Viva Lorca, viva Arcola
ONCE FIVE YEARS PASS
Arcola Theatre
THE Arcola Theatre, Dalston’s best-kept secret, has broken rank.
The old textile factory – which after five years has finally won Arts Council funding – is now considered “off-West-end” in theatre listing sections.
Readers will find the Arcola’s celebrated Viva Lorca Festival ranked alongside productions at established venues like The Donmar Warehouse, The Roundhouse and The Almeida.
Sitting among the audience at the Arcola was a refreshing experience. Even for an abstract piece of Federico Lorca’s convoluted surrealism, the diversity of Dalston was representing itself inside the theatre.
I think Federico Garcia Lorca – a poet, playwright, republican and homosexual, murdered by Franco’s supporters 70 years ago – would have been happy here.
Once Five Years Pass was written five years to the day before Lorca’s assassination.
If that doesn’t leave you spooked, the action will.
Drawing strongly on the surrealist influences and experiments of Lorca’s close friends Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, the playwright’s obsession with timelessness manifests with characters locked in a perpetual nightmare. A dead child is continually being buried, children stone a cat for eternity and a baby is never born. A young man (Mark Field) – a kind of Mediterranean Hamlet – encounters the pain of love, reluctantly faces up to his future and is obsessed by death. His doomed relationship a young girl (Sophie Roberts) who casts him aside, was performed admirably in the small Studio 2. Happy days. But there is something uplifting and daring about this play, which Lorca once described as his “impossible theatre.” Viva Lorca; viva Arcola, I say.
Until September 23
020 7503 1646
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