Poetic “No to war”
Ull crític/ Festival Grec 09 
By Mario Roehrich, Translated from Spanish by Elisabet Ràfols
08/08/2009

It happens sometimes, not very often, that by polishing and polishing a literature classic, the theatre director manages to write a new play.The Iliad that opened on Wednesday in the gothic cloister of the Biblioteca de Catalunya. There was scorn and dream, drama and tenderness, on a stage covered with sea salt, to portray an inhospitable desert, real and as a metaphor. The extraordinary twist of the director is that five women tell us the fifty-one days of the siege of Troy, from the perspective of mothers and wives that se their loved ones leave for an absurd war. Thus Bentley-Fisher rescues, from the apparent warrior shell that covers the Homeric text, an allegation in favor of a civilization free of violence. For that, its creator deserves the plus of those who don`t settle for safety. 
There couldn’t be a clever adaptation, without a brilliant ending. The director manages to square the circle and leaves us with an indice of hope that plays with the symbology: thirsty earth, fire-blood and water-life in an inalterable cicle. That’s why it is provindencial the anachronistic break in the final scene, when the sounds of modern warfare are succeded by a torrential rain. Life sprouts from the destruction. 

Dietari De Santi Fontdevila
Translated from Catalan by Elisabet Ràfols
08/08/2009

Good closure for the Grec'09. It is a luxury to attend a artistically ambitious creation with a fascinating acting work in diction as well as in the movement. In the commitment of the actresses. There is emotion. There is power. There is quality. Stage adaptation by Canadian director Tom Bentley-Fisher. 

Wallpapered Flat
by Francesc Massip (Avui, 10/8/09)
Translation from Catalan by Elisabet Ràfols

The best of the Festival were the Catalan productions. Two productions I attended were more than remarkable. I am referring, on the one hand to Ifigènia- on the other hand, Ilíada, a summary actualization of the classic focusing on the human voice, doing without the divine interventions and exposing the current passions of dominant males who still find beauty in war. The version of Canadian Tom Bentley-Fisher, with the collaboration of Elisabet Ràfols, gave the space of the Biblioteca de Catalunya a strange tragic density filling it with coarse salt and doing without the famous Trojan horse and the arrow that pierced Achilles’ heel, elements from the Eneid by Virgil.