Las Piedras isn’t much to look at. It’s a twenty minute
drive from Montevideo. Named after a ninenteenth century battle. Which only
matters if you’re Uruguayan. All in all Las Piedras is a bit like Beckenham or
Plaistow, only less glamorous.
“La Sala” is Las Piedras’ only theatre space. It’s situated
on a back street which no-one seems to have heard of. The front is brightly
painted, but as soon as you go inside you realise this is a space with minimal
resources. Basically it’s a shed with a stage at the end. A stage which can
only be accessed by a rickety set of steps at the front, unless you want to
risk life and limb climbing up from the back. There’s no fixed seating, just an
empty auditorium with some bucket chairs stacked in a corner.
It feels a long way from Montevideo, with its urban
theatrical know-how. And it feels like a million miles from London. We’re here
as the last stage of our one-week only, three-venue tour of Jon Fosse’s complex
but beguiling play, Winter. The first performance, on Tuesday was in
Montevideo, to a packed audience of actors and theatre buffs. The second, in
Libertad, on Thursday, was in the smart theatre of La Casa de La Cultura, with
a keen, youthful audience. Now we’re in Las Piedras and we don’t know what to
expect.
There’s a woman, Natacha, in the tiny, impromptu café at the
front. She seems tired. She’s cleaning up and offers us coffee. Otherwise
there’s no-one else. The woman tells us she’s going to have to go in a bit as
her three children need looking after. Everything feels ad hoc and
underwhelming.
Our company, (myself, Claudia, set and lighting designer,
and the actors Carlos and Margarita), decide on how we’re going to use the
space. The play consists of four acts, two in a park and two in a hotel. In
Montevideo, the staging took place in an old house with a courtyard in the
back, which we used for the park. Here we decide to use the stage as the park
and make the most of the open plan auditorium by doing the hotel scenes there.
The spectators will just have to swivel their seats around between acts.
Another young woman appears. She seems to be in charge of
the lights. With Claudia’s assistance, she and Natacha being rigging. We don’t
need much. The play has been set up with the aim of being something that can be
done in almost any space. Our scenery is a bench, a lantern and a bed. The bed
is some wrapping paper which we tape against the wall. The lantern is hung from
the ceiling. For a bench we scout around and find two beaten-up brown leather
chairs which look like old car seats. Natacha offers to find something to cover
them, but they’re perfect as they are. She tells us that they found the chairs
in the street and co-opted them.
The story behind the theatre gradually emerges. Natacha and
her husband, Seba, took over the space almost ten years ago, wanting to do
something in Las Piedras. Over the years they have put on their own shows and
welcomed other groups. Companies from across Latin America have come to this
unlikely backwater, with workshops hosted by Spaniards, Colombians and anyone
who passes by. Last August, they raised sufficient funds to buy the space. Now,
bit by bit, they’re doing it up. One of the first things they did was put in an
alarm system, having being burgled weeks after finally taking ownership. The
three of them work at the theatre for nothing, as a labour of love.
Sebastian appears with their three children who run around
for a while before being taken away by their grandfather so Seba and Natacha
can watch the show. I ask how many spectators they expect. Natacha is unsure.
Anywhere between 2 and 20. At 9pm, the scheduled start, there’s no-one. They
tell me not to worry, people are always late. Sure enough, in dribs and drabs,
over twenty people appear. We even have to put out extra seats. I give a brief
introduction and the show is ready to begin.
Fosse has few supporters in the UK, something he seems philosophical about in interviews. For some reason British audiences have found him dense,
impenetrable, gruelling, even though his plays are not overly long. However,
around the world he’s revered. I was offered the opportunity to work on the
play by Margarita, and the project received the support of the Montevideo
equivalent of the Arts Council. It’s part of the reason we’re here now, in
far-flung Las Piedras. We’ve dedicated our brief rehearsal schedule not just to
working on the play, but also to devising acting techniques which help the
actor get under the skin of Fosse’s sparse language and demonstrate the dynamics
at work. This process has been facilitated by looking at a few clips from the
work of Ostermeier and memories of Nübling’s version of Stephens’ Three
Kingdoms. I explain some of this before the show starts, in my pock-marked
Spanish. No-one seems phased. It’s accepted here that there’s more than one way
to skin a cat. When so much devotion is dedicated to doing theatre for nothing,
there’s no reason not to experiment, and this has been one of the joys of
working on the project.
It’s also been fruitful with regard to the play. The
audience seem hooked from the moment Margarita’s brittle but beautiful woman
totters into view, entering via the side door and almost literally crawling up
the steps to reach the stage. It’s the third time we’ve done the show and the
actors have now got the bit between their teeth. These two bizarre but loveable
characters, caught up in the unlikeliest of love affairs, charm the audience
with an other-wordly grace and the use of their curious, sometimes comic gestures.
Rather than proving to be a downbeat study of degradation, Fosse’s play becomes
a story of redemptive love. Perhaps a London audience would question our
techniques or the dramaturgy. But a Las Piedras audience is open and generous,
happy to go on the journey along with these two flawed characters.
The net result is one of the more remarkable nights I’ve
spent in a theatre. Reminding me that theatre is all about transformation.
Taking a space which initially looks like a deserted warehouse and, with a
text, two actors, some love and a bit of stagecraft, turning it into something
else altogether. A hotel, a park, a field of dreams, a space for the old magic to
occur.
