The Sickness of Stone

El mal de la piedra
by Blanca Domenech (Spain), 2014
One male, one female, and voices.

Published in The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Plays, shorlisted for the 2019 Valle Inclán Award for literary translation, out now.

An extract is published online in Asymptote

Decades on, and a former dictator’s self-mythologising mausoleum is crumbling from within.  Hired by the government of today, a young researcher spends scrupulous hours seeking ways to keep it standing.  But as Right and Left clash in the outside world and the political debate creeps violently towards the door of the monument, her attempts at professional distance are quickly challenged.  Trapped inside with a guard whose motives are unclear, she can no longer escape her own hypocrisy, and her once-proud arguments are dangerously threatened from every corner.

It’s like having a wound. Would you keep on picking at a wound? Sticking your finger into it over and over again? No. No you wouldn’t. Not unless you’re a masochist. And that’s what you are, you lot from Historic f***ing Memory. How do you heal a wound? You let it scar over. And once it’s scarred over, the scar stays there forever. And you forget about it. And you carry on like nothing’s happened. Like it’s part of your body. You just forget. If what you really wanted was reconciliation, you wouldn’t spend all f***ing day picking at the wounds.

The Sickness of Stone had its world premiere on 6 July 2016 at Out of the Wings, King’s College London.  It was performed by Denise Hoey and Christopher Knott, with the voices Ian Keir Attard, Gavin Duff, Ben Stanley and Almiro Andrade.  It was subsequently premièred in Madrid and, in August 2016, in New York at the Access Theatre. It was later performed at the International Play Reading Festival, Columbia University, New York, June 2019

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