A woman driving along an isolated rural road is flagged down by a man whose car has broken down. This is the third time she has seen the same man on the same road. This time, however, she stops.

Desig (Desire) is a superb play by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet written in 1989 and immortalised in a 1991 production (and film) directed by a young Sergi Belbel. Here, loneliness in all its manifestations is painfully picked apart, like an explosion/implosion in slow motion.

Born in 1940, Benet i Jornet was an exemplary playwright and screenwriter whose contribution to Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era was paramount. Born in Barcelona, he was inspired by an apparent love of comics (he lived just near Mercat Sant Antoni, where the historic Sunday secondhand book market is still held) and went on to create around 40 texts for theatre. Benet i Jornet died of Covid in 2020, after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2015 saw him placed in care. 

Desig, which won the Serra d’Or literary prize in 1990, is a play about repression and self-censorship, and considered to be one of the author’s more ostentatious works. The shock ending may not be such a shock anymore, but there is absolutely enough here to speak to our pseudo-open age of introspective narcissism, where oversharing emotional trivialities has ballooned into a dangerous form of mass distraction. Even the conspicuous lack of names in the play: ’her’ ‘him’ ‘man’ ‘woman’ seem an invitation to explore slippery gender pronouns. 

This new adaptation directed by Sílvia Munt places the audience on two sides, capturing the claustrophobic vertigo, and perhaps the central provocation of the play. The interpretations, however, seem brittle and frustrated; as if upstaged from the outset by the text. English subtitles happily hovered just above stage right in one performance, exemplifying how, in few words oft repeated, Benet i Jornet lures us into a vivid yet unreliable landscape of isolated individuals in a profound state of disconnect.