(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/21.)
There is a moment towards the end of this double-bill of plays by the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón when a table begins to shake. A scale model of the notorious Villa Grimaldi, the largest of the 1,200 detention and torture centres created by Pinochet's military dictatorship, teeters and blazes blood-red. The glasses on the table smash to the ground.
It's an appropriate image for these plays, which examine the shards of memory that stab at the heart of a nation nable to forget. Lives have been shattered; the divisions are still painfully sharp. In the programme, the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti is quoted saying: "Forgetting is filled with memory."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/aug/21/villa-discurso-edinburgh-theatre-review