Galloping along with the pace of a screwball comedy, even as its plot plumbs ever more harrowing depths, ‘Our Private Life’ is Columbian playwright Pedro Miguel Rozo’s first play to be performed in English and makes for a startling introduction.
In an unspecified ‘town with the soul of a village’, brothers Carlos and Sergio discuss the rumour that their father, Don José, has been abusing an underage boy. Gay, bipolar Carlos is nervous and excited as he suggests that perhaps Don José abused them too. In Lyndsey Turner’s breakneck production, the velocity of the rumour reaches bullet speed, hitting home with bone-shuddering impact, scenes slamming into each other without pause as salacious gossip devours the town in minutes.
Rather nihilistically, Rozo seems to suggest that anybody will choose to believe anything, without a shred of conscience, so long as it helps them fashion a narrative for their life that they can feel comfortable with. The community wills Don José to be a paedophile because then he can be blamed for the gay sons, the unfulfilled mothers, for everybody’s disappointments.
It’s a disorienting, provocative play, pinning the audience down under a hail of zingy witticisms and unsettling personal anguish: we’re unable to do much more than gawp in shock as the narrative zips towards its eye-wateringly nasty final scene. If you were permitted pause for thought, you’d perhaps see Rozo’s misanthropy as verging on juvenile. But this raid on the senses was designed for speed, and Turner is a nimble pilot, abetted by a solid cast – in particular Clare Cathcart’s frightening Tania and Colin Morgan’s fey Carlos – and an appropriately dextrous set from Lizzie Clachan.