Joan Oliver i el Teatre de Txèkhov

Abstract

Joan Oliver's versions of Chekhov's plays stem from Oliver's interest in the Russian playwright. However, what promoted their continuity and performance was the Agrupacio Dramatica de Barcelona (ADB) and independent theater groups such as Teatre Experimental Catala (TEC) or Teatre de la Gavina. Thanks to them, Chekhov's theater would undergo a gradual integration into Catalan theater and literature that would become wide and definitive from the 1980s. For Oliver, his versions of Chekov were a way of contributing to the renovation and consolidation of Catalonia's theater at the extraordinarily difficult moment that Catalan culture experienced during the Spanish post-war period. This article looks at the circumstances surrounding the performance of Oliver's versions from the early 1950s to the late 1960s and their reception by the theater critics of the Barcelona press. The latter, pressed to write short articles to tight deadlines, often failed to give Oliver's text the attention it deserved, and although ...