The End: Drama in the Face of Death
From 10 am to 2 pm and from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
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 this planet joins us all.
Today life expectancy is the highest it’s ever been, yet with rapid climate change and the recent unpredicatability of global events and politics, the possibility of the apocalypse has been brought to the forefront of the popular imagination, in the sharpest focus it’s been since the cold war.
We’re all going to die, but when? And how?
Are we really going to be the generation to witness the end of everything?
Or is it just easier to imagine the end of the world than imagining a world carrying on without us?
When I look at all of my favourite works of art across every medium, they all seem in some way to be wrestling with these ideas.
How is it possible to live and to love in the face of impending death?
How can we raise our children as our own life ebbs away?
How can we keep going to work each day as the planet itself dies around us?
And how can we as writers confront our own end?
Do we write eulogies like Arthur Miller, or laugh into the darkness like Joe Orton?
Why do we write at all? Is it all a thinly-veiled reach for immortality?
Or, thanks to the internet, are we all immortal already?
Alistair McDowall
Seminar description
The guest playwrights of this edition are Adrián Bellido (Spain), Geoffrey Dahm (France), Lara Díez (Catalonia), Françoise Dô (France), Francesca Garolla (Italy), Frankie Meredith (England), Domingo Milesi (Uruguay), Jakob Nolte (Germany), Aino Pennanen (Finland) and Thomas Perle (Austria). All of them have been recommended by international theatres and centres. They will send in advance a short play on the subject. These plays will be translated into Catalan and presented in the form of a staged reading by l’Obrador d’estiu’s Resident Company. The readings will be open to spectators.
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