We are delighted to announce that internationally distinguished Argentinian playwright, translator, actor, and opera and theatre director Mónica Maffía will be joining Cymbeline in the Anthropocene. Dr. Maffía will create a new translation of Cymbeline in Castilian Spanish, which will be performed by her Buenos Aires-based theatre company, Setebos.

A graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colón de Buenos Aires and Middlesex University, UK, Dr. Maffía has had an extraordinary artistic career in which Shakespeare has played a leading role. In 2009 she wrote and published the first Spanish translation of Edward III (pictured above and below this paragraph), staged at the Teatro IFT de Buenos Aires. She also translated and  directed King John for the first Argentinian production of the play at the Teatro Hasta Trilce and the Auditorio Losada, both in Buenos Aires, in 2016.

Dr. Maffía has also created, performed, and directed a passionate one-woman show, La violación de Lucrecia, based on Shakespeare’s nondramatic poem. After being performed many times on tour, it was selected for performance at The British Council Mexico’s 2016 conference of Shakespeare in translation, “Un gran estejo de idiomas” (“A great feast of languages”) in Mexico City. At the same conference, Dr Maffía led a group of Shakespeare translators from throughout Latin America in discussions and workshops. Watch the video below for a trailer for the festival, featuring scenes from her show, and comments on the contemporary significance of Shakespeare:

Dr. Maffía also has an interest in Christopher Marlowe. In 2014 she wrote the first Spanish translation of Dido Queen of Carthage (pictured below). It was published and staged over the following two years in the Buenos Aires theatre, El Cubo, and in 2015 it was declared of National Public Interest by the Argentinian Ministry of National Culture.  

Dr Maffía has also recently developed interests in ecodramaturgy. Her dramatic monologue En carne viva was commissioned for the 2019 “Planeta Vulnerable” festival in Madrid (An aside from Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project leader Randall Martin: I read the play in a French translation [Á vif] made for a performance in France). En carne viva is a brilliant recreation of the central environmental conflict of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, but re-told through an original story informed by Anti-Tóxico: vive una vida más sana, by the award-winning Spanish journalist and lecturer, Carlos de Prada. The play also calls into question theatrical sponsorship by environmentally compromised corporations (e.g. like BP in the UK), and it intelligently questions contemporary theatre’s own environmental responsibilities in their material practices of production.

A list of Dr Maffía’s many other original works and stagings is available on her webpage. She also hosts a weekly Sunday radio programme, “Shakespeareana,” on Radio Universidad de Buenos Aires 87.9 FM. 

A profile for Dr. Maffía and her theatre company, Setebos, will be added to our “People” pages in the new year. We are thrilled to welcome Mónica Maffía to Cymbeline in the Anthropocene, and are eager to share her creations with the rest of our collaborators, and with you, our audience.