A very English drama

Madrid's Festival de Otoño en Primavera (or, Fall festival in spring - the result of a 2010 date change for the city's annual performing arts event) brings a crop of first-rate English-language theater to the capital over the next month, as well as dance and music events.

First among them is Peter Brook's The Suit, an adaptation of a story by South African author Can Themba (1924-1968) that the now 87-year-old theater legend initially brought to the stage in 1999, but has now transformed into a musical. It's an experiment that takes the genre in a new direction, and received glowing praise following its world premiere at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris last month.

The story is as simple as it is powerful. A man catches his wife cheating on him. Her lover manages to escape but leaves his suit behind. So the man takes his revenge by forcing his wife to treat the suit as a guest - a long and painful humiliation that has disastrous consequences. It stars the singer and actress Nonhlanhla Kheswa, alongside Jared McNeill and William Nadylam, and there are musicians performing live on the Teatros Canal stage.

So why recast the work as a musical? "One is never satisfied with what one does," Brook says. "I never have been. But the only thing that interests me is the present moment. In this case, my close collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, she was the one who came up with the idea for The Suit. Why not do a new version? Today we think that this work has a new meaning and the feeling to do it now with music could bring [...] new dimensions."

Also in English at Teatros Canal next week is The Master and the Margarita, an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic satirical novel from director Simon Burney's Complicite company. Featuring some of the avant-garde British theater group's finest actors, the story offers a critique of Soviet bureaucracy via three parallel stories: two set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and one in Jerusalem at the time of Pontius Pilate, as well as Complicite's trademark evocative sets and astonishing visual effects.

Visionary Canadian director Robert Lepage has chosen Madrid's Circo Price Theater for the world premiere of his Playing Cards 1: Spades, the first of four works - Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs will follow - inspired by the rules, signs, numbers, mathematics, mythology and characters in a deck of cards. In French, English, Spanish, Arabic and German, and taking war as its subject, it features multimedia technology and a 360-degree stage, with each half representing a desert city: Las Vegas and Baghdad, at the time of the US invasion.

Festival de Otoño en Primavera. Until June 3 at various venues around Madrid. www.madrid.org/fo/2012