The Royal Court’s international programme, long supervised by Elyse Dodgson, gets little publicity. It is good, therefore, to find Guillermo Calderón, a Chilean dramatist nurtured by the programme, making his main stage debut with a 90-minute play about people we loosely dub “terrorists”. But, while his work initially generates a Pinteresque tension, it becomes over-explanatory.
One of Calderón’s aims is to explore the mixed motives behind political protest. He introduces us to two young, hapless female anarchists, Marcela and Alejandra, who can’t even lie convincingly to their neighbour, Carmen, and who seem nervous about undertaking their first disruptive mission. But the stakes are raised with the arrival of the veteran José Miguel, who not only supplies the women with the vital bomb but who also exposes their essential naivety. For much of the action, all three characters are hooded, but once they abandon their disguise we quickly grasp that they are driven by contradictory purposes.
Despite the horrendous urban violence of recent times – for which a French philosopher coined the term “metrocide” – Calderón manages successfully to convey the self-aggrandising absurdity that often lies behind terrorist acts. The three activists here speak in code so that the four-letter word “bomb” is either known as “B” or “the cheese”.
One of the women is even asked to defecate into a can to make the nails surrounding the bomb lethally infectious. This, in turn, reveals the gulf between the two women who want to make a non-violent, anti-capitalist protest and José Miguel who seeks to perpetuate his longstanding war on society. The problem is that, having revealed his characters’ muddled intentions through action and dialogue, Calderón suddenly gives them long, explicatory monologues resembling confessional arias.
Calderón’s text indicates a simple staging with no more than four chairs and a table. Sam Pritchard’s production, however, comes equipped with a realistically dilapidated set by Chloe Lamford of depressing ugliness. Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Danusia Samal clearly establish the strange innocence of the self-styled anarchists in contrast to the destructive fury of Paul Kaye as the bomb-maker, and Sarah Niles is suitably ambivalent as the intrusive neighbour. But while Calderón’s play, translated by William Gregory, is enlightening about the varied impulses behind urban violence, it spells out its intentions too vociferously.
• At Royal Court, London, until 21 October. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
