La Chunga – review

Second Skin Theatre perform La Chunga. Photograph: Helen F Kennedy

Hot on the heels of The Lion, Ryan’s Bar launches itself as the latest Stoke Newington venue for fringe theatre as artistic director Andy McQuade settles in downstairs with his newly established company Second Skin.

The intimate venue promises to be an exciting place to watch theatre in the future, but the theatre’s flawed first play struggles to merit the effort of such a strong cast.

McQuade has chosen La Chunga to mark the inauguration of  the Church Street Theatre. This is a two-act play by prolific Peruvian writer and 2010 Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, has never been performed in the UK before, which makes this an ambitious production and gives it good publicity value.

Three men are in a down-at-heel bar somewhere in Peru in 1945, very well evoked by the intelligent lighting and set design (and the fact we can hear the upstairs bar). La Chunga is the bar woman, caustic and indifferent. Victoria Grove brings a physical assuredness to the part that has her slowly dominate the stage, playing with ideas about gender performance that are central to the play.

La Chunga becomes captivated by Meche, the pretty blond girl who arrives at the bar to see Josefino, one of the dice players. Josefino decides to ‘lend’ Meche to La Chunga for the night for 300 sous, telling her, “she won’t do anything to you, she’s a woman”.  The two women disappear and after that evening Meche is not seen again.

For the rest of the play the men take it in turns to imagine what may have happened that night.  They move in and out of fantasies that become increasingly abusive and surreal.  This should be engaging. However, interesting ideas (guilt and sexual identity, the possibility all relationships verge on the exploitative…) are treated with a heavy-handedness that left me feeling patronised and impatient.

None of the characters have been adequately developed to provoke any real concern for them; they resemble types, not complex individuals. As the second act persists with a kind of hollow eroticism it starts to feel this is a playwright over indulging himself. This is a shame as the acting is strong and the staging is imaginative. So, faults aside, definitely worth watching this exciting new space.

La Chunga
The Church Street Theatre
Ryan’s Bar
Tuesday 27 September 2011

Related: Church Street Theatre opens