Blackbird

(2011)

Blackbird is, before anything else, a love story. And like all good love stories Blackbird is a story of impossible love. A tragic love story. If one approaches this play from this place, if one attempts to read the story of these two human beings as paradigms of something that might be and was not you will have in your hands a highly flammable material.
Blackbird can also be read, of course, partially: condemning the actions of these two people, blaming them, and reducing the conflict to a moral judgment. But if the reading try to be expansive, if we read neither with compassion nor with the intent of punish these two people, will be closer to a huge contradiction that this play presents us and that Harrower does not resolved.
We (readers, viewers) must produce the synthesis: decide in the silence of our minds what it has been presented before our eyes.
Blackbird is a piece to hear. As were those pieces from Elizabethan theatre. Blackbird presents a universe closed, suffocating, desperate, silenced. Blackbird is a tragedy in which those who fall are no longer kings or heroes or soldiers as Woyzeck (the first tragic soldier of the history of theatre) but two beings that seem to melt into the greyness of the city: Una and Ray live in a corner of one of the many companies in one of the many cities of one of the many countries hit by the Capital; their fates reflect the foreshortening of all those people in this world where not even a love tragedy is possible.
Blackbird is a desperate cry, a special attempt of an extraordinary writer that puts human condition at the centre of the stage.
Blackbird is, if so great thing is even possible, a modern tragedy.
Alejandro Tantanian

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Photos: Ernesto Donegana

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