IIf Juan Rulfo’s magical realist novel Pedro Páramo has the character of a séance, then this musical theatre version of the Mexican Pulpo Arts also has the character. Close together, crammed together on three sides, with a glass of mezcal in hand, we gather around a stage that is just big enough for the eight actors and their huge drums, plus accordion, violin, trumpet and piano. The story is less acted than sprung from nothing.
This story follows Juan Preciado (Stephano Morales), who promises his mother on his deathbed that he will find his estranged father, Pedro. To do so, he must venture into the land of the dead and the ghost town of Comala. “Some towns just reek of misery,” someone says of a place that is “full of people who have died and don’t know how to leave.”
In playwright Conchi León’s Spanish-language adaptation, past and present blur together as Juan learns of his father’s depravity, a man who rose to rule the town “like an unwanted weed,” bringing murder, rape, and sex trafficking with him. Even the nicer townspeople seem to have been complicit as the rot spread throughout Comala. “It was the rumors that killed me,” Juan says mysteriously.
It’s strange, hallucinatory stuff that’s not easy to categorize, even more so in a production – based on an idea by co-creators Alonso Teruel and Alejandro Bracho – in which each actor/musician takes on multiple characters, one of whom is represented only by an animal bone. They don’t tell a story so much as drift and dream their way through it.
In this same spirit of movement, Pablo Chemor’s omnipresent music, with its sparse, bar-like simplicity, sometimes erupts into song – a suggestion that even in this dark and ghostly place, the possibility of beauty has not yet been extinguished.
At Southside Zoo, Edinburgh, until August 25th
