Watch out for Brazil. It not only produces great soccer players but also highly promising playwrights. Certainly, one of the two plays by 25-year-old Marcos Barbosa that end the Royal Court's short season of new Brazilian work grips you by the throat and never lets go. Almost Nothing is about the fear that stalks Brazilian life. Starting with a long, Pinteresque silence between an affluent married couple, it goes on to explore the shadow that has fallen over them: they have killed, ostensibly in self-defence, a 10-year-old boy who attacked them with a knife.
When the boy's mother tracks them down, they are edgily defensive and buy her off with a large bribe. But the key scene is that in which a creepy fixer offers to banish any lurking danger by doing away with the mother, and he takes their silence for consent. Given the writer's youth, what is extraordinary is how much of the drama lies between the lines. With the utmost economy, Barbosa evokes a world in which violence is always impending, the law is bendable and the wealthy are dependent on parasitic middlemen. But his masterstroke is to leave you unsure where the truth lies: if the married couple are guiltless why did they offer a bribe, and if the boy's mother wants justice why did she accept it?
Above all, the silences that begin and end the play convey the unease against which money is no protection.
Translated by Mark O'Thomas, directed by Joseph Hill-Gibbins and powerfully acted by David Westhead and Michelle Fairley as the haunted couple, this is a play that deserves to move from rehearsed reading to full-scale production.
It also proves that fear is best when undefined. In Brazier, on the other hand, the fear is spelt out in letters a mile high. Admittedly the play deals with a tense situation in which a farming family have to decide what to do after their boy has been caught thieving by a landowning terrorist and threatened with death. As the father, mother, grandmother and the boy's brother fiercely argue, they themselves become almost as lawless as the world outside their door.
I was reminded at different times of a western or the Galician rural dramas of Ramon del Valle-Inclan; the problem is that the play's overcompression leads to melodrama and the irony of external anarchy overtaking the family is all too apparent.
But Barbosa clearly has talent, the quartet of actors, including Dinah Stabb as the grandmother and Nicholas Aaron as the brother, give it all they've got and the Court's international department deserve nothing but praise for bringing the flavour of Brazilian life into sodden Sloane Square.
