With George Bush on My Mind

In the early spring of 2003, while touring Spain with a try-out run of Garcia Lorca’s ‘Play Without a Title’ as war in Iraq looms inevitable, a theatre troupe loses and halfway regains its equilibrium after the car-crash death of a player and the arrival of his replacement, a combative young TV star bent on turning the production into an antiwar statement. Co-scripted by the four lead actors (including ‘Talk to Her’s’ Javier Camara), Oristrell’s dry, sometimes bitterly witty chamber piece offers both sympathy and scepticism toward notions of art’s transformative political powers.