"Stories from an Abandoned Warehouse". Pilch

Stories From An Abandoned Warehouse by Chilean playwright Ramón Griffero, is a genuine rarity and an important find. Oxford student Patryk Wisniewski came across Griffero’s work, and particularly this piece from 1984, while travelling in South America and writing a dissertation on Chilean theatre. After tracking down Griffero himself, and obtaining his permission, Wisniewski translated the play into English – the first time this has ever been done. His production at the Pilch Theatre is its UK premiere. If that’s not worth a First, I don’t know what is.

In the 1980s, Griffero was one of an incredibly brave, small group of dissident artists who risked torture, imprisonment and death by mounting events critical of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Griffero founded a secret, underground art space, El Trolley, which became a hub for experimental, socialist culture. El Trolley was located in an abandoned warehouse, and this play is essentially a collection of stories that were performed there. Hence the title.

It’s a bizarre, surreal piece, in which a group of struggling, everyday people find themselves trapped in what they believe to be a refuge from some unknown, unspoken danger. They include a man who is devoted to a dead rat he keeps in a cage, another who carries two buckets of water yoked permanently across his shoulders, a woman with a baby, a child. They swiftly come under the control of a privileged and heartless ruling class led by the tyrannical Don Carlos who, along with his aristocratic cronies, metes out summary punishment and random indignities on his subjects. In the words of Wisniewski, the play exposes how authoritarian systems dehumanise individuals, silence dissent, and normalise cruelty in a dictatorship.

This is political satire and allegory, wrapped up in magical realism, fuelled by a passionate sense of injustice and a desire to find new ways of expression through performance. Wisniewski’s production fully embraces the discombobulating surrealism of Griffero’s technique, focusing on exaggerated acting styles, expressionistic sets and over-the-top lighting effects. We’re constantly reminded that what we are watching is not real, so that it comes across as critique, rather than drama. Like the MC in Cabaret, Grace Weinberg’s ‘Child’ orchestrates the action, part Chorus, and part victim.

In fact, Stories… might work even better in English than its original Spanish due to the added layer of distancing imposed by the act of translation. Watching it is a jarring, unpleasant experience, but at the same time riveting, like listening to The Beatles’ Revolution 9. Its lineage is a distinctly South American blend of Bertolt Brecht on one side and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the other.

What does an Oxford audience get out of watching this play though? In the dusty confines of El Trolley’s bare walls, where Pinochet’s enforcers might burst through the door at any moment, one can imagine how the sheer originality of Griffero’s theatre, on top of the sedition in his words, would have felt like a heroic declaration of mental freedom against Chile’s crushing oppression at the time. Does it have any relevance in our cosy, collegiate world? It would be easy to forge a comparison between Don Carlos’s social censorship and the assaults on free speech we see around us nowadays. But I don’t think that’s the point. Stories From An Abandoned Warehouse is of its time and for its time. Watching it gives us a glimpse into another world, and a rare insight into the role of art as rebellion.

And Ramón Griffero? He survived the military dictatorship, and he survived Pinochet too. He is now the Artistic Director of Chile’s National Theatre, and teaches drama all over the world. When things get serious, art isn’t just for art’s sake. It’s for the sake of life.