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The Siege of Numantia
Premiering in Season 2009-10
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Miguel de Cervantes's play
El Cerco de Numancia (ca. 1581) – The Siege of Numantia – is
about the siege of the Celtiberian city by Roman forces.
The Celtic people on the Iberian peninsula fiercely resisted the Romans for
twenty years. When the Roman general Scipio arrived with his troops and a
complement of mercenaries they laid siege to Numancia for eleven months. The
inhabitants of the town chose suicide rather than surrender. The play – in
Cervantes hands – is a nationalist drama, complete with mythological and
allegorical figures, which claims the deaths of these Celts as representative
of Spanish honour and foundational in the idea of the Spanish nation.
Guillermo's adaptation will be an anachronistic adaptation of the play,
probing resonances between this classical tragedy's memory of exemplary
deaths and contemporary discourse of freedom and duty as well as the
persistence of notions of good and evil and fate.
This is Governor-General Award-winning playwright Guillermo Verdecchia's
second collaboration with Modern Times, following his remarkable
bloom (2006) inspired by T.S. Eliot's The
Wasteland.