Curling leaf

Slim pickings for my blip today ... I had a wander round the garden. 

This evening we went to a play at the Casa de la Cultura (yep, third night running), given by an ad hoc theatre group. It was advertised as being about the Desbandá, a flight of refugees from Málaga to Almería in 1937 that resulted in thousands of deaths. But actually it wasn't about that specifically; it was based on a German play written I believe in the 1950s about refugees and war more generally, and the way people turn a blind eye to what's happening beyond their own lives.  The director is a local German doctor who as well as having a practice in Almuñecar does humanitarian work around the world.

 He'd chosen to present the play in three  languages, so there were three groups of actors on stage. Each group had the same text, in different situations; the German speakers were locked in a cattle truck, the English speakers in a refugee camp, and the Spanish in a cellar in a war zone. Meanwhile images of war and fascism were projected on a screen behind them.

The play was quite simple, based around a single idea of being trapped in confined spaces with received ideas, and refusing to see what is going on in the wider world. But it was effective, and great for language learners. I was quite gratified that I could even get the gist of the German, despite having not made any effort with it since the early 1980s.

Edit: updating this after googling the author of the original play. The director mentioned that he was Günther Eich, without saying any more about him. Born in 1907, he was a poet and prolific author of radio plays from the 1930s onwards, hence he played his part in Nazi state broadcasting. His plays stuck to uncontroversial themes while still toeing the Nazi line, and one or two were specifically propaganda. After the war it was clear he suffered from feelings of guilt and remorse, and this play is in some sense a reflection of that ... he was gullible, and should have looked beyond the walls of Nazi thought.

 We found that Guiri had a cameo role reading a poem as a prologue, and afterwards we went to the usual after-theatre spot, the Francisco I, with guiri, F, and a couple of their friends. Wine, tapas, and good conversation in Spanish and English ... we didn't get home till midnight.