As shockingly beautiful as it is horrifyingly brutal, actor Armando Babaioff’s deeply Brazilian adaptation of thriller Tom at the Farm leaves a rancid taste in the mouth and harrowing images seared on the retina. It’s a show to shock and provoke, but also to deeply disorientate, blurring the boundaries between pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion in a way that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.
And it’s quickly become something of a classic text, beginning life in 2011 as a play by Canadian Michel Marc Bouchard, before being filmed by Xavier Dolan in 2013. Babaioff returned it to the stage for Rio company Cena Brasil Internacional, but his version strips away any of the show’s cultural specifics, siting the action firmly in the arid heat of Brazil, and in the remote, isolated village farm that was the childhood home of Tom’s lover, who’s now dead. Tom has travelled miles – far further than he anticipated, he admits – from the city for the funeral, only to encounter a mother who knew nothing of her son’s sexuality or of his and Tom’s relationship, and a brother, Francis, who knew everything, and will stop at nothing to protect his mother’s apparent innocence.
What follows is a violent cat-and-mouse game of threats and rewards, punishment and tenderness, as farmer Francis both attacks and attracts Tom, only for the cultured city boy to embrace the blood and earth of the farm, and find white-hot solace in Francis’s unforgiving grip.
Running for an intense, break-free two hours, Babaioff’s Tom at the Farm is an unremitting plunge into cruelty, but it’s also a staggeringly beautiful show in director Rodrigo Portella’s lavish, large-scale staging, which fills one of the hugest spaces in Edinburgh’s International Conference Centre. Mud and water are everywhere, and the two protagonists’ sweating bodies are spotlit in shocking reds as the violence grows increasingly intense. Babaioff simmers with energy in the title role, finding a convincing if shocking route from disgust to desire, while Iano Salomão struts and swaggers as Francis, his demands for attention and satisfaction betraying his unanswerable loneliness. Denise Del Vecchio is strong, too, as the mother whose happiness Francis is so keen to preserve, fussing over meals while catching glimpses of the two men’s dark attraction.
It’s an ambitious, audacious show that dares to stare into the connecting threads between desire and disgust, and to throw in questions of class, privilege and urban/rural living into its seething mix. But it’s an unforgettable experience, a visually stunning, deeply disturbing two-hour immersion in blood, despair, terror and longing.
- Until 24 August
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