“Make sure you pay him a visit … ask after what we are owed”. It’s his mother's deathbed wish, which Juan didn’t think he would honour until his imagination begins to run free.
Now he has come in search of the town of Comala, set on a green plain with a bit of yellow from the ripening corn, on a road that rises and falls according to whether one’s coming or going. For him it descends towards his past and his long-lost father, Pedro Páramo.
Comala is a place that can only be reached by theatre and so the ensemble allocates the many parts, often playing multiple characters to people the town. They insist our narrator Jaun signs a waiver as it appears that if he gets in there is no way of stopping what happens next.
What he will find is a ghost town, the streets occupied by spectres wondering how to get out, where he cannot be entirely sure where the line is drawn between the living and the dead. It’s a purgatorial place full of whispers of the past, memories, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries. And central to the town is his notorious and reckless father, a tyrant, adulterer, rapist and murderer.
Will the whispers get to him?
This is a surreal, immersive musical journey with a setting resembling a mezcal fuelled wake. The intimate thrust stage setting sees the ensemble crowd around large Raramurí drums used as tables to play regional Mexican instruments in producing an atmospheric soundscape, Latin rhythms, and brooding melodies. The story is largely faithful to the novel and its rhythm is used to create the musical vocabulary.
The language is hypnotic, a poetic stream of words accompanying sensory images. The structure is nonlinear, jumping in time and the plot is complex. Unless you have a knowledge of the narrative comparable with Gabriel García Márquez (who claimed that he "could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards.") it is likely that you will share Juan’s difficulty in knowing whether characters are alive or deceased. The pace also makes it difficult to keep up with the translated supertitles at times.
If you go with the flow themes of hope, dreams, despair and retribution develop alongside those central to Mexican life such as patriarchy, family legacy, and religion.
Dreamlike and haunting it is terrifically realised and it is easy to imagine it being transferred to the Edinburgh International Festival.
Show times: 2 to 25 (not 7, 13, 20) August 2024 at 5.15pm.
Tickets: £15 (£13) to £17 (£15).
Suitability: 12+ (Contains distressing or potentially triggering themes - discussion of sexual assault and depictions of suicide). Performed in Spanish with English surtitles.