Nuestras Vidas Privadas
premièred in Pedro Miguel Rozo’s native Colombia in 2009, where it won
a major playwriting competition. It seems, in Simon Scardifield’s
eminently playable English translation, both witty and intelligent.
Rozo plays amusing games with the convention of the aside, for
instance, resulting in characters eavesdropping on one another’s
“thoughts”; overall, too, he is very canny at leavening serious subject
matter with black comedy but without trivialising it. That would have
been an outrage to vast numbers of us, because his subject is child
sexual abuse.
Don Jose, it is rumoured
around the small town, tried to interfere with his former farm
employee’s 12-year-old son; his own sons, now adults, seem under
hypnosis by a psychiatrist to recover memories that they too were
assaulted. Rozo’s play is principally about the ramifications within
the family. Elder son Sergio (adopted or illegitimate, we don’t know,
but “he’s not your dad”) secretly funds a lawyer to prosecute young
Joaquin’s case; younger son Carlos’s psychological imbalances are not
helped, to say the least (almost the first words to him from his mother
onstage are “You mustn’t stop taking the Lithium”); their mother
ostentatiously supports her husband even through her own uncertainties.
Each has their own issues, mainly sexual, which influence their
attitudes towards the case; in comparison the resentfulness of
Joaquin’s mother and the urbane manipulations of the shrink are simple
– they scent money.
All of which is
fine, as far as it goes. But Rozo seems to have on the one hand an
admirably complex concept of paedophilia (for instance, he does not, as
most of us now do, equate it simply with sexual abuse of children), yet
on the other a strangely simplistic one of homosexuality, which also
recurs throughout the play in incongruously bald terms. I do not think
these are simply the views of the characters; a few remarks about
religion versus reason, the church versus the couch, seem similarly
reductive at an authorial level. These apparently unsubtle, un-nuanced
attitudes call into question the thoughtfulness elsewhere, raising the
possibility that this is simply another workaday drama combining family
tensions and sexual scandal (the climactic family confrontation is even
set over Christmas lunch), which hits a few haunting notes purely by
fluke.
Written for the Financial
Times.