An old medium meets a new one: Theater has been acknowledging the mere existence of the cell phone for a while now — if sometimes just as an unwelcome aural sign of life coming from the auditorium. However, it’s with his play Mòbil — Comèdia telefònica digital that renowned Spanish dramatist Sergi Belbel, probably as a premiere in theatrical history, has elevated the cell phone not only to a distinctive plot element but to the central agent of the whole play, along with its particular characteristics. (Personally, I’d say that by doing so, he’s paid due tribute to the realities of man in our modern age and his little digital companion.)

The play was first performed in Copenhagen, 2006. Opening with its premiere on 01/08/2009, it’s now being scheduled under the German title Mobil – eine digitale Telefonkomödie by the Mainzer Kammerspiele, in the hometown of Zelfi plc, and can be attended till early February in five subsequent performances.
 

Poster illustration for Mobil (Mainzer Kammerspiele)

 
In Belbel’s comedy of mistaken identities about three women and a man, the cell phone plays just its own self, shining in its role as a catalyst of interpersonal communication and human action in all their intriguing facets —  the good ones as well as the bad ones. At the venue of an airport, another epitome of modern mobility, it seemingly serves little but the convenient dealing with everyday correspondence at first. In the course of the play though, it unites lovers, uncovers shams, but also gets turned into an instrument of intrigue as well as into the trigger of a bomb in a terrorist attack. “Drama, Baby!” — nobody can escape the magic and the possibilities of this medium.

In Mòbil, Belbel exemplarily plays with the dramaturgical potential of this communicational device, which Zelfi plc, too, has long discerned. After all, it’s not for nothing that the motto of Zelfi’s mobile, location-based gaming platform JOYity goes: “Anything can happen”