ABSTRACT
I can’t remember the name or exact address right now, but it’s a theatre at the foot of a spiral staircase behind a door that gives immediately onto the street along the Diagonal Norte in central Buenos Aires. That is to say not far from—and in many respects not dissimilar to—the Teatro del Pueblo on the same street, a venerable institution where, for instance, in 1939 the émigré Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, to make a few pesos, cooked up a public lecture on “Cultural Regression in Lesser Known Europe” and where, in early Autumn 2015, I saw an afternoon performance of Mauricio Kartun’s play Terrenal. Pequeño misterio ácrata [Earthly. Little Anarchic Mystery]. In the play a trio of men in their tatty black suits and painted-on faces, like figures out of Godot, or out of the popular music hall that came before, worked through, on a black-curtained little stage, a suburban retelling of the Cain and Abel legend, which ranged from the shibboleths of territorial dispute (as in any theatre there is ever a gap to get over, there for some but not for others), through fall-about comedy (the Abel character is killed not with a jawbone but a slap-stick) and on to an impressively apocalyptic-sounding verbal rhetoricalese. Or so I supposed. I don’t actually follow Spanish. I was thinking too, while watching, that this is not so much a contemporary drama as something ghosted out of theatre’s history, although the applause at the end—and the laughter during the show, which wrinkled through the auditorium like so many taken-by-surprise recognitions on the part of individual spectators, little dialectical eruptions was how I thought of it—was contemporary enough. It was for sure us applauding after.
