Andrew Bovell's latest play was written on commission for the Spanish theatre collective Numero Uno, after two of his previous works had been hits in Madrid - "When the Rain Stops Falling" and "Things I know to be true". Two years after its premiere there, he gets his Australian debut at Belvoir, in a beautifully simple production.
Some of Bovell's usual techniques are here again - the strategic bending of time and character (as all four actors play double roles across two different time schemes) and the unburdening of personal traumas - in this case, connected to the wider national trauma of Spain's emergence from forty years of fascist rule, and the damages it left behind on two families across years. The quartet of actors is gathered from two men from the original Madrid production and two New Zealand actresses who have both worked in Australia before - the set a mound of earth with a little bit of a garden on the edges, suggestive of buried secrets and the wastage they leave behind. There's strength in all four performers - Sarah Pierce as the damaged elderly Carmelia and the more immediately active Margerita - Kerry Fox as both the bitter sister and the wife of a senior facist leader - Borje Maeste as a migrant carer and as a young man about to be sent overseas - and Jorge Muriel as two men ultimately driven by lusts they barely understand.
Morgan Maroney's lighting design is precision-close, creating corridors and shadows that suggest the locked-down world that these characters exist in, bringing to mind the ghosts of the past that underlie the play. Mel Page's muddy, adapatable design is probably pure hell for the crew (the footprints having to be raked back out again after every performance) but it's a powerfully real location. It's a raw, emotional piece, delving deep into unpleasant truths in a way that feels uncomfortably familiar as we see history seeming to arc back towards this kind of darkness again. It's a play that's far more topical than anybody in the play wants it to be, and it's absolutely worth experiencing.
No comments:
Post a Comment