Writer: Marina Cusí Sànchez
Director: Megan Farquhar
For most of its history, the province of Catalonia has had a factious relationship with Spain, of which it is officially a part. The desire for independence resulted in a 2017 referendum in the region. Although the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of independence, several factors – a low turnout prompted by a boycott of unionists, and rulings from the Spanish constitutional court that proclaimed the referendum to be illegal, among others – the result was not full independence, but yet more disruption and distrust between Catalonians and the Spanish state.
Writer-performer Marina Cusí creates a story set on the day of the ballot. She plays multiple activists (including Marina, who one presumes is based on herself) who have all slept overnight at a polling station to protect the process and open the vote on time.
The subtitles above Cusì’s head (which should make them surtitles, one supposes) use colours to distinguish between the performer’s multiple Catalan-speaking roles. But what starts as a convenience in translation soon starts to suggest something more profound, as words and phrases on screen start to be redacted behind Marina’s back.
The initial introduction of whited-out words is subtly clever. And when Marina notices that her words are being projected for broader use, whoever is creating the captions becomes a character in their own right. They help present a potted history of Catalonia from the 1700s to the present day, using humour and cutout animation in a Horrible Histories-meets-Monty Python approach. The author of the subtitles also communicates directly with Marina, expressing solidarity with her.
But once the activist’s back is turned, it is a different matter. As matters turn violent and Catalan activists recount tales of violent clashes with Spanish police and unionist protestors, the subtitle writer overwrites the first-hand narrative with their own, converting sentences into a version of events that reframes the independence activists as aggressors.
The use of Catalan as Cusì’s spoken delivery all but guarantees the need for the captions for us, the audience, to fully understand what is going on, even for the Spanish-speaking audience members (Sub Title Over is performing as part of FesTeLõn, the Festival of Spanish Theatre). And that means that its subversion is all the more effective. Even when we can see that what appears on screen does not match what is said on stage, we are denied the truth; instead, all we have is the manipulation presented to us.
Within the context of the fight for Catalonian independence, it mimics how Spanish-speaking peoples relied on third parties to hear about the independence movement’s aims, goals and beliefs and were thus corruptible when that translation was neither fair nor honest.
Cusí’s narrative is not always as focused as it could be. The animated history, while fun, distracts from the central premise of the caption screen’s more malevolent purposes.
But the global narratives her writing touches open are undeniable. When media organisations sit between the truth and the public, the opportunity to distort, even invert, the situation to fit one particular narrative is all too easy. As we witness people talking over others so that voices are obscured or ignored, it is worth questioning whose words we are really hearing.
Reviewed on 1 November 2025
