The Hub 4 stars When writer and director of this Chilean double bill Guillermo Calderon introduces his work at the front of the Hub’s intimate purpose-built stage, it sums up his entire aesthetic, if not the anger that follows in his dialogue. Because at no point is anything hidden by the three women who appear in both works that dissect Chile’s post-Pinochet legacy, linked by a song as they move the set around in-between the two. Villa finds the three gathered around a table holding a miniature of Villa Grimaldi, the former dictator’s notorious torture house. The trio have been co-opted to decide what should happen to the site in a democratic Chile. Should Grimaldi be flattened and the land re-developed? Or should it be converted into a museum as a reminder of the atrocities carried out there? An initial vote is split three ways, with one ballot paper spoilt. The fierce debate that ensues reveals far more than just the fact that they’re all called Alejandra. As the three then don the sash of office, they adopt the stance of Chile’s real-life post-Pinochet president Michelle Bachelet to give an imaginary resignation speech. Spoken both separately and in unison, only love and sex are off the agenda in what might well be the most honest political speech you’ll never hear. Both plays demand attention via a dense melange of symbols, grand gestures and state of the nation addresses that aren’t without wit beyond Calderon’s impassioned exchanges and stark staging. When an older woman joins her comrades onstage, the play itself becomes a monument, not just to the brutality and hypocrisy of the past, but to reconstructing a future that’s only just begun. The Herald, August 21st 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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Villa in Split