Lorca: A Theatre Beneath The Sand

A painfully earnest show about theatre and passion

★★
theatre review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 13 Aug 2019
32828 large
Lorca

Two boys chase each other with plump words and padded feet in this painfully earnest show about theatre and passion. 

Playing drama students, Daniel Migueláñez and David Pereira chuck around ideas of desire, masculinity as they rehearse the works of Spanish theatre practitioner and poet Federico García Lorca. Migueláñez emotively recites extracts of the Lorca’s play, The Public, while Pereira demonstrates astonishing physical strength, dancing to the words and balancing atop an upturned shopping trolley—top marks to anyone who can figure out what purpose this serves in the story—with one arm and both legs shooting into the air. 

There is no grounding to the pairs’ disjointed parts. Phrases are so thickly coated in lyrical cliché that their intense sincerity falls close to melodrama, without any sense of tongues near cheeks.

Enebro Teatro is Spanish, and some limitations in tone perhaps come from the show being English as a second language. When Migueláñez recites an untranslated poem, there is so much more softness and variation in tone, pleasure mixed with longing and grief. Even without understanding the words, the meaning rings out far more than in their more monotonous, dragging conversations. 

When their hyperbolic words have run out of meaning, they turn together to movement and dance to Leonard Cohen’s 'Take This Waltz'. It is rare and beautiful it is to see two young men dancing together with such tenderness and makes the rest of the performances seem like a waste. I would much have preferred an hour to watch them dance.