Lluïsa Cunillé

Cunillé is one of the most singular voices in Catalan theatre today. The characters in her plays meet and establish relationships totally by chance. They are solitary souls who are usually lost in the great desert of the modern world, seeking an arm to cling to so that they may be saved. Hence, despite the pessimism conveyed by her texts, the characters also try to keep struggling to escape the harsh situation in which they are immersed. Her plays avoid moments of high drama to focus instead on the small, everyday situations that, in fact, constitute the characters' moments of greatest truth. Cunillé is also the author of some of the best works of cabaret in Catalan theatre.

In the 22 (twenty-two!) plays written by Lluïsa Cunillé between 1991 and the time of writing, she has applied her poetry of subtraction, as I should like to call it, to different areas of theatre with results that are also different. From her total occlusion of the reference and/or situational context, which makes some texts frankly cryptic "but not necessarily lacking in humour, lyricism, dramatic tension and intrigue? "through to her resolve not to reveal, in others, the backgrounds or motivations of her characters, the connections between the different scenes that constitute a play, the degree of reality of each situation, the person to whom a word is addressed, the veracity of information of a confession and, in particular, the nature of affective bonds and the subterranean intensity of emotions and feelings, her work engages in a subtle and implacable exploration of the limits of opacity. To this, one should add her renunciation of elements of the spectacle and the extreme dramatic economy that also characterise her "subtractive" poetry.

José Sanchis Sinisterra, "Una poètica de la sostracció", Prologue to Accident (Barcelona, Institut del Teatre, 1996).


Lluïsa Cunillé, who writes in both Catalan and Spanish, is perhaps the playwright who, in venturing beyond Catalan cultural frontiers, has had most influence on the greening of the landscape of Spanish theatre today. In her work, integration of form and content is achieved in the construction of pieces that are seemingly intimate and ambiguous, and marked by a powerful enigmatic charge, texts that implacably escort the open expectations of her audiences through to a dramatic finale, which turns out to be as arid and unclear as the story that has preceded it. The effect is shocking: it seems that the play is presenting the grey and terrible page of everyday life in society, the solitude and poverty of communication, the need to fabricate excuses in order to enjoy the least social exchange ? All in all, these unresolved expectations, the unfulfilled waiting, the "greyness of the characters" and the final evidence of the "paradoxical banality of the dialogues" (Sanchis, 1996: 7-8)"effects that are perfectly coherent with the ethical dimension of the text" ensure that Cunillé's work enjoys the disproportionate enthusiasm of some admirers and the radical rejection of her detractors. Like Koltès, Cunillé tends almost always to present the same fortuitous encounter between two characters in a strange or mysterious setting. Curiously, however, the poetry of shock, of conflict, of the "deal" that hints at a proximity between the writing of the Catalan playwright and the poetry of her French counterpart, is not specified either, and it moves towards denouements that are somewhere between realism and the absurd, with a certain poetic and humorous charge. Noteworthy among her numerous works are Berna (Berne) (1992), La festa (The Party) (1993), Libración (Libration) (1993), Accident (1994) and Privado (Private) (1996).

Carles Batlle, "La nova dramatúrgia catalana: de la perplexitat a la diversitat" Caplletra, Nº. 22 (1997).


La festa shares with other plays by Lluïsa Cunillé a remarkable capacity to generate unease, unease in the milieu in which her characters dwell and in the feeling that is transmitted to her readers and audiences. This sensation is, in good part, the fruit of bringing to the stage the most utterly trivial and commonplace affairs, which is Cunillé's original way of approaching people's awareness of their solitude and their problems of communication. Continue reading...