(FOUR STARS)
It is considered to “The slaughterhouse”, the first Argentine realistic story. It was published in 1871, twenty years after the death of its author, Esteban Echeverria (1805-1851), who chose the area where the cattle were slaughtered and processed to market the meat and the derivatives of their slaughter, in order to tell a story that emphasizes barbarism.
attributed to the regime Juan Manuel de Rosas. the main leader of the Argentine Confederation and governor of the province of Buenos Aires.
In the plot, after a flood that lasts more than fifteen days and keeps the establishment closed, the government decides to provide a considerable amount of steers to supply the residents. Those who end up enjoying that
vital food are those with the highest resources and are linked, in one way or another, to power. On the other hand, the more humble people of the suburbs bid among themselves to snatch the pieces that the butchers discard. The Church, in
That context helps prevent a rebellion, calling on the population to abstain from meat consumption for a time.
With very good judgment, the talented actor Pablo Finamore and his colleague Claudio Martínez Bel, with dramaturgical supervision of Mauricio Kartún, they imagined a proposal in which Misky, the protagonist, is the prototype of a man with few lights. Son of Echeverría’s maid, he learned to read voraciously every written piece of paper that fell into his hands. He absorbs everything with obsessive relish, whether it’s his mother’s shopping list or the hidden text that his boss hides in a drawer.
In the narrative that will unfold over the course of just one hour, complicity with the audience arises spontaneously. Finamore, he is an all-round actor, capable of using his enormous physical and vocal abilities to put
on stage the symbolic load of the original story.
Very well conducted by the director, in an almost bare space, except for a device that acts as a gate, cart or horse, he deploys a range of resources with which he tells us, very naturally, that he was present the day the cattle and the story differs quite a bit from what Echeverría wrote.
Images emerge full of strength and passion in which the contradiction between civilization and barbarism, between federalists and unitaries, is accentuated, the eternal Argentine dichotomy that has divided waters since those remote times.
Ultimately, it is an unmissable chamber show, in the midst of the overwhelming number of options that populate the Buenos Aires billboard.
