Negra, the General’s Nurse

‘One of the best pieces of theatre I have ever seen…  Stunning.’  Leo Butler, playwright

Times have changed. Viewed now with disgust by the nation whose leader she once so proudly served, a nurse takes refuge in the arid northern mountains of her birth. Reunited with her family, she sets about forging a new life, but the vengeance of a people, and of the very earth, may not be so easy to escape.

I don’t want to be rude, or cause any controversy, or scandal in the local news, or the international news, but is it so hard to be hospitable?  Is it so hard to be welcoming?  Locking someone up?  Putting them on trial?  Putting a grandfather in jail?  Do you have grandparents?  A grandpa?

But I’ve not come here to complain, or to chain myself to the railings outside your monuments.  I’ve come to ask you, to beg you, to implore you to let him go back home.  Can you imagine your royal family in a Chilean jail?  Learning prison slang, going to macramé workshops?  The criminal masses and the royal nobility?

Let him go back, go back to his country.  He’s tired.  He wants to see his grandchildren, his people, his plants, his animals, his dogs, his horses, his rabbits.  What else are you going to do to this grandfather?  What more do you want to ask him?  The General is tired.  He’s tired.  You don’t understand.  He wants to go back.

Negra, the General’s Nurse was first performed in English at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2013, directed by Richard Twyman and performed by Deborah Findlay, Sam Troughton and Suzanne Burden.

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