Dramaturgical Notes
By Mike Dorrell
Every so often, a play crosses your desk and disturbs you in a way that makes you think again about something you would prefer to forget. Skin in Flames, by Catalan playwright Guillem Clua, translated by D. J. Sanders, is one of these plays. It is an arresting and disturbing accomplishment, full of reminders about the different ways in which the First World dominates the Third. Sometimes sexually graphic, always politically provocative, Skin In Flames probes both the morality of success in photo-journalism and the establishment of a questionable democracy in a nameless third world country.
Frederick Salomon, the photographer who took an iconic photo of a little girl flying through the air due to a bomb explosion twenty years ago, has achieved fame and fortune, but there seems to be a vacuum at his psychological center. When the play opens, he has not taken a photograph in recent years. Now, he runs an agency, but others have taken over the creative functions. There is a sense in which success has exploited him to the point of emptiness. His disturbing encounter with the journalist Hanna, for example, is also an encounter with a part of himself for which he seems to have disclaimed responsibility. The Frederick Salomon we meet at the beginning of this play suffers from an incapacitating numbness. The one we leave at the end is capable of action, questionable though it may be. Salomon's journey, then, is a trip through an embattled minefield of guilt and privilege towards a deeply personal kind of release that may also be political. In this journey, the enigma of Hanna the journalist's true identity, surfaces and retreats and allows the audience to ask the salient questions and follow Salomon's conflict as we must.
Parallel to this action, taking place in the same hotel room, though not contemporaneously, the scenes between Dr. Brown and Ida are more forthright both sexually and politically. There is no question of who is in charge here, or for what purpose. As brutal as Brown's misuse of Ida is, it obviously comes from a deeply disturbed psyche with a derangement of the conscious surface that is only satisfied by the complete sexual humiliation of another. If Brown is meant to stand for a significant part of us; if the sexual metaphor stands for the political, then the playwright is telling us the psyche of western dominance is deeply traumatized, and is only able to find release through despicable practices. It is a troubling indictment.
These twin encounters interact with and reverberate against each other in ways which are both disturbing and arresting, and create an unrepeatable dramatic surface of shifting time scales and moral values. Both deeply psychological and political, Skin In Flames is also ultimately a visual theatrical experience that leaves scenes indelibly imprinted on the cortex of our complacency.