One of the most popular Spanish playwrights to have emerged in the 1990’s, Sergei Belbel’s Caresses adopts a structure similar to that used by Arthur Schnitzler in his controversial 1896 play, La Ronde. Like the play that inspired it, Caresses encapsulates a range of carefully interwoven encounters between various complex personalities, each of whom is attempting to deal with the contradictions and fraught challenges of seemingly normal contemporary relationships. Unlike Schnitzler’s piece, not all such encounters are of a sexual nature, but in each case the emotional fragility, passion and sheer danger makes for a compelling and often blackly humorous social satire.
This production features a cast of graduating professional actors from the Manchester School of Theatre.
Sergei Belbel is a Catalan-Spanish playwright and the director of Teatre Nacional de Catalunya.