What I like about a festival like the World Theatre Festival is the expectation that I will see performances from different cultures, hear different languages expressing new and different ideas. Diciembre (translation December) by Teatro en el Blanco from Chile is a Spanish speaking show set in the near future. It's about war and what it is like to live in a war-torn country.
The audience enters the theatre to see three actors sitting at a Christmas Eve party with jingle bells being played over and over again which gives an eerie feeling, it's as if a ticking time bomb is about to go off. Twin sisters (who are both pregnant) are throwing a Christmas party for their brother who is on leave from the army. The brother wants to know who fathered his sisters' children, but this question goes unanswered. While this scene gives the impression of a happy family it is anything but, with the two sisters fighting over the future of their brother as one sister who is all for the war wants him to go back and join his troop. The other sister wants to help him escape and hide out until the war is over as she fears he will be killed. The underlying question throughout the show is, 'who got the sisters pregnant?'
I took a little while to get used to the Spanish language and the subtitles sometimes changed very quickly and I missed a lot of the dialogue. It would be good to see this show in a smaller more intimate space with a better placing of the screen showing the English text as its placing made it very awkward to read from where I was sitting. Performers Trinidad Gonzalez, Jorge Becker and Mariana Munoz performed well in their multiple roles in this politically charged, tension filled performance. In the end after all the fighting and squabbling between the three siblings you can say that the sisters literally spilled the beans.
No comments:
Post a Comment