feos (w guillermo calderon, d aline kuppenheim)

Feos (which means “the uglies” in English) is a featherweight theatre piece which nevertheless punches hard. It recounts the story of two hideously disfigured people who meet at the cinema, go for a coffee, then go back to his and make love. The majority of the 50 minute play is taken up by the conversation in the cafe. The action cuts in and  out of their conversation as they gradually get to know one another. It’s a love story, but a love story between two people who believe themselves fundamentally unloveable. They feel this way because of their disfigurement. Part of the skill of the piece is that this disfigurement has a metaphysical edge, as everyone feels themselves to be unloveable, in their own secret fashion. The beauty of love is that it succeeds in overcoming this innate, common instinct, no matter what you look like. Calderon again reveals his exactitude as a dramatist, burrowing away at this scene in order to extract every nuance, every tragic-comic detail. Calderon writes like a dog with a bone it’s in love with: he won’t leave a scene until every last scrap of meat is off that bone. It’s an intense but affecting style, whose potency gets its pay-off in the last scene, when the lovers go back to his flat and decide that, in spite of the fact they are so unloveable, they will commit to love each other. 

There is a twist to the show. Which is that these two “people”, are actually puppets, manipulated by no less than five puppeteers (who received a great reception when they came out to take a bow). The effect of this is that it acts as a distancing device, which allows us as an audience to disengage sufficiently from the action to not feel as though we are being voyeuristic as we observe the intimacy of these two damaged characters. It also means we don’t gawp; this isn’t a freak show. In some way, knowing that these characters aren’t actually human, allows us to engage more with their feelings. We don’t need to feel pity for them, because we know they’re not “real”. Rather we engage with our own experiences of meeting someone who helps to make our own stay upon this sometimes painful earth make sense.

We saw the play on the night that Guillermo Calderon’s play opened at the Royal Court in London. He’s a writer who always takes the high road, never the low. Which sometimes makes him challenging, but the work is all the richer for that. His writing makes you acutely aware of the possibilities of theatre, in a way which few contemporary playwrights are capable of. Feos is a bold, beautiful piece which celebrates the importance of seeing, being seen, and also not being seen, the darkness. It’s also a piece whose many words reinforce, when they reach a quietus, the value of silence and the way in which these opposites nurture each other.