Sunday Night

It was a glorious day. It’s mid-Autumn here, but today was like a day in high Summer in England. I spent as much of it as possible asleep. Seemed the most useful thing to do.

This evening I went to see the play Segio, the actor from my short, is in. By a German writer called Dea Loher. Apparently the play, The Last Fire, has been very successful there, a dense piece of 33 fluid scenes, so Segio told me, which reminded me of both Wilder’s Our Town and Von Trier’s Dogville. Which, Sergio told me later over coffee, was the model adopted by the director, making the cast watch Kidman, Bacall and co doing their thespian stuff. However, as the actor observed, Dogville is film and this is theatre. The play runs at two hours twenty minutes, without an interval. I didn’t get bored, but there were moments which seemed more obscure than they should have done, and this wasn’t just down to the language. Interestingly the translation was done by a Chilean, which means that parts don’t work that well for a Uruguayan audience.

Mid way through, the play suffered from an explosion of candombé outside, a cacophony of drumming like a thunderstorm invading the space. One of the actresses had a line which went something like: ‘The killer could have been anyone, you [said to the Englishman in the front row], me, or one of those people drumming outside; a dash of improvisation always welcome.

Afterwards Sergio invited me for coffee in his high rise flat, which reminded me of Polesworth House, except for his has a view of the sea. We talked theatre and all that jazz.

I walked back to Anibal’s along the Rambla. It was midnight. The night was warm. People were fishing or jogging or hanging out, watching the night water. Kids played on swings on the last day of the Easter holidays. Todo tranquilo en la ciudad.



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