Sergi Belbel

Mobile

digital comedy

Translated by:: Gábor Duró and Mercédesz Baksa

Are you going to pick up? Delete? Send? Ring? Fix? Hang up?

Catalan writer-director Sergi Belbel's play puts the mobile phone, an inseparable part of our everyday lives, under the microscope, and does so in a way that turns it into a dramaturgical device.

What happens when the characters meet almost exclusively on mobile phones? What do personal relationships become when they are entangled in the omnipotence of the gradient? What does the word spoken here and now become when it is communicated to a device, to a voice recorder, to a video recorder? What happens when the message reaches its destination elsewhere?

The comic interweaving of the lines unfolds in an extreme yet eerily realistic situation: the lives of the four characters - Sara, Rosa, Claudia, and Jan - intersect in the aftermath of a terrorist attack at an airport. The real bomb triggers an even more real explosion inside them: their most hidden feelings, thoughts and desires are brought to the surface. In extremes of love and hatred, they are all desperate to find what they can hold on to in a world that is falling apart.

Sergi Belbel (b. 1963) is a Catalan writer-director, director of the National Theatre of Catalonia since 2005, and one of the best-known and most performed contemporary Catalan playwrights. His play Mobile was first performed by Plan B, an independent theatre company in Copenhagen, in 2006, and premiered in Hungarian in 2009 (Neptun Brigád).

Alexandru Colpacci (1945) - currently a director based in Paris. He started his career in Oradea and had several successful productions until 1981. His production of Mrozek's Tango with the Hungarian company won several awards in 1979. His most recent production was Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, directed by Mrozek in 2004.

 

Synopsis translated by: Vivien-Tamara Sárközi

Cast of characters:

Premier: 2011.03.04