Festelon, the Festival of Spanish Theatre, is returning to London with an array of plays performed by excellent Spanish theatre companies.

Join us on Wednesday 2nd October at 7.30pm The John Lyon’s Theatre
(1-10 Keeley Street) to watch “La Calderona”, played in Spanish with English surtitles (See plot below). Let us know you’re coming in advance and we’ll book the tickets together for a group discount!

She was the bastard daughter that no one ever mentions. Who was María Inés Calderón, better known as La Calderona? For some, she was one of the most important actresses on the 17th century Spanish stage, for others, the most controversial of Philip IV’s lovers, the mother of John Joseph of Austria, who Philip would later acknowledge as his bastard son. There are even those who say that the Sierra de la Calderona in Valencia was named after her and that she ended her days as the leader of a gang of bandits.

How did a young girl abandoned in a doorway become none other than the King’s favourite, in a Spain where being a woman and a bastard was the same as being nothing? La Calderona’s story is one of power, ambition, love and survival, related in the form of a dark comedy to a hip hop soundtrack, with a DJ on stage and constantly going back and forth, in a game of mirrors which is both original and baroque, from the 17th century to the 21st, and from the 21st century back to the 17th. Do you really want to miss it?