CYBERWORLD: From Thriller to Friends I'm not a particularly heavy Internet user but the way in which it has changed the Western world fascinates me. Whole communities are emerging made up of people who will never meet face to face or even talk to each other. Chat software such as Messenger, allows you not only to have long conversations across the world for cheap rates but also facilitates net meetings for people in different countries. Ebay, MySpace, Utube… you name them… Of course, this wonderful technology keeps being exploited by those dark souls around us. One afternoon, while I was still developing the ideas for Stung, I was walking home wondering whether the concept for Stung was too sci-fi like, too Matrix like… only to watch on BBC News that a man had been put in jail for befriending young girls on the internet, obtaining their email addresses and then hacking into their computer switching their printers on and off at night and opening and shutting their CD drives.

When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she told me that a criminal gang had just been caught in Spain. Two "little angels", 19 year olds, were hacking into private PCs located in people's bedrooms, switching on their webcams and taking snapshots at night… you can imagine the material for blackmail… So Stung could have been a thriller set in cyberspace… However, the themes in Lorca's farces were too strong to be ignored: repression of all sorts, unrequited love, wanting the wrong kind of love… Finally, we couldn't escape it, the underlining thread to the story, had to be love… The Café The decision to set the story in contemporary Madrid was made early on. Not only would it help us with all of Lorca's funny names, but it also provided a context for the contemporary characters to be asking themselves questions about marriage and the roles of women and men in today's society.

Of course, these conversations would also be believable if the play had been set in London, but somehow I felt that Spanish society is still trying to find its feet. Franco's dictatorship is still relatively recent; glass-ceilings are still strong in the workplace; young mothers are still expected to be the ones staying at home and on the flip-side, one has to be careful not to sound too traditional for fear of being labelled right-winged. These are tricky times for a society where gay marriages can happen only seventy years after being gay might have landed a bullet in your head.

The world of 'Stung' and García Lorca Forbidden has tackled many of Lorca´s works: When Five Years Pass was our first London production, a performance of Blood Wedding formed part of our adult Education Programme and we had great fun playing with The Butterfly´s Evil Spell as part of our Script-in-Hand Performance season many years ago. I was therefore very pleased when Richard Mann and I decided to look at Lorca's works again. The three plays were our starting point: by focusing on their common plot (young/ardent woman and old/traditional man) and their common themes (society's insistence on marriage and fantasy versus reality) we eventually came up with a setting that would allow the plays to stand on their own while forming part of a contemporary world. Ironically, the development of technology and telecommunications has given us the framework to do what we do best: exploit our performance style to celebrate all that is theatrical.