Projecte NISU

Word and image are fused in a powerful play that employs a fragmented, repetitive narrative to portray the contemporary world. The winner of the 2013 Theatre Institute’s Adrià Gual Prize transfers the myth of Sisyphus to a motorway rest area.

If you sit on a bench in motorway rest area, you will see life pass before your eyes. Or, if not, at least fragments of lives that may be repeated over and over again in a kind of mythical torment that, at times, you may not even be able to perceive. Because lives, passions and feelings might seem personal and exclusive, but perhaps they are nothing more than repetitions or new versions of lives, passions or feelings that someone has already experienced before, and which are repeated over and over again ad infinitum. In Shell, these repetitions occur in a space that the French anthropologist Marc Augé called “non-place”, one of those sites with no importance in themselves, and which are defined only by the use that is made of them. For example, a hotel room or a motorway rest area, which can easily become a contemporary hell in which characters who have lost their identity are condemned to repeat fragments of lives.

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