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My Life After – review My Life After – review
(4 months later)
The Brighton festival's theatre programme ended with this extraordinary import from Argentina in which five actors recalled, with the aid of photos, letters, home movies and old clothes, the lives of their parents. Conceived and directed by Lola Arias, the show offered a compelling mix of personal memories and – since the actors were all born around the time of the 1976-83 dictatorship – a mosaic of modern Argentinian history.The Brighton festival's theatre programme ended with this extraordinary import from Argentina in which five actors recalled, with the aid of photos, letters, home movies and old clothes, the lives of their parents. Conceived and directed by Lola Arias, the show offered a compelling mix of personal memories and – since the actors were all born around the time of the 1976-83 dictatorship – a mosaic of modern Argentinian history.
I suspect Arias is an admirer of the Brazilian pioneer Augusto Boal, whose "theatre of the oppressed" dramatised communal issues. Here, the big question is how the actors either live up to the radicalism of a previous generation or, in one case, live down its collusion with dictatorship. The most moving story is that of a performer who discovered that her supposed brother was actually the child of a "disappeared" family and had been illegally abducted by her policeman father: there is both sadness and a sense of relief in the way she recounts that her guilty dad is currently serving an 18-year jail sentence. But amid the stories of parents who suffered death or exile for their politics, there are lighter moments. One actor brings his eight-year-old son and the boy's pet turtle on stage; as the reptiles allegedly have prophetic powers, we watch in suspense as the turtle slowly indicates whether there will be a future Argentine revolution.I suspect Arias is an admirer of the Brazilian pioneer Augusto Boal, whose "theatre of the oppressed" dramatised communal issues. Here, the big question is how the actors either live up to the radicalism of a previous generation or, in one case, live down its collusion with dictatorship. The most moving story is that of a performer who discovered that her supposed brother was actually the child of a "disappeared" family and had been illegally abducted by her policeman father: there is both sadness and a sense of relief in the way she recounts that her guilty dad is currently serving an 18-year jail sentence. But amid the stories of parents who suffered death or exile for their politics, there are lighter moments. One actor brings his eight-year-old son and the boy's pet turtle on stage; as the reptiles allegedly have prophetic powers, we watch in suspense as the turtle slowly indicates whether there will be a future Argentine revolution.
Arias's production would doubtless have an even greater impact on a society that had lived through the events described. But it gives us a vivid picture of the high price paid by a previous Argentinian generation for opposing, either openly or covertly, a dictatorship. It is also inventively staged, with descending cascades of clothes symbolising the weight of the past, and performed with great verve: you had to admire the unfazed cool of Liza Casullo as she coped with a technical hitch in the midst of a filmic re-creation of the lives of her exiled parents. But that, one would guess, is the least of the problems this resilient and blazingly honest group of performers has ever had to face.Arias's production would doubtless have an even greater impact on a society that had lived through the events described. But it gives us a vivid picture of the high price paid by a previous Argentinian generation for opposing, either openly or covertly, a dictatorship. It is also inventively staged, with descending cascades of clothes symbolising the weight of the past, and performed with great verve: you had to admire the unfazed cool of Liza Casullo as she coped with a technical hitch in the midst of a filmic re-creation of the lives of her exiled parents. But that, one would guess, is the least of the problems this resilient and blazingly honest group of performers has ever had to face.
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