Synopsis
The Mayor of Zalamea
Adrian Mitchell from Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Published by Dramatic Publishing
3 Female
It is a battle-to-the-death between the instinctive honor-rooted justice of the Spanish peasant and the narrow, castebound justice of the military
We are in a small Spanish town where Philip II's troops are billeted en route for Portugal
An arrogant captain falls obsessively in love with the daughter of Crespo, a rich peasant farmer
Having failed to win the girl openly, the captain whisks her off to a forest and rapes her
When Crespo becomes mayor, the stage is then set for a conflict between his desire for instant justice and the tribal code of the Spanish army, a deadlock that is resolved only by the arrival of the king himself" ~ Michael Billington, The Guardian
In The Mayor of Zalamea, which premiered at the National Theatre in London, Calderon challenges our preconceived ideas of honor, of individual responsibility and of personal dignity and asks us to examine the relationship between civil law and military authority