ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 looks at Roberto Bolaño’s celebrated novel, 2666, and its transposition to dramatic mode in the form of Àlex Rigola’s theatrical interpretation with Teatre Lliure, first performed in Barcelona in 2007. Taking sacrifice as a central trope, the chapter is interested in the ways in which the representation of pain and death receives such a radically different treatment in Rigola’s stage version. Arguing that this is part of a continuum of representations of feminicidio as sacrificial victims, it examines the implications of such treatment in the context of audiences in Catalunya in 2007 in the aftermath of the passing of the Ley de Memoria Histórica [Law of Historical Memory] relating to the victims of Spain’s civil war past. While the writhing, screaming body of the principal actor (Alba Pujol) raises troubling questions about the way in which portrayals of ‘other’ women are frequently locked into discourses of hysteria, I also argue that Rigola’s reliance on a theatrical repertoire based on excess in the representation of rape and murder opens up a space in which the possibility of agency is enabled and indeed, energized.
