Socially, you know it is going to be awkward. Tom has travelled miles for the funeral of his boyfriend who has died much too young. Deep in the countryside, Ágatha, the bereaved mother, has never heard of Tom and knows nothing of her son’s sexuality. Tom wants to grieve but, out of respect, cannot give voice to his true emotions – not least because the dead man’s brutish brother, Francis, is determined to keep Ágatha in untroubled ignorance.
The social awkwardness is part of Michel Marc Bouchard’s play, first seen in Montreal in 2011 and later adapted for the screen. What director Rodrigo Portella adds to this spellbinding production for Cena Brasil Internacional is a fierce physical awkwardness.
It is in the way the actors stand isolated on the desolate stage, designed by Aurora dos Campos in rusty browns that seem to extend for ever. The figures are picked out in lonely relief by Tomás Ribas’s punishing lightning, lost souls on a collision course. It is in the way the stage is puddled with farmyard mud, clinging to the actors and making their discomfort palpable.
And it is in the menace of Francis (Gustavo Rodrigues), an unreconstructed symbol of macho intolerance. He bears down mercilessly on the urbane Tom, played with grace and some resistance by Armando Babaioff who, as translator, relocates the script to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the country reported to have the world’s highest rate of violent deaths of LGBTQ+ people.
Coupled with the stately pace of a broody, intense production, it makes this farm not just a reactionary backwater, but a cultural dead end. It is a place where any possibility of progress is extinguished like the sickly cattle Francis throws into a ditch. The play becomes not just about the death of a son but about the death of hope.
Even if Ágatha (Soraya Ravenle) is not as clueless as Francis makes out and even if Tom becomes paralysed by Stockholm syndrome, this awful scenario can surely not persist. Arriving from the city, Sara (Camila Nhary) throws brief light on a self-destructive culture eating itself from within. It is as cruel as it is mesmerising.