbel’s Danish director, feels that Belbel belongs principally in the tradition of the French comédie, which, in Boberg’s view, is a key factor in his popularity in Denmark, a country that is attracted to this style of theatre. The dramatic forms and language of the plays convey a broad critique of contemporary society, not in a narrow sense of contemporary Catalonia or Spain, but of what might broadly be termed Western society. The plays’ characters are essentially middleclass or – particularly in the early works – classless, in the sense that their social status is not always evident. The subjects of the plays are not limited to contemporary society, however, and broader concerns such as sexuality and death characterise many of them.

This chapter aims, through an analysis of representative texts, to trace Belbel’s development as a playwright since the mid-1980s. These texts have been chosen to illustrate what I consider to be the principal stylistic and thematic features of his œuvre. The objective is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of his plays, nor to consider other genres in which he has written, notably the television soap and the novel in dialogue form, as, to date, his output in these areas is scant. I attempt to achieve a chronological balance, although I devote more time to his most recent plays as they have received less critical attention than those that belong to the pre-2000 period.