The Dog in The Manger

No matter what you say, say nothing

this has led to a play that is constantly on the boil, and where characters are forever drawn into that dangerous area where words begin to mean real things, where real things are constantly on the verge of being said and of being understood

There is a point here

libertine but not free

suggestion of games of sexual power and domination

most controlled and most erotically liberated plays

Theatre, for him, was a business

What is the relationship between blood, blue blood and sex? What are the subterfuges that nobility will employ in order to maintain its privilege and its status? And the question that underlies it all: where does the principle of love, the bond of common humanity, sit with all of this

it was to lose the volatile audiences of the Madrid theatres of his day, the ‘corrales’ which, not unlike the theatres of Elizabethan England, were like crammed and throbbing cockpits

reminiscent of Shakespeare’s so-called ‘double time’