• Overview
• Staging information
• Translations
• Sample translations
• Production history

Productions in Spanish

La entretenida (Helena Pimenta)

Details

Director: Helena Pimenta
Production company: Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico
Dates: 2 February 2005
Venue: Teatro Pavón
Location: Madrid, Spain

Productions in English

The Diversion (John O'Neill)

Details

Director: John O'Neill
Based on translation: The Diversion by John O'Neill
Production company: The Anatomy Players
Dates: from 4 May 2007 to 5 May 2007
Venue: Old Anatomy Museum, King’s College London
Location: London, United Kingdom

Further information

This is the first known translation of this play. For the purposes of the staged reading the play was cut from about one hour and 50 minutes to just under one hour and 30 minutes. John O’Neill explained that he created the character of the Narrator in order to smooth over the transitions between scenes that otherwise might have seemed somewhat abrupt because of the cuts. He also changed the seguidilla that is played in the interlude in Act 3 into a samba, followed by a bossa nova, a change that he explained was largely forced on him by his limitations as a guitarist.

O’Neill wanted to recreate the feeling, which he felt was present in the original, of Madrid as a bustling metropolis, a magnet for people from the provinces who come to seek their fortune. In order to do this he wanted to have as many different regional accents as possible, so Ocaña is Welsh, Cristina is from Hampshire and Muñoz speaks with a Lancashire accent. Don Silvestre and Clavijo, who are from Peru, speak with caricature Latin American accents in order to emphasise that they are from the New World, a place of fantastic exoticism for Cervantes’ contemporaries, and to literally accent-uate their ‘otherness’, both for the audience and the other characters in the play. (Information from Programme Notes by John O’Neill, used with permission)

Entry written by Kathleen Jeffs. Last updated on 4 October 2010.

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