Theatrical Representation Module

“LAS VARIACIONES GOLDBERG”

“Las Variaciones Goldberg” is a play written by George Tabori. This play is a production of Teatres de la Generalitat Valenciana. The director is Josep Maria Mestres. We saw the play on 1^st of December of 2005 at Teatre Rialto.

This play is a combination of two kind of stories. One follows the Bible and the other follows a plot linked with the theatre, the preparation of a theatre play (that follows the Bible).

Mr. Jota, the theatre director and Goldberg, the director assistant in the play that is being prepared, play the main forts of the play. Mr. Jota is a good person but at the same time he is bossy, unreasonable, etc. The play that is being prepared by Mr. Jota, Goldberg and the other actors (Raamah, Masch, Jafet, Ernerstina Van Veen, and Teresa Tormentina, that perform the different papers of the different scenes), follows the story of the Bible, that is to say, the play has the Bible as a plot. There is a strong relationship between the play and its preparation and also the Bible. The plot starts with the creation of man and ends in the crucifixion, crossing some of the parts written in the Bible. Other characters take part in the play, as Mari and the inferno’s angels. Mari is the stage cleaner and the inferno’s angels appear as a singing music group.

But there is a relation that is important. At the beginning of the assays all is chaos, the characters complain about their roles, their conditions in the play, their companions, etc. Mr. Jota is irritated and Goldberg has to solve everything. This situation also occurs in the Bible, at the beginning, as Tabori said: “But reading the Bible, which deal with the divine disasters, I realise that, at the beginning, in the Genesis, nothing works and all is dark”. The director of the play, Josep Maria Mestres also talks about the Bible disasters: “The plagues of Egipt, the slaughter of Isaac at the hands of his father Abraham, the universal deluge, the tumble of the ramparts of Jericho, the destruction of Babel Tower, the slaughter of the innocent saints.” Little by little, the situation changes, that is to say, in the theatre the actors start to prepare the play more carefully, and in the Bible the situation becomes better. It is difficult to take in this characteristic, but it is very important to understand the whole plot of the play that we see.

The space in which the play is acted is very interesting. We ee a stage in which there are not any elements because the characters have to prepare their play, that is to say, at the beginning there are no elements and we see the interior part of a stage as if we were watching the assay of the play that the characters are preparing. During the play, some persons place the elements which are necessary to assay the scenes. It is beautiful to see how the actors prepare the plays, because we only see the final staging. The stage changes during the play, but the lights too. There are some lights that only illuminate a character while he or she is talking. There are also lights of colours that are glowing when the actors move to another place on the stage, for example when a actor goes up the stairs that are in the bottom of the stage, or when the persons put another elements in the stage. During the entire a table and some chairs were on the stage and these are used by Mr. Jota and Goldberg. The rest of the elements are more tables, chairs, beds, etc.

The wardrobe is another aspect to study in this play. It is very varied and the actors are continuously changing their costumes. There are for example simple dresses for normal wear and there are other more comical dresses such as the dress that an actor has to wear when representing the scene of “Adam and Eve” (it was very funny for many people in the audience). The clothes were modern.

There are some aspects of this play that I have to mention, firstly the play has a sense of humour combined with sex, music and violence. The ambience in the theatre was very positive because the play was exciting, entertaining and very interesting, aside from funny. On many occasions the sex was very explicit and there were many laughs from the audience. During the play a woman can not stop laughing, and it makes the rest of public laugh more.

My opinion of this play is that it is very good, its development was very good, and the theme that it dealt with is very interesting, the relation between the theatre and the Bible. We have to see this play to realise the similarities that theatre has with other things, in this case, with the Bible (religion) or better, still the development of them.