Tenderness

The sea foams like the mouth of a rabid dog. When will we reach land and where exactly are we?

Three noble women – a mother with two daughters – were shipwrecked at sea to escape the presence of men. Three woodcutters – a father and two sons – took refuge on a deserted island and have lived without women for twenty years.

Contemporary Spanish playwright Alfredo Sanzol has thrown motifs, plots and images from Shakespeare's plays into the mixer of his imagination and distilled from them the essence called Tenderness. In language laden with Renaissance yearning to encompass the entire world, he draws the audience into a whirlwind of confusions, disguises and mistakes.

Above it all looms a smouldering volcano, and at its foot unfolds the age-old dance of two feuding "families".