Staging Spain's glory

Laurence Boswell is a man on a mission. While English playhouses of the 17th century reverberated to the philosophical musings of Shakespeare, over in Spain they were having a whale of a time.

The Golden Age of Spanish drama combined big themes with pure entertainment, sharp satire with blustering farce - and kept audiences rapt. And yet the prolific output of those writers has been largely ignored here and ill-served (maybe through excessive reverence) in its native land. Enter Mr Boswell.

He believes the Spanish period is as important as the theatre of fourth century Athens and Jacobean London. 'It's a rare and wonderful thing when drama defines the national consciousness,' he says.

The jovial director has spent a large part of his career trying to point out to theatres and theatregoers what they've been missing. Now, his RSC Golden Age season - which has played to enthusiastic audiences in Stratford, Newcastle and Madrid - finally opens in London.

Boswell grew up in a highly political, working-class Coventry family, where Spain was mentioned with particular reverence: his eldest uncle was killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

His enthusiasm for Lope's comedias was also fuelled by the fact that he'd been brought up on raucous panto and music hall theatre, rather than middle-class drawing room comedies. For, despite its exalted status, highbrow drama this most certainly is not.

Born two years before Shakespeare, Spain's Lope de Vega, a serial womaniser with a string of illegitimate children, set the template for Golden Age drama and bashed out an estimated 800 plays. He delighted in knocking the strictures of Spanish society, especially the concept of honour, but always with story-driven, high-drama plots full of playful absurdity - shown amply in The Dog In The Manger, which Boswell directs.

'The heroine is a countess of great power, wealth and beauty, who envies the easy familiarity of her servants. She falls in love with her male secretary through jealousy, when she sees her female servant being wooed by him, but marrying beneath her rank would destroy her honour.

'The love triangle created is incredibly painful and tragic, but also incredibly funny,' he explains. 'It's a conflict between a desire for ethical control and the irrational, erotic impulses of the unconscious.'

The two other plays in the season are purposefully left-field: 'We're just starting to open the lid on the treasure chest, so the driving impulse was to widen people's knowledge of the authors of the period.'