Jugar con fuego
Music: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri
Libretto: Marina Bollaín (after Ventura de la Vega)
(Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid, 27 March 2026)

a critique by Miccone

The what and the how

It’s been more than a quarter of a century – hard to believe – since Jugar con fuego (‘Playing with Fire’) was last performed at Teatro de la Zarzuela. Now as then, it was one of the season’s main dishes, though this time we left feeling hungry.

Its stage director, Marina Bollaín, has given several interviews during the last few weeks reflecting on the ‘validity’ of what Jugar con fuego tells us. For her, it seems clear, the what is much more important than the how, which has led her to completely replace Ventura de la Vega’s original text with one of her own creation, set in a 2026 football stadium.

The result, sadly, proves superficial from the dramatic point of view. The Duchess is reduced to a capricious and fickle figure, far removed from her original complexity, where her condition as a widow – and therefore, a rich and socially autonomous woman – is essential to understand the scope of her games with the Marquis of Caravaca, with her father and with Félix. Nor does the elimination of Félix’s and Antonio’s noble lineage help, which in Ventura de la Vega’s libretto allows us to understand their ambiguous position within the social system and, consequently, the Marquis of Caravaca’s interest in promoting their rise. Devoid of that context, their actions lose meaning, and the dramatic framework dissolves into in a kind of cheesy afternoon sitcom.

What works on the level of conceptual equivalence – I would even dare say ‘nicely’, if I didn’t abhor football and everything it represents in our society – is revealed as over-simplification on the level of drama. Because Jugar con fuego is not a sainete-like farce: it is not articulated as a social fresco, but as a delicate machinery of relationships in which meaning emerges from language, ambiguity and the play of identities.

The court is not only a space of power: it is a network of codes, distances and conventions that make this game of misunderstandings precisely possible. The stadium, on the other hand, works in a different way: everything is overt, everything is instantly recognized, without filters or mediations. And that’s where Bollain’s boat starts to take on water. Because it is not just a matter of translating the action from one place to another, but of understanding what kind of relationships each space allows. There is no possible translation here: what there is, simply, is substitution. Where Ventura de la Vega constructs a dramaturgy based on the implicit, on ambiguity and on the spectator’s intelligence, the contemporary substitute opts for explicitness, direct identification and the reduction of conflicts to conventional patterns. In the last act, one of the boldest concepts of the original – the shocking change to the insane asylum and its ‘madmen’ – is suppressed, transformed here to sinister hooligans. So the result is not an update, but an impoverishment of those layers of reading that make Jugar con fuego something more than a simple love intrigue.

Unsinkable Barbieri

Fortunately, not everything sinks in this farcical flattening of one of the most sophisticated zarzuelas in the romantic repertoire. Because if this new Jugar con fuego proves anything, it is that Barbieri’s music carries uncommon anti-viral resistance to any assault from scenic bacteria.

Its complexity of ensembles – so characteristic, so original in its dramatic construction – worked admirably thanks to Álvaro Albiach’s conducting, with a theatrical pulse that seemed to flow, at many moments, independently from what was happening on stage. Where the staging opts for literalness, the score consistently deploys that play of tensions, ambiguities and superimpositions that constitutes one of the work’s great achievements, especially during the sensational second act.

Vocally the performance also reached a remarkable level. Ruth Iniesta created a Duchess of great musical solidity, capable of intelligently sustaining Barbieri’s demanding and nuanced vocal writing, while Alejandro del Cerro offered a Félix of careful line and sincere expression, very appropriate to the character’s personality. Bravo to both! Less convincing, on the other hand, were the Marquis and Duke of José Antonio López and David Lagares, lacking the necessary comic flair to reach their full theatrical potential. Clearly, in this case it was a castration imposed by the stage direction.

Beyond specific names, what is truly striking is to feel the extent to which Barbieri’s music continues to support – and support well – what the staging simply does not manage to reflect. Because in Jugar con fuego the conflict is not exhausted in the anecdotal plot, but is elevated through musical and verbal language to a much more complex dimension: one where the affirmation of desire ends up acquiring a weight that goes far beyond mere anecdote.

And so it could be said that this music – miraculous, considering that Barbieri was barely thirty when he composed it – ends up emancipating itself from the staging conceived by Bollaín, as if it were reclaiming its own logic in the face of shackles attempting to constrain it. It is not difficult to imagine this music pronouncing, with the same forcefulness as the Duchess of Medina in Ventura de la Vega’s original, even without human embodiment, these words that were erased here:

‘You are my father,
but, although I owe you respect,
you do not command me. I am a widow,
I am free. If you commit such violence
against him,
wherever Madrid sees me,
I’ll be seen with him...’

So I left Teatro de la Zarzuela happy to have heard this superb score once again, but sad to see that, when the what is imposed on the how, what is lost is not only the style, but the very meaning of the work. To get to the heart of a work, it is not always enough to invoke supposed modernity, and of course it is useless to deconstruct if what you build instead is, quite simply, a ball of fluff.

An expensive play

Before returning to the Doge’s Palace in Venice, it is worth opening up one last front, which is not unimportant: the economic one. Because beyond airing legitimate aesthetic grievances, it is also worth asking what kind of productions are being financed with public money. Especially in a context of cuts and cries of woe – in Madrid as in so many other places, whether London or Vienna – where each cultural investment should invite at least some reflection on its meaning and scope.

According to the data available on the Portal de Transparencia de la Administración General del Estado, this production of Jugar con fuego has involved considerable investment in various aspects. The scenography alone reaches the not insubstantial figure of €142,900, to which is added €12,000 for newly-created costumes and another €59,000 for costume rental. The lighting costs €13,000, while the video projections – by Félix Bollaín – and their reproduction rights amount to another €8,000.

These figures, considered in isolation, might be seen to fall within the (absurd) standards of a production of this kind. But they take on another meaning when considered in relation to the artistic result. Because here the question is no longer how much it costs to make theatre, but what kind of theatre you decide to make with the money.

© Miccone and zarzuela.net, 2026

Cast: The Duchess of Medina – Ruth Iniesta; Félix – Alejandro del Cerro; The Marquis of Caravaca – José Antonio López; The Duke – David Lagares; Antonio – Manuel de Diego; A madman – Javier Povedano. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid; Antonio Fauró (chor. dir.); Marina Bollaín (d.); Blanca Añón (des.); Teresa Mora (cost.); Marc Gonzalo (light.); Félix Bollaín (video); Álvaro Albiach (con.)

en español
Jugar con fuego (English synopsis)
Francisco Asenjo Barbieri (English biography)
homepage - zarzuela.net

30/III/2026