To mark the opening of Scotland's new parliament, the Edinburgh Festival, founded in 1947 and Grec Festival, Barcelona, which was formed in 1976 against the background of the transition to democracy and in reaction to the restrictions of the Franco regime, and which runs every year from June 21 to the end of July, have each commissioned a play from a leading playwright of the other's nation. This project is in partnership with Scotland's home of new writing, the Traverse Theatre. The Speculator (which I did not see), a play set in Paris, 1720, concerning the Scot, John Law and the playwright Marivaux, written by the Scotsman David Grieg was commissioned by Barcelona; The Meeting, a modern piece, set in any time, was commissioned by Edinburgh.
Often compared to Harold Pinter, Cunille is one of Spain's most prominent contemporary playwrights, winning many awards for her work. The Meeting, a strangely haunting combination of five mysterious scenes, none related to each other but for the character of the Man, played with authority by John Stahl, is directed by Alberti, to whom the play is dedicated. Each scene contains a few disparate witticisms spoken by characters who seem lost in space, underscoring the isolation of our present society; there is little to no action and the direction is so excruciatingly slow, at times it is hard to keep one's eyes open. Each scene could be developed as a full play, but instead is left unfinished, a question mark in a time capsule. The first amusing scene takes place on a park bench and concerns the conversation of two men, each conning the other. The Man seems to espouse Cunille's philosophy, when he tells the Old Man (Russell Hunter), "Time is the only thing that's ours to keep."
Time is examined again in the second scene, which takes place in a watchmaker's shop. The female Watchmaker admits to the rootless Man that she is missing a breast, but it does not deter him from pursuing her. In the third scene, the Man runs a photo booth and the Young Man is having his picture taken, because he's going to enter a medical guinea program for insomnia. After a protracted conversation followed by a kiss between the two, the Young Man leaves, and now the Man is having his photo taken, by a doctor, for a job. When asked why he's taking this job working on the new line for the underground, the Man says, "I want to work on something that once it's done, will last a long time...I've always worked on things that were a bit temporary...." The punch line concerns the amount time that the doctor has spent with his patient -- obviously inspired by socialized medicine -- something we Americans are beginning to experience.
Scene four takes place in a railroad station, and the talk is about insurance companies and nightmares. In the last scene, the Man is alone in a cinema watching a film in which the last images are of a train station. The scene switches and the Man and the Female Stranger are on the platform of an underground station, waiting for a train. He vomits; she hugs and kisses him. The play ends. The program includes the script, which reads much better than it plays.
