Our Private Life

Synopsis

"This isn't a village. We've got the largest shopping centre in the area. Now there’s somewhere people can go to watch movies, have something to eat, spend money to make sense of their lives" When a rumour spreads like wildfire through a Colombian village, a respectable family start to wither in the heat. As long- buried secrets begin to surface, their efforts to discern truth from slander become fused with a desire for justice. A new black comedy of twisted morality set in modern Colombia.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 21 February 2011

Colombian playwright Pedro Miguel Rozo attended an international residency at the Royal Court, and Our Private Life (translated by Simon Scardifield) is the result. It’s a fairly edgy, unsettling play about child abuse in a Colombian family poised on a socially evolutionary cusp between farming and fashion, small village and larger town.

The characters say what they think, sometimes up front, sometimes in a cartoon bubble aside to the audience. There’s Ishia Bennison’s flagrantly coarse Mother, holding the ring in a now sexless marriage with [Anthony O’Donnell]’s ex-farmer who may or may not have “fiddled” with the young son of his former employee, Tania (a foul-mouthed, vengeful Clare Cathcart).

The couple’s two sons are severely contrasted: the elder, Sergio ([Eugene O’Hare]), is married, about to become a father – with the church’s blessing – and has embraced the new culture; he’...

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Latest User Review

rds - 22 February 2011:

This terrifically well acted and staged play from Venezuelan writer, Pedro Miguel Rozo, makes the difficult subject of pedophilia work as an unlikely theme for this dark comedy. And comic moments are certainly needed to release those pent up explosive forces - like a geyser blowing off steam. It is a sell out and not surprisingly. The Royal Court showing yet again it leads the field in new drama. ...

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