Lope de Vega's Peribáñez in Translation French-Colombian Style: Omar Porras's "Masks of Reality" on the Boards of The Comédie-Française

In the past decade, Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña was not only produced once in Spain (2002), but also translated and mounted twice in England (1998, 2002). Florence Delay's faithful French rendering under the title of Pedro et le Commendeur reached the boards of The Comédie-Française in 2006 under the aegis of Colombian director Omar Porras. Porras deployed the mask à la James Ensor—with its contrastive elements of illumination and color—to depict the feudal story of eroticism, transgression, and vengeance in his mise en scène. In view of the extreme appropriation of an early modern text that Porras's staging represents, one wonders to what extent the ideologically encoded liminalities affecting the audience's perception of the performance generated a sophisticated confrontation with René Girard's so-called brand of "anticathartic irony": irony that is "experienced in a flash of complicity with the writer at his most subtle, against the larger part of the audience that remains blind to these subtleties" (A Theatre of Envy 253). (SLF)