With City of God packing out UK cinemas, now seems an ideal time for the Royal Court to be offering a season of new Brazilian plays. Five works, developed by the Court's own staff, are being given nightly rehearsed readings. Since they range from a Pinterish study of sexual betrayal to an account of a football-based revenge killing, they clearly convey the wild contrasts of Brazilian life.
Random, by the 35-year-old Pedro Vicente from Sao Paulo, is itself a fascinating study of colliding worlds. It starts out as social comedy, with two lovers furiously quarrelling at a swish party. Ulysses, a young advertising executive, dreams of quitting the rat race. Bee, his partner, wants him to earn big lolly. While she ogles celebrities, he pornographically parodies campaign slogans until accosted by a philosophic waiter who urges him to overturn his life.
Having satirised Brazil's media-mafia, Vicente's play does a complete switch in the second half. Ulysses finds himself living with beggars under an urban flyover and apparently rescued from death by the saintly Lucy. What is unnerving is that the waiter still apocalyptically hovers, and Bee turns up to take picturesque poverty snapshots without recognising him. So is Ulysses a down-and-out who dreamed he was part of Sao Paulo's upper crust? Or has he jumped, as he suspects, into a parallel universe?
Clearly Vicente's play, in part, is about the obscene co-existence in Brazil of extremes of wealth and poverty. It also resembles one of those JB Priestley time-plays, based on the theories of JW Dunne, in which past, present and future are inextricably mixed. Although it pungently captures the dreamlike contrasts of Brazilian life, it finally lapses into a rather woozy mysticism when Vicente gives Lucy an overly affirmative climactic hymn to "the power and beauty of everything in existence".
What the play provides for the armchair tourist is instant anthropology. You come out having learned a lot about Brazil's sex-obsessed media culture, about the existence of parallel social worlds and about the possibility of charity among the urban poor. Given that our theatrical knowledge of Brazil is generally confined to revivals of Charley's Aunt, that is quite something. Vicente is also well served by John London's translation, Gordon Anderson's production and good sit-down performances from Justin Salinger and Claudie Blakley as the bitching lovers, Bernard Gallagher as the cosmic waiter and Jo McInnes as the altruistic beggar. But the real pleasure lies in being transported to a world that is simultaneously recognisable and strange.
