Four men come on stage and start to warm up. They stop and talk to the audience. The house lights stay on. Has the play started? Has it not? Will it ever? What's it about? The men move about the stage. There's a fluidity to everything. A story starts to emerge. Two men work in a Kafkaesque office. One day they start to talk about films over coffee. They will become friends. They might become lovers. They might not. They are sacked. They are released.
This is an exercise in loose-limbed storytelling, even though the story is little more than a Macguffin for the company’s stagecraft. The stage is cut to ribbons by the four bodies, then it's reconstructed and cut to ribbons again. Life is captured in all its repetitive glory. Days become weeks become months become a story. We remember what it's like to work somewhere, how long it takes to make a friendship, how complex a friendship can be. The show, adapted from a novel by Caio Fernando Abreu, is part narrative, part dance. It restructures reality in its own image and makes us wonder how we would tell the story of our lives. Not the show of the highlights, but the show of the mundane in-between bits. How all those ephemeral moments might be captured, documented, celebrated. All the moments we have lived and already forgotten.
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