Griselda Gambaro is arguably Argentina's foremost dramatists and a playwright of international standing whose poetics not only interpret Argentine reality but transcend cultural and geographical borders. Popular across Latin America and also Europe, her plays lack recognition in the UK due to the lack of translations into English - a problem that this welcome anthology solves.
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. Gambaro has written plays from the 1960s through to the 1990s. As well as giving a flavour of her early work with Siamese Twins (1967), the plays in this collection represent a more recent phase of her creative output that has grown stronger with each decade.
Griselda Gambaro's work is radical and endlessly playful and inventive in her use of form and theatricality. Her plays make searing comments on our own domestic and political contexts, an experience which may not be comfortable but is always vital. Gambaro cannot fail to dazzle with her original, incisive and poetic theatre.
Siamese Twins (1967)
In this absurd and forceful play, two brothers, one weak, one strong, play out a primal scene of envy, cruelty and torture as the strong exerts his power and aggression over the weak. Involuntarily, the audience finds itself complicit in the brutality witnessed onstage through Gambaro's command of a powerful and irresistible black humour. Here the absurd becomes a harrowing metaphor of the most pure and raw reality.
Mother by Trade (1997)
We begin with a recipe for melodrama: mother meets daughter forty years after she abandoned her as an infant; daughter discovers mother cohabiting with her lesbian partner of twenty-five years. But this script resists the high emotion and comforting closure you could expect from such a premise; instead the play dramatises a stark process of truth and reconciliation between mother and daughter who are strangers to one another.
As the Dream Dictates (1999)
The dream in Gambaro's play is part of reality itself, and cannot be ignored. It is humans grappling with the impossibility of questions such as how to look to the future when there is great trauma in the past. It also celebrates the kind of untethered thinking which goes on in dreaming, the immense freedom to go beyond what is expected or the rules a society might impose.
Asking Too Much (2001)
In Asking Too Much love is just a memory. And with all the messiness, the hiatuses, contradictions and traps which memory brings, the encounter and the dialogue which the spectator witnesses is a painful and irretrievable residual sum of fragments. The man, perhaps, still loves the woman. Or does he hate his own company, to which he has been left exposed? The woman, who has maybe remade her life with another man, seems to make an effort not to hurt him, but fails. Neither of the two manages to reach the other. Or to reach beyond themselves.
Persistence (2004)
Persistence chooses its setting in the real life event of the 2004 Beslan massacre in Russia. It imagines three Chechnyan rebels before and after the they take the children hostage. There are many plays attempting to tackle the subject of Islamic terrorism on English stages, but none which enter the hearts and minds of the protagonists in the way Gambaro does here.
Dear Ibsen: I am Nora (2012)
Nora, the character created by Henrik Ibsen in A Doll's House, decides to confront her own creator and to debate with him his words and actions. In doing so, she becomes the author of her own identity, whilst making the playwright into a character.
The Gift (2015)
Margara is a woman with the gift of prophecy. Like Cassandra, people do not believe her, even though what she predicts is the hope of the world. All we need to save ourselves - she presages - is for humanity to hear and understand that goodness brings profit.
- ISBN10 1350233641
- ISBN13 9781350233645
- Publish Date 19 May 2022 (first published 21 April 2022)
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Methuen Drama
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English